Who Needs Water Anyway?

This winter's El Niño event resulted in a lot of rain on California and left the mountains with a nearly normal snow pack that will fill the rivers as it melts. The California drought is over, right?   Guess again.  Climate change is only going to make things worse, in particular for the 40 million people who import nearly all of their water from the Colorado River basin.  This includes the most populous areas of California, Nevada and Arizona. 

1984

As it happens, there is less of Lake Mead than there ever has been before, which is a problem because Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States. Created by the construction of Hoover Dam, a big government project of the past, Lake Mead provides drinking water to four states, including California. In California, it supplies water to Los Angeles, a fairly good-sized port city on the Pacific coast. There is now only 37 percent of Lake Mead left.

The American Southwest—and the Los Angeles area in particular—are natural deserts.

2016

Only the miracle of engineering has made them habitable. Quite simply, we created human space in a place that, left to its own devices, would have been suitable only by cactus and lizards.

There is another concern regarding the Colorado River basin and the future viability of the basin’s capacity to support the tens of millions of people and the vast agricultural lands that depend on keeping the water flowing.  Since 2004, the western drought has also driven increased use of ground water.  Two full Lake Mead's worth of water pulled from the ground.

Monthly measurements of the change in water mass from December 2004 to November 2013 revealed the basin lost nearly 53 million acre feet (65 cubic kilometers) of freshwater, almost double the volume of the nation’s largest reservoir, Nevada’s Lake Mead. More than three-quarters of the total — about 41 million acre feet (50 cubic kilometers) — was from groundwater.

“We don’t know exactly how much groundwater we have left, so we don’t know when we’re going to run out,” said Stephanie Castle, a water resources specialist at the University of California, Irvine, and the study’s lead author. “This is a lot of water to lose. We thought that the picture could be pretty bad, but this was shocking.”

Throughout Central and Southern California groundwater is being pumped at prodigious volumes to compensate for the impact of the state's prolonged drought.  The California Central Valley is literally sinking as agricultural user dig more and deeper wells to pump out ground water to keep the fields and animals alive. 

As Californians have sucked up trillions of gallons of groundwater over the last century, many are now using water that’s more than 20,000 years old.

Experts believe that it will take decades to start to significantly reverse the effects of overpumping in many areas — but that is if folks can start to talk about water without too much fighting.

We could bring about a different future than the one the Southwest currently faces, but do we have the will to do so?

As population growth and heavy demand for water collide with hotter temperatures and reduced snowpack in the future, there will be an even greater mismatch between supply and demand, said Kelly Sanders, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in water and energy issues.

“The question becomes how to resolve this mismatch across states that all depend on the river to support their economic growth,” Sanders said. She expects incentives and markets to help ease some of the strains on water supplies, “but it is going to be tricky to make the math work in the long term.”

Do you think Donald Trump knew any of this when he proclaimed that there was no drought in California?