Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: E-Mails Don’t Put Water in the Colorado River
Posted on | December 15, 2009 | 3 Comments
From this morning’s newspaper:
Here in the Southwest, the question of whether we can trust climate science — not the few scientists involved in the e-mails, but the enterprise as a whole — matters a great deal because of what the science’s leading practitioners have been telling us in recent years.
Tucked away in a routine Bureau of Reclamation report released last month was this remarkable fact: The decade of the ’00s has been the driest 10-year stretch in the Colorado River Basin, in terms of the amount of water available for cities, farms and the river’s ecosystem, since record-keeping began more than 100 years ago.
Lake Mead, the massive reservoir that stores Colorado River water for Nevada, Arizona and California, is at its lowest level since it was first filled in the 1930s. Its upstream sibling, Lake Powell, is not much better.
With Albuquerque increasingly dependent on water imported from the Colorado River Basin for its water, and Santa Fe soon to follow, what happens there matters in New Mexico.
The shrinking river and dwindling lakes must have an eerie and unpleasant “told-you-so” feel for California water researcher Peter Gleick. In 1993, in one of the first detailed studies of the effect increasing greenhouse gases might have on the great river basin, he and a colleague predicted declining flows in the arid west’s great river.
Related posts:
- Colorado River Dry
- Water and Energy on the Colorado River
- Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere, Colorado River Edition
- Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Colorado River Delta
- Could Global Warming Be Good for Colorado River Flows?
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3 Responses to “Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: E-Mails Don’t Put Water in the Colorado River”
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December 15th, 2009 @ 11:54 pm
It’s peculiar to say it doesn’t affect “basic” climate science since it doesn’t affect climate science at all.
Anyway, time to give those CRU emails a rest.
Nitpick: Talking about using the change in basin hydrology as proof of AGW is an odd way to put things. The analysis connecting them would proceed from the top down and wind up with the conclusion that AGW is causing the hydrology change.
December 16th, 2009 @ 10:02 am
Thanks for posting this – one of the most thoughtful responses to the otherwise slanted media stories.
December 16th, 2009 @ 10:34 am
If I had an economically affordable way to convert local brackish water to clean drinking water, would anyone care and would they help us get such a thing going locally?
I seem to have such a way.