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Good luck, Rio Verde
https://www.12news.com/article/news/...5-e2f545b85499
drill baby drill
https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/n...izona-2701985/“Our research has shown that the groundwater in the lower basin has been disappearing nearly seven times faster than the combined water losses from Lakes Powell and Mead,” said Jay Famiglietti, a hydrology professor and executive director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Ins ute for Water Security. “Groundwater losses of that magnitude are literally an existential threat to desert cities like Phoenix and Tucson.”
Good luck, Rio Verde
https://www.12news.com/article/news/...5-e2f545b85499
Sounds bad
The Great Salt Lake in Utah is facing “unprecedented danger,” experts say, as it has fallen to an alarmingly low level amid a climate change-fueled megadrought that’s tightening its grip in the West.
Less than two weeks away from Utah’s 2023 legislative session, nearly three dozen scientists and conservationists released a dire report that calls on the state’s lawmakers to take “emergency measures” to save the Great Salt Lake before drains to nil.
Without a “dramatic increase” in inflow by 2024, experts warn the lake is set to disappear in the next five years.https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/us/gr...ate/index.htmlThe Great Salt Lake, plagued by excessive water use and a worsening climate crisis, has dropped to record-low levels two years in a row. The lake is now 19 feet below its natural average level and has entered “uncharted territory” after losing 73% of its water and exposing 60% of its lakebed, the report notes.
“The lake’s ecosystem is not only on the edge of collapse. It is collapsing,” Benjamin Abbott, a professor of ecology at Brigham Young University and lead author of the report, told CNN. “It’s honestly jaw-dropping and totally disarming to see how much of the lake is gone. The lake is mostly lakebed right now.”
Mind bogglingly dumb, just wildly guessing what to do instead of conserving water.
Alfalfa accounts for ~68% of water drawn from the Great Salt Lake. Saudi Arabia banned it in 2018 -- they grow their supply in the US now.
As far as these recent rains helping, yes of course they did.
Thought the article said barely tho. Urgently need about 10 more rains like this and that was just to go up a small level.
Is there a word or idiom that describes the slow approach of a big problem everyone sees, while doing nothing to stop it?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...climate-crisisSummers marked by roiling, poisonous clouds sweeping in off the lake is something that “of course worries me”, says Mendenhall. A host of respiratory, cardiac and cancer-related problems could be stirred through the city’s 200,000-strong population, which is part of a broader string of urban and suburban development of 2.8 million people wedged between the lake and the Wasatch mountain range in Utah.
You can put a frog in boiling water and it will attempt to escape. Put a frog in water brought to a boil and it will die oblivious.
Not a bad analogy, but the Great Salt Lake *could* dry up in about 5 years. Barring a biblical flood, that burner is on high.
the big problem is extremely profitable for the oligarchy causing the big problem, the same oligarchy owns and operates with Untouchable power, so the people who will suffer from the big problem are powerless
untouchable power you say. the putatively powerless masses. it's almost like the privileges of ownership crowd everything else out for you.
are you an owner, boutons?
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/01/u...ate/index.htmlArizona officials announced Thursday the state will no longer grant certifications for new developments within the Phoenix area, as groundwater rapidly disappears amid years of water overuse and climate change-driven drought.
A new study showed that the groundwater supporting the Phoenix area likely can’t meet additional development demand in the coming century, officials said at a news conference. Gov. Katie Hobbs and the state’s top water officials outlined the results of the study looking at groundwater demand within the Phoenix metro area, which is regulated by a state law that tries to ensure Arizona’s housing developments, businesses and farms are not using more groundwater than is being replaced.
The study found that around 4% of the area’s demand for groundwater, close to 4.9 million acre-feet, cannot be met over the next 100 years under current conditions – a huge shortage that will have significant implications for housing developments in the coming years in the booming Phoenix metro area, which has led the nation in population growth.
State officials said the announcement wouldn’t impact developments that have already been approved. However, developers that are seeking to build new construction will have to demonstrate they can provide an “assured water supply” for 100 years using water from a source that is not local groundwater.
Las Vegas is next.
And then Salt Lake City.
It will start to hit Texas in the 2040’s.
I still can't pick a winner for this one, one has yet to emerge.
Trump's funding freeze could kill off Colorado River restoration efforts
Trump nuking appropriated funds with vague, overbroad EOs is wildly uncons utional -- it's impoundment
https://grist.org/drought/questions-...olorado-river/The order, signed the first day Trump took office, aims to, “unleash America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources,” by ending “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations.”
But the order also says, “All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”
“These are not ‘woke’ environmental programs,” said Anne Castle, who held federal water policy roles during the Biden and Obama administrations. “These are essential to continued ability to divert water.”
Water users whose grants have been paused said they are asking the federal government for more information and getting little in the way of answers. The federal agencies in charge of Western water did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.
Conservation programs like the one sending money to California farmers have been key in boosting water supplies in major reservoirs. That is no small feat, as leaders of the states that use Colorado River water are caught in a legal standoff about how to share it going forward. They appear to be making little progress as they meet behind closed doors ahead of a 2026 deadline.
“Having this appropriated funding suddenly taken away undoes years and years of very careful collaboration among the states in the Colorado River Basin,” Castle said, “and threatens the sustainability of the entire system.”
Just run water lines from the East to the West.
Just reopen the desalination plants up and down the Western seaboard. They're brand new.
Just close the golf courses West of Oklahoma/Texas.
the you say is getting dumber and dumber
..."But, I'm President, and their not."
groundwater is being depleted rapidly
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2025/ma...he-colorado-r/As the Colorado River’s giant reservoirs have declined during the last two decades, even larger amounts of water have been pumped and drained from underground, according to new research based on data from NASA satellites.
Scientists at Arizona State University examined more than two decades of satellite measurements and found that since 2003 the quan y of groundwater depleted in the Colorado River Basin is comparable to the total capacity of Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir.
The researchers estimated that pumping from wells has drained about 34 cubic kilometers, or 28 million acre-feet, of groundwater in the watershed since 2003 — more than twice the amount of water that has been depleted from the river’s reservoirs during that time.
“The Colorado River Basin is losing groundwater at an alarming rate,” said Karem Abdelmohsen, the lead author and a researcher at ASU’s School of Sustainability.
The losses are being driven largely by heavy pumping to supply agriculture, he said. At the same time, prolonged drought and rising temperatures have sapped river flows and decreased the amount of water percolating underground and recharging aquifers.
“As surface water becomes less dependable, the demand for groundwater is projected to rise significantly,” the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “Groundwater is a crucial buffer … but it is rapidly disappearing due to excessive extraction.”
The Colorado River Basin covers parts of seven U.S. states, from Wyoming to Southern California, and northern Mexico. The river’s water sustains fast-growing cities including Phoenix and Las Vegas, as well as more than 5 million acres of farmland and ranchland.
The researchers found that most of the depletion of groundwater (about three-fourths of the total) is occurring in the river’s lower basin, largely in Arizona, where the bulk of the water is pumped from desert aquifers to irrigate farms.
They estimated that annual groundwater losses in the Colorado River Basin have averaged more than 1.2 million acre-feet — about four times larger than the amount of water the Las Vegas area is en led to take from the Colorado River each year.
“If this trend continues, it could lead to severe water shortages that impact not only local farmers and residents but also broader agricultural markets and municipal water supplies throughout the southwestern U.S.,” Abdelmohsen said.
The declines in water supplies have worsened as climate change has intensified drought conditions, driving what scientists describe as the aridification of the Southwest.
Research shows that the past 25 years have probably been the driest quarter-centuryin western North America in 1,200 years. Scientists have found that global warming is intensifying this long megadrought and has caused roughly half of the 20% decrease in the Colorado River’s average flow this century.
“Climate change is only exacerbating the stress on groundwater,” said Jay Famiglietti, the study’s senior author and science director for ASU’s Arizona Water Innovation Initiative.\
“If groundwater remains unprotected in large swaths of the southwestern U.S. and continues to disappear, it will dramatically limit food production,” Famiglietti said. “Groundwater is critically important in desert states like Arizona and desert cities like Phoenix and Tucson, and if it disappears, then it becomes an existential crisis.”
really bad draught in Iran
https://apnews.com/article/iran-pres...6aa53ea76dcf8aIran’s president has warned that the capital is facing an unprecedented water and energy crisis as reservoirs have plunged to historic lows, threatening supplies of drinking water and electricity generation, it was reported on Friday.
“If it doesn’t rain in Tehran by late November, we’ll have to ration water. And if it still doesn’t rain, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran,” President Masoud Pezeshkian was cited as saying on Thursday by the SNN.ir semi-official news agency.
Pezeshkian described the situation as “extremely critical,” citing reports that Tehran’s dam reservoirs have fallen to their lowest level in 60 years.
The city has entered its sixth consecutive year of drought, with some dams at less than 10% of capacity.
Officials say that in the east of Tehran, the Latyan Dam — one of five key reservoirs — is only about 9% full.
snowflake democrats fold again and bend knee to Trump over government shutdown....lmao
Lake Powell deadpool predicted by the end of the year
https://www.landdesk.org/p/the-color...crisis-is-hereFirst, the Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) released a grimmer-than-ever spring runoff forecast for the Colorado River and its two big reservoirs. Then the seven Colorado River Basin states announced that they once again had failed to reach an agreement on a plan to bring demand into line with diminishing supplies by the Feb. 14 deadline. While the states have blown by other deadlines since negotiations began in 2022, this time was different in that it triggered the federal government to move forward to impose a post-2026 management plan of its own.
On paper, the states still have until the end of the water year, or Oct. 1, to come up with a deal or to implement an alternate plan. But that may be too little too late to keep Lake Powell’s surface level from dropping below minimum power pool — otherwise known as de facto dead pool — later this year. While the negotiations are over the Colorado River, or rather the water in the river, in many ways they pivot around the need to keep Lake Powell’s surface level above 3,500 feet in elevation. That can only be done by releasing less water out of Glen Canyon Dam, or increasing flows into the reservoir, or a bit of both.
The sticking point in the negotiations hinges upon whether the Upper Basin states will take mandatory and verifiable cuts in water use. The Lower Basin states have already taken cuts, and have agreed to take more, but only if the Upper Basin does the same.
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