I was surprised by the urgency of this article.
Jon Gertner interviewed water managers all over the southwestern United States for his article on the predicted water crisis. They used words like catastrophe and armageddon to describe the water shortages they see coming in their region.
That may sound over the top, but the area’s major reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are currently only about 50% full. Lake Mead was slightly lower in 1955 and 1964 (Powell wasn’t built until 1965), but the system is more stressed now. There are more people relying on that water, and the climate models indicate that there may not be enough rain to fill them. The Southern Nevada Water Authority is racing to install a lower water intake from Lake Mead before the lake level falls below the existing intakes that supply Las Vegas. Of course, the trend could reverse any time, but a lot of knowledgeable people are convinced that the current dry spell is the beginning of a permanent change.
From Gertner’s article:
Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”
The southeastern US is also in the middle of a severe drought, but the climate models aren’t predicting armageddon there. Texas seems to be the only place in the southern US with full lakes at the moment, but the aquifers are falling there too.
Read the rest of Jon Gertner’s article: The Future is Drying Up
It was in the 10/21/07 New York Times Magazine, but I’m linking to Truthout’s reprint to avoid the NYT’s ridiculous registration page.
