Drought and the American West...

Just saw this come across the news. We've had discussions related to drought before, but this is even more grim...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23130256/

Oh, but wait, "climate change" isn't really happening (or so sayeth FoxNews, why shouldn't I believe 'em?).

"Federal hydrologists have even projected that Lake Mead, which receives water from Lake Powell, may never refill again." (from a conservative Utahn paper, http://www.thespectr....NION/802100342

That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it might take 10-15K years before it does - the same way the pluvial lakes scattered all throughout the Basin & Range have dried and filled over geological time. Fat lot of good that's going to do Las Vegas.

While it'll knock out Xyrauchen, at least it'll take care of those pesky quagga mussels that recently showed up in the reservoir (http://www.lvrj.com/news/15502852.html)!

So, global warming is the villain, as opposed to all the faucets that have to be turned on daily?

Well, y'all know where I stand - no use beating a dead horse. Or as some people say, "beat it like a dead horse"!

What Dave said reminds me of a joke. A guy is in the hospital. He wakes up and the doctor tells him he has good news and bad news.

"What's the bad news?", the guy asks. "We had to amputate both of your feet", the doctor tells him.

"Hell," asks the patient, "What's the GOOD news"? The doctor says, "Well, those pesky corns of yours are COMPLETELY gone!"

Faucets play a role too... but I'd wager that neither the first settlers that discovered the springs where Las Vegas now sits, nor the engineers that worked on Hoover Dam ever considered that precipitation regimes upstream would change as dramatically as they appear to be doing. Systems just aren't going to behave quite the same way that they have in the remembered past. That's the rub. It's not just going to come down to conservation (though that would be a doggone good place to start!!). It's not going to be all new storage, or groundwater extraction, or desalinization, or transport from somewhere else (though all of those will likely be used to some degree as well). Finding a solution is going to require a long, hard reassessment of how many people the southwest can realistically support over long-term scales.

Without this, the demands of a human population pushed beyond its resources are going to trump the needs of native fishes every time.

I wonder who won?