The Desert Reclaiming Its Place

My wife recently returned from visiting her mother in Scottsdale, Arizona. She was amazed at the continuing pace of development in the Valley of the Sun. The highways are clogged, housing developments continue to spread in every direction from Phoenix toward the mountains that bound the broad flats of the valley. People apparently continue to flock to that location, where the recent summers have seen extended stretches of 110-degree-plus heat. I've written here about the concern over water supply for the millions of residents of this desert region. Today, USA Today published a story about the prospects of a moister future, and those prospects are slim to none. The lede:

Drought, a fixture in much of the West for nearly a decade, now covers more than one-third of the continental USA. And it's spreading.

Of course, the Southwest is not the only region suffering extreme drought. The Southeast is about 50 inches behind in precipitation. The central valley of California sees cattle ranchers selling off their herds.

"It seems extremely likely that drought will become more the norm" for the West, says Kathy Jacobs of the Arizona Water Institute, a research partnership of the state's three universities. "Droughts will continue to come and go, but … higher temperatures are going to produce more water stress."

So what I'm looking for is the first indication that growth in population and land development is slowing down in these desert regions that were only settled because technology allowed water to be supplied through unnatural means. When even our dams, pumps and deep water wells aren't enough, and rationing cuts into lifestyle issues, what will residents do. And where will they go?

California Streaming - Water Policy Changes

Drought and flooding, as the potential extremes of climate change, have long been threats to California - a state whose very financial existence depends on moving water from its natural locations to the dry valley farmlands and concentrated population centers that otherwise would be semi-arid deserts. How are the needs of farmers, environmentalists, municipal utility districts and fishing industries served from natural water supplies that may become even more limited? People fight in the courts, congress and state legislatures over water rights and it's a rare occasion when opponents reach agreement over how limited water will be distributed.

Now environmentalists and local politicians have reached what amounts to a treaty over water distribution in the Sacramento Delta and it may serve as a useful model as climate change forces water crises elsewhere in the US.

The SF Chronicle article is headlined Big, New Water Project Under Way: Diversion to Supply Sacramento Area and the East Bay and its lede is

Government officials and environmentalists broke ground Monday on a new Sacramento River water diversion system, deeming it a historic project that sets a precedent for state water distribution in an era of global warming and drought.

As with most of these tugs of war, it's a complex issue, not easily explained in the space of one article, but the important part for environmental concerns in future similar situations is this:

...the project accomplishes two main goals of the environmental community: protection of the lower American River and the promotion of water conservation and wastewater recycling.

Scrambling for Agua

The American West has been reading the drought tea leaves for long enough. Its residents can no longer dismiss this trend as a normal cyclical fluctuation in precip. The reservoirs and water tables are not being replenished to make up for the dry years and the upper Colorado River basin pictured here is being asked to provide for more needs than it can keep up with. From now on, every year may just be a "drier than normal" year, and with millions of residents having been added to the region in recent years, it's time to get creative.

In the article An Arid West No Longer Waits for Rain (registration required), NY Times reporters Randal C. Archibald and Kirk Johnson describe some of the projects either newly under way or revived from previous abandonment - some $2.5 billion dollars worth of pipelines, reservoirs and desalination plants.

According to some long-term projections, the mountain snows that feed the Colorado River will melt faster and evaporate in greater amounts with rising global temperatures, providing stress to the waterway even without drought. This year, the spring runoff is expected to be about half its long-term average. In only one year of the last seven, 2005, has the runoff been above average.

Everywhere in the West, along the Colorado and other rivers, as officials search for water to fill current and future needs, tempers are flaring among competing water users, old rivalries are hardening and some states are waging legal fights.

The tug of war over Colorado River water is intensifying as more experts project that it my rarely - if ever - return to the reliable source it once was. Seven states have historically depended on some portion of that water, and as it provides less, each of these states require more for growing needs and environmental purposes.

The source of the satellite photo above - the National Climatic Data Center - noted that, as of a May 2006 study, "The Lees Ferry reconstruction suggests a higher long-term mean than previous reconstructions but strongly supports earlier findings that Colorado River allocations were based on one of the wettest periods in the past 5 centuries and that droughts more severe than any 20th to 21st century event occurred in the past." The implication being that drought may prove to be more normal than the water supplies used as the baseline for distributing the Colorado's water. Oops!

So even under the best of supply scenarios, the exploding population belt in the mountain and sun belts of the West is putting stress on water resources. Utah and Nevada are in the courts, challenging each other's water rights. Water rights lawyers can look forward to full employment.

Ultimately - with climate change and population growth forcing the issues - compromise will end up being the only course to take. California set an example recently for how cities and farmers may have to deal with limitations.

An agreement reached a few years ago between farmers and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the chief supplier of water to that region, is one model. Under the terms of the agreement, farmers would let their fields lie fallow and send water to urban areas in exchange for money to cover the crop losses.

Ski Bummers

The vanguard victims of climate change - the most vulnerable to current conditions - include mountain populations that depend on cold and snowy winters. In the Sierra Nevada, Cascades and Rocky Mountains, winters have been getting less cold with less snow. The ski and snowboard industries are not optimistic. As these aerial shots of a dry winter (top) and a normal winter (bottom) show, the writing is plainly on the wall. But it's not just the winter recreation that will suffer. The reduction in snowfall and rainfall and the shrinking of glaciers will affect water-based recreation during the warmer months, too. And that's not to mention the overall reduction in water supply for a fast-growing population.

The US Global Change Research Program (yes, such a program does exist, supported by our tax dollars) is conducting a US National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change (whew!), and its Regional Paper: Rocky Mountain/Great Basin Region describes the likely impacts on a climatic region that has been developing steadily for the past century.

Warming conditions ... hold the potential to trigger avalanche conditions that are a risk to skiers, boarders, and hikers and would hasten the retreat of glaciers, a process that has already begun. For example, the area covered by glaciers in Glacier National Park has declined by 70% from the area occupied at Park establishment in the early 1900s. At present warming and recession rates, all glaciers in the Park are expected to disappear over the next 30 years.

But it's really the threat to the winter sports businesses that looms most darkly over the Rockies. There's the hope that shorter winters and longer warm seasons will open up more business opportunities for mountain biking and backpacking, but no one can believe that these activities will replace the revenue that comes from winter lodging, eating, shopping and lift passes.

Also impacted by the effects of climate change on the ski industry would be the many support industries that derive revenue from skiing. Ski equipment and clothing manufacturers and retailers, travel agencies, resort hotels, and local restaurants could all face economic challenges should the RMGB ski industry be compromised. Impacts on property values would also be in this same category. Many of the ski areas that are associated with significant amounts of private land (many areas are built only on national forests) are the locations of major, up-scale, real estate development. Vail and Aspen in Colorado, Deer Valley and Park City in Utah, Sun Valley, Idaho and Jackson, Wyoming are prime examples. Lots and homes are routinely valued in millions of dollars. Ski-area officials are in wide agreement that these property values would plummet if skiing were to disappear, even with allowances for continued use for summer recreational activities.

In its report, the Global Change Research Program does recommend some actions to mitigate damage from climate change, but it's meager recompense.

• Inform anyone thinking of opening new facilities that it's a bad bet.
  
• Develop other activities for visitors to enjoy during warmer winters.
  
• And support and facilitate water conservation, because if the water supply disappears, nothing else will work to support existing mountain communities

After a few more warm winters, we'll see how much difference these ideas will make in the lives of Rocky mountain residents.

Humans: a Drought-Tolerant Species?

One thing about dryness - it preserves the records of human activity and subsequent abandonment of regions. Many a monument lay in ruins as testaments of once-thriving civilizations and cultures that eventually caused - or just happened to be in the path of - longterm drought. Innovation allowed the early Egyptians to take advantage of precipitation cycles far away in the highlands to flood and irrigate their desert-edge crops. But mankind seems to be blind to limits and overuse of resources, leaving ourselves vulnerable to the consequences of our own excesses and Nature's whim.
Phoenix and Las Vegas come to mind when I think of huge human settlement of locations that don't seem to be meant to support such a thing. Vegas, of course, is the most ridiculous example in the world of outright squandering of scarce resources. Gamblers will, of course, support that waste for a while, and the sheer number of residents invested in living in the Valley of the Sun will keep Phoenix going for years. But some less conspicuous locations in the U.S. have been suffering drought for long enough to have their condition labeled extreme by the US Department of Agriculture.

Check out this map. I'll be keeping track of how these conditions impact the farmers, ranchers and residents in these areas as their droughts extend. As history has shown us, people can only tolerate such conditions for so long, even if you believe they're simply part of natural climatic cycles.