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The Colorado River is shrinking

sciencemag.org

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Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#151

Post by asdff »

avgDev wrote: post #6

I know this may be silly but one reason why I stay in the "Great lakes states" and own property here is because of global warming and my lack of hope that tech/governments/capitalism will solve it before we reach a point of no return during which we will experience massive property and life loss in the US. Only then significant change will occur IMO. There are places in the south now that need water to be delivered b…

I know people who work for local governments in the midwest and the big elephant in the room there is quite a lot of the roads, sewers, bridges, and other essential infrastructure that was built in the 60s and 70s is approaching the end of its useful life, and these governments don't have the tax income to maintain or improve any of it. Recent heavy rains this summer have inundated local sewer systems, the national weather service had to issue an alert for people to stay in their homes due to how much high water was appearing and trapping vehicles.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#152

Post by blooalien »

delecti wrote: post #148
avgDev wrote: post #6

I know this may be silly but one reason why I stay in the "Great lakes states" and own property here is because of global warming and my lack of hope that tech/governments/capitalism will solve it before we reach a point of no return during which we will experience massive property and life loss in the US. Only then significant change will occur IMO. There are places in the south now that need water to be delivered b…

I've idly thought about which areas are likely to come out ahead because of climate change. It's going to affect just about everything, but surely there will be at least a couple winners next to the pile of losers. Obviously you can't predict too far out, but like you've said, the midwest seems likely to be a winner in the short-term. I've also seen a lot about the Russian permafrost melting, and I can't help but thi…

Problem is that in this particular issue the natural systems of the planet are straight up breaking down and soon could spiral so out of control as to be entirely beyond our ability to do anything about the issue. The longer we wait, the higher the odds it becomes "unfixable".

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#153

Post by nradov »

JshWright wrote: post #104
CountDrewku wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In my opinion we have absolutely no business growing these crops in a desert, You might as well just say people shouldn't be living in most of the western US then since a majority of it receives very little rainfall. It's very easy to call these people out when you're not directly affected. Yes just strip them of their major sources of income. No issue there.... You need a better plan than just telling the Governor…

Why should we subsidize the cost of them making money?

Most of those crops aren't directly subsidized. The problem is water rights which are legally tied to real estate. So there's no way to force farmers to pay market rates for water.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#154

Post by busterarm »

kibwen wrote: post #9
avgDev wrote: post #6

I know this may be silly but one reason why I stay in the "Great lakes states" and own property here is because of global warming and my lack of hope that tech/governments/capitalism will solve it before we reach a point of no return during which we will experience massive property and life loss in the US. Only then significant change will occur IMO. There are places in the south now that need water to be delivered b…

> There are places in the south now that need water to be delivered due to shortages. An argument for moving to Florida or Louisiana, where the water will be delivered to your home for free in short order. Dark humor, but sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying.

Louisiana's problem is more land erosion than sea level rise and it's mostly due to dams all the way up in the Dakotas.

Water rights are a huge mess and I see it being the thing that eventually breaks up pacts between most nations. The US and EU will cease to be and nations will go to war over it.

The legislation around these rights is a time bomb.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#155

Post by Niglodonicus »

blooalien wrote: post #147
Niglodonicus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there's a lot of techno-optimists on this forum diligently huffing the hopium that the eventual (perhaps even imminent) collapse of our current systems will surely be subverted by some great breakthrough. Of course they're going to downvote any view that purports that this is highly unlikely.

Personally, I been upvoting everyone who makes realistic and valid points, even if I don't like what they have to say, because especially in discussions about this particular topic, we need to entertain a wide variety of viewpoints and be willing to accept that not any one magical solution is gonna fix this. The reality is that the whole "climate crisis" thing is gonna require humanity in general to gang up on the pr…

It's a lot bigger of an issue than merely the climate crisis. Regarding trying to prevent it (and related issues), we would not only needed to have started 50+ years ago (when it was already clear what was happening), but the incentives in our economic system just do not work in such a way to allow for all the capitalist decision makers to all collectively stop turning a profit. The system is somewhat like rolling a boulder up a hill, it must continuously push it up, or the boulder will roll back down, a little, or all the way. Once growth becomes imposssible/infeasible due to resource limitations, this will happen eventually anyway. But if the machine stops churning, it will simply happen sooner.

Regarding the various aspects of the unsustainability of our society and how it is reaching its limits, this wiki subsection is a very good read (and the rest of the wiki page as well, separated into concrete sections, and links to lots of source materials):

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/index#wiki_what_would...

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#156

Post by OldHand2018 »

mastax wrote: post #113
candiddevmike wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap fresh water will become the new oil. I wouldn't be surprised if the ridiculous idea of pumping Lake Michigan to NV/CA comes to fruition.

The Great Lakes Compact forbids that. As an agreement between states it went through US Congress, so theoretically an act of Congress could repeal or modify it. However this seems unlikely to me due to the Midwest's outsized political influence and how protective locals are of the lakes.

The Great Lakes Compact has a giant loophole you could drive a train full of water right through.

You can export water out of the watershed in containers no larger than 5.7 gallons (~21.5 liters)

Build a short loop of rail, half in the watershed and half out of it. Drive a train in a circle continuously. When you are inside the watershed, fill up the 5.7 gallon containers (just make it a continuous waterfall that you drive through or something). When you are outside the watershed, dump them into a reservoir/pumping facility. There's nothing anybody could do about it.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#157

Post by AtlasBarfed »

avgDev wrote: post #6

I know this may be silly but one reason why I stay in the "Great lakes states" and own property here is because of global warming and my lack of hope that tech/governments/capitalism will solve it before we reach a point of no return during which we will experience massive property and life loss in the US. Only then significant change will occur IMO. There are places in the south now that need water to be delivered b…

It's dangerous because at some point some idiot brained Western politician will demand a huge water pipeline from the great lakes to Arizona so they can sustain their massive city in a middle of a desert that should not be there in the first place.

Then a few decades later, the US will have its very own Aral Sea.

That particular cynicism aside, what will probably happen is that sufficient global warming will make the desert actually uninhabitable and people will migrate to the Great Lakes.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#158

Post by simiones »

giantg2 wrote: post #8
simiones wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, let's ignore the simple solution - stop consuming so much water - and jump to a high-tech, unknown impact, expensive, complex, expensive solution. What could go wrong?

"Sure, let's ignore the simple solution - stop consuming so much water" I agree that it's a demand-side issue, but the solutions are not "simple".

They are "simple", but hard to implement. You stop farming and in arid areas (and also stop high water consumption industries in those same areas) - simple. Also simple to achieve: either tax industrial water usage, or outright ration water for industrial use. Hard to do - people don't want to move, local food shortages may happen, people hate taxes and price hikes etc.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#159

Post by rtkwe »

CountDrewku wrote: post #100
ngngngng wrote: post #10

Approximately 27% of the water used in Utah comes from the Colorado River and 60% of Utahans benefit from the river. 82% of Utah water goes to farmers. Significant amounts of that water usage is to grow Cotton and Alfalfa. Two water intensive crops that are largely exported out of the country. In my opinion we have absolutely no business growing these crops in a desert, especially just to ship them out of the country…

>In my opinion we have absolutely no business growing these crops in a desert, You might as well just say people shouldn't be living in most of the western US then since a majority of it receives very little rainfall. It's very easy to call these people out when you're not directly affected. Yes just strip them of their major sources of income. No issue there.... You need a better plan than just telling the Governor…

You can live out there with little water impact if you don't insist on importing the kind of green water intensive landscaping that the rest of the country wants. People living there is relatively ok from a water point of view (though from a power usage perspective we really should be building very different homes in that area too) it's doing farming in some of the drier parts of the US that seems wasteful when we know water is an issue there.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#160

Post by delecti »

blooalien wrote: post #152
delecti wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've idly thought about which areas are likely to come out ahead because of climate change. It's going to affect just about everything, but surely there will be at least a couple winners next to the pile of losers. Obviously you can't predict too far out, but like you've said, the midwest seems likely to be a winner in the short-term. I've also seen a lot about the Russian permafrost melting, and I can't help but thi…

Problem is that in this particular issue the natural systems of the planet are straight up breaking down and soon could spiral so out of control as to be entirely beyond our ability to do anything about the issue. The longer we wait, the higher the odds it becomes "unfixable".

I don't disagree with any of that. I'm not saying things will be good globally, or even in very many places. I'm just saying that it's likely that climate change will leave some areas of the planet better than they are now.

Whether or not we have the ability now, or will have the ability in the future, to reverse course on climate change was entirely unrelated to the point I was trying to make.

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