Crunch Time In Western Drought: A Permanent Drought Could Become A Permanent National Crisis

"Bathtub Ring" in Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam shows how
low the water is, and how high it should be. If this keeps up
for a few more years, we have a national crisis.

 Here in Vermont, the drought we were enduring this spring and early summer is nearly gone. Northern areas still need quite a bit of rain, but at least it's better.  

Not much rain is in the forecast, but there is hope that autumn storms will come along and wet us down further. Our drought in northern Vermont is not the biggest possible crisis.  

Out west, meanwhile, the situation is turning more dire.  You might have heard about those wonderful monsoon thunderstorms that created some flash floods in the Southwest this summer.  That might have led some people to believe the drought is ending out there, too.

Not a chance.  The summer thunderstorms lessened, but did not eliminate the drought in a few sections of Arizona.  But most of the heavy rain consisted of local downpours that swept down mountain slopes and canyons but didn't create any widespread wetting.  The storms were a drop in the bucket. 

Extreme drought lives on.  The only hope for relief comes this winter.  Normally, large storms crank through the West over the colder months, causing widespread rain and mountain snow.  They'll need many, many such storms this winter to ease this long lasting drought.  One wet winter will not be nearly enough to solve the problem. You'll need a string of them. 

For what it's worth, long range seasonal outlooks from NOAA paint a grim picture in the Southwest. They call for persistent dry weather all winter out there. Worse, the forecasts call for above normal temperatures, which increase evaporation and can make droughts even more dire.

Granted, long range forecasts months in advance can easily be inaccurate, but the early thinking is bad.

Until now, real people have not been super affected by this southwestern drought, but that's changing. 

When Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam, is totally full, the water is 1,225 feet deep. Now, it's down to 1,075 feet or even a little lower than that.  That means conservation orders are in effect in parts of Arizona and farmers are now starting to have to let fields go fallow for lack of irrigation.

That's bad enough. But if this slow-motion disaster goes on for a few more years, it turns into a national crisis.

The drought that is making Lakes Mead and Powell so low was not just a one or two year affair, like the relatively minor drought we've had in Vermont.

The western drought has been building for a decade or more.  Climate change might well have permanently made the West hotter and drier than it once was.  So the winter rains could very well continue to fail indefinitely.

Experts are saying that climate change is making the weather more extreme. You might get a brief super wet period in which torrential rains hit the West, causing some serious flooding and briefly interrupting the slow decline of western reservoirs. 

But if climate scientists are right, we'll have to stop wondering if the explosive population growth over the past several decades in the Southwest was really such a good idea.

According to the Arizona Republic, there's a 41 percent chance Lake Mead water will be so low by 2025 that big cities like Phoenix could see sharply curtailed water supplies. And, if current projections hold, there's a one in five chance that by 2025, Hoover Dam, which holds back Lake Mead, will have to stop producing hydropower.

If that happens, electricity for 1.3 million people gets cut off.  Upstream Lake Powell might have to shut off the electric turbines due to low water by 2023.  There goes another source of electricity for 1.5 million people. 

The shortages of water and electricity at the very least could make life more difficult for millions of people. Some might become "climate refugees,"  leaving the Southwest for wetter, more hospitable parts of the United States.

This is a sign that the crap is hitting the fan with climate change. You can imagine the social and political upheaval if western drought causes large scale population shifts and migrations. This would affect us all, so the western drought is not just "their problem."

Remember, one study I wrote about recently suggested Vermont is one of the so-called "safer" places as climate change takes hold.  Will we get an influx of climate refugees?

Sure, with labor shortages and and aging population, a small surge of young, industrious people to the Green Mountain State would probably be a good thing overall.  But what if we see thousands upon thousands of people moving here at once?

This won't happen immediately, of course. It'll be a generational thing.  But great minds will have to plan for both what to do to confront the likely permanent drought in the Southwest. And they''ll have to figure out what to do about the widespread societal impacts that the drought and other effects of disastrous climate change might bring. 

We are obviously an already deeply divided nation.  We've divvied ourselves into mutually hostile tribes. That's not a recipe for cooperation.

We failed as a nation handling the pandemic, as we resorted to political hackery and profiteering, with deadly results. So what are the chances we'll get our act together and figure out as one nation how to confront the societal effects of climate change? Societal effects that might make the pandemic seem like a blip on the radar?

I'm not optimistic.