Above: Glen Canyon Dam on Feb. 3, 2022, in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area near Page. Lake Powell was at 26% of capacity, 168 feet below its full elevation of 3,700 feet above sea level at the time.
The Arizona legislature had only two things that it had to address this year: (1) the fiscal cliff in education funding it created with its efforts to undermine Invest in Ed, Prop. 208, with a tax cut for Arizona’s wealthiest citizens, and (2) the impending water shortage crisis from an historic megadrought and climate change.
The legislature will say that it addressed the fist issue (not really). But it has done virtually nothing constructive to address the second issue, while it wastes its valuable time on GQP culture war issues and MAGA/QAnon cult election denier Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression bills.
When the water dries up, the people will leave. Arizonans will become climate refugees from desertification brought on by an epochal megadrought and climate change. Arizonans may become the new Anasazi, or Ancient Pueblo People. Is Ancient People’s End a Warning for the Future? (excerpts):
As modern officials try to assess the risk global warming might present to the American Southwest, they’re paying a lot of attention to what scientists say about how climate changes affected the region’s ancient past.
The people who lived in these ancient villages, which are known as pueblos, were part of a large culture that thrived for several hundred years in the high desert plain that covers parts of modern Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona. Archaeologists call them Anasazi, or Ancient Pueblo People. One of the best known of their pueblos is in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.
But sometime in the late 1200s, the Anasazi abandoned all of their pueblos. And for more than a hundred years, archaeologists have been perplexed about why.
Kuckelman thinks she may have found the answer. The pueblo people didn’t leave a written record, but she believes they left clues behind in the villages she’s studying.
Kuckelman thinks the reason was climate change. A major drought hit the area in the 1270s. Kuckelman says her research from one of the villages, Sand Canyon Pueblo, shows that the drought destroyed the people’s ability to grow corn to feed themselves and their turkey flocks. They were forced to revert to hunting and gathering.
This and other evidence convinced Kuckelman that the corn crops that fed the ancient farmers and their turkeys failed because of the drought.
Kristen Kuckelman couldn’t have come up with her theory if it weren’t for the work of scientists who study the growth rings of trees. The rings reveal important secrets about the distant past, such as when kivas were built, and when the great drought hit. That information enabled Kuckelman to link the collapse of the pueblo’s crops and turkey flocks to the Great Drought of the 1270s.
Woodhouse and her colleagues recently presented an alarming picture of the ancient history of the Colorado River. They sampled the oldest trees they could find — dead and alive — and used them to estimate stream flows all the way back to the year 762. Their results show that the droughts over the last hundred years weren’t as severe or as long as earlier droughts. And in fact, the first part of the 20th century was unusually wet.
“Not only was it wet in the context of 100 years, but there was not a wet period like that for at least 400 years,” Woodhouse says.
That has major ramifications for modern people who rely on the Colorado River for water. The laws that are used to divvy up the river assume that the extremely wet period was normal.
Woodhouse says the lesson from the tree rings is that longer dry spells, like the one that chased the pueblo farmers from their villages, could return.
Some experts believe they already have.
Kuhn believes the lower river levels over the last several years represent a new, drier normal. And because of climate change, he expects the river to become even drier in the future.
With that in mind, Kuhn thinks that the tens of millions of people who rely on the Colorado River to irrigate their fields, water their lawns and fill their bathtubs, should take the experiences of the ancient pueblo farmers seriously.
Kuhn notes that while modern society has a lot of technology, it also has a thirst for the Colorado that is greater than its supply. He believes that what happened to the ancients could still happen today.
“We’re used to a certain amount of water,” he says. “If that changes just a little bit, it’s going to cause some big disruptions in how we deal with life here in the southwest.”
The Associated Press recently reported, Lake Powell hits historic low, raising hydropower concerns:
A massive reservoir known as a boating mecca dipped below a critical threshold [last] Tuesday raising new concerns about a source of power that millions of people in the U.S. West rely on for electricity.
Lake Powell’s fall to below 3,525 feet (1,075 meters) puts it at its lowest level since the lake filled after the federal government dammed the Colorado River at Glen Canyon more than a half century ago — a record marking yet another sobering realization of the impacts of climate change and megadrought.
It comes as hotter temperatures and less precipitation leave a smaller amount flowing through the over-tapped Colorado River. Though water scarcity is hardly new in the region, hydropower concerns at Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona reflect that a future western states assumed was years away is approaching — and fast.
“We clearly weren’t sufficiently prepared for the need to move this quickly,” said John Fleck, director of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program.
Federal officials are confident water levels will rise in the coming months once snow melts in the Rockies. But they warn that more may need to be done to ensure Glen Canyon Dam can keep producing hydropower in the years ahead.
Though both Lake Powell and its downstream counterpart, Lake Mead, are dropping faster than expected, much of the region’s focus has been on how to deal with water scarcity in Arizona, Nevada and California, not electricity supply.
For Glen Canyon Dam, the new level is 35 feet (11 meters) above what’s considered “minimum power pool” — the level at which its turbines would stop producing hydroelectric power.
If Lake Powell drops even more, it could soon hit “deadpool” — the point at which water likely would fail to flow through the dam and onto Lake Mead. Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico already are taking a combination of mandatory and voluntary cuts tied to Lake Mead’s levels.
About 5 million customers in seven states — Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — buy power generated at Glen Canyon Dam.
The government provides it at a cheaper rate than energy sold on the wholesale market, which can be wind, solar, coal or natural gas.
For the cities, rural electric cooperatives and tribes that rely on its hydropower, less water flowing through Glen Canyon Dam can therefore increase total energy costs. Customers bear the brunt.
The situation worries the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, one of the 50 tribal suppliers that rely on the dam for hydropower. It plans to spend $4.5 million on an alternative energy supply this year.
“It’s a very sensitive issue for all of us right now,” said Walter Haase, the tribal utility’s general manager.
Bureau of Reclamation officials last summer took an unprecedented step and diverted water from reservoirs in Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado in what they called “emergency releases” to replenish Lake Powell. In January, the agency also held back water scheduled to be released through the dam to prevent it from dipping even lower.
Anxieties stretch beyond hydropower. Last summer, tourism and boating were hobbled by falling lake levels. The Glen Canyon National Recreation Area is taking advantage of the low levels at Lake Powell to extend boat ramps. Most are now closed or come with warnings to launch at your own risk.
[T]he record low also comes after a tough year for hydropower. Last year, as U.S. officials worked to expand renewable energy, drought in the West drove a decline in hydropower generation, making it harder for officials to meet demand. Hydropower accounts for more than one-third of the nation’s utility-scale renewable energy.
Nick Williams, the bureau’s Upper Colorado Basin power manager, said many variables, including precipitation and heat, will determine the extent to which Lake Powell rebounds in the coming months.
Regardless, hydrology modeling suggests there’s roughly a 1 in 4 chance it won’t be able to produce power by 2024.
The Arizona Repubic reports, Arizona drought conditions are expected to worsen through the spring, forecast says:
Drought will continue into the spring months across Arizona, increasing wildfire risk and stress on water resources and agriculture, according to a new forecast by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The projected level of drought means there will likely be a below-average snowpack in the mountains, drier than normal soil moisture and a lack of water availability in places, according to Brad Pugh, a meteorologist with the Climate Prediction Center at NOAA.
Arizona has experienced a long-term drought dating back to 1996, which was exacerbated by a dry monsoon season in 2020, when the state received little rain in July, August and September.
It was worsened by two La Niña winters in a row, several climatologists and meteorologists said. During La Niña cycles, colder than normal sea surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific typically produce drier winters in Arizona. While Arizona recorded the second wettest July on record last summer, it wasn’t enough to make up for the winter deficits.
La Niña and El Niño — the opposite phenomenon, where warmer temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific tend to cause wetter winters in Arizona — are naturally occurring phenomena. But some scientists believe they may become more intense or frequent or both as a result of climate change, although the connection is not clear.
“The drought expansion and intensification that we’ve had across the country this past winter is largely due to La Niña,” Pugh said. “And the drought we’re seeing in the western U.S. is consistent with what we would expect in a warming climate.”
In Arizona, moderate and severe drought levels are increasing, with areas of extreme drought on the west side of the state, according to state climatologist Erinanne Saffell. Abnormally dry conditions, one level below what’s considered drought, have decreased in parts of central Arizona, she said.
Saffell noted that extreme drought levels fell this year compared with last year, with last year’s extreme drought at 85% of the state and this year’s at 6%.
“It’s not unexpected to see that the spring outlook is to continue drought, and perhaps even extend some of the drought,” she said. “More than likely, we’re going to be continuing these drought levels … it will definitely take more than one season, more than one wet year, to move out of drought.”
In-state reservoirs remain stable
About 75% of Arizona is in drought right now, ranging from moderate, severe, extreme and exceptional levels, a decrease from last year when nearly 100% of the state experienced drought, according to statistics from the U.S. Drought Monitor.
The state has suffered increasing drought in the past few years: In March 2019, about 5% of the state experienced drought. In 2021, after little rain during monsoon season, the number surged, with nearly 100% of the state experiencing drought.
Bo Svoma, a meteorologist for Salt River Project, which provides water to about half of metro Phoenix and draws from the Salt and Verde rivers, said NOAA’s spring forecast of drought won’t significantly affect the utility’s reservoir operations.
Svoma said unlike the Colorado River system, SRP’s reservoir levels haven’t changed much since Arizona’s 26-year drought began. The reservoir is currently at 72% capacity. In May 1995, it was at 75% capacity.
“This drought is thought to be the worst in the last 700 years and SRP storage is pretty much the same now as it was at the beginning of the drought,” he said. “And that is certainly not the case for the Colorado River reservoir system, which has steadily gone down through that severe drought.”
Lake Mead, the largest reservoir on the Colorado, is currently about 34% full. Lake Powell, the other major reservoir on the river, is hovering around 24% of capacity.
Droughts are ‘complicated’
Svoma attributes this to a few factors. First, SRP’s system is smaller than the Colorado River system. It’s able to refill in one wet winter, which the state saw in 2017, 2019 and 2020.
Second, the utility’s system is in long-term balance, with demand even slightly decreasing from more efficient water use, while the Colorado River system is over-allocated, meaning that more water is taken out of the system than comes in on average.
And, according to research over the past decade, the Salt and Verde rivers are less sensitive to warming than the Colorado River, which was declared in shortage for the first time ever last August. Aside from less rainfall, hotter temperatures take a big bite out of the runoff budget because of increased evaporation, Svoma said.
The Colorado River basin receives its runoff in the warmer months of April, May and June from a melting snowpack, when the days are long and the sun is high in the sky, while the Salt and Verde rivers receive their runoff from rainfall and snowmelt in the cooler winter months of January, February and March.
Still, Svoma expects the reservoirs to be 10% to 15% lower than current levels by the end of summer because of this year’s dry winter. He notes that’s when the utility has the highest demand for water, although he isn’t worried about the reservoir getting to an uncomfortably low level.
“It’s important to look at drought through where you get your water from,” Svoma said. “So if you get your water from the Colorado River, then your drought’s tied to storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which is a multi-decade thing, bleak to climate change. If you get your water from Salt River Project, then this last dry winter is not really having a big impact. If you get your water from wells, then maybe you got to think a little harder about how a single wet winter impacts your water situation.
“So the drought issue is complicated, and I think looking at those drought maps, you have to be a little thoughtful on how you interpret those.”
In related news, Drought-stricken California imposes new round of water cuts:
California’s urban water users and farmers who rely on supplies from state reservoirs will get less than planned this year as fears of a third consecutive dry year become reality, state officials announced Friday.
Water agencies that serve 27 million people and 750,000 acres (303,514 hectares) of farmland, will get just 5% of what they’ve requested this year from state supplies beyond what’s needed for critical activities such as drinking and bathing.
That’s down from the 15% allocation state officials had announced in January, after a wet December fueled hopes of a lessening drought.
But a wet winter didn’t materialize and unless several more inches of rain falls this month, the January-March period will be the driest start to a California year at least a century. That’s when most of the state’s rain and snow typically falls.
* * *
California is in its second acute drought in less than a decade, and scientists say the U.S. West is broadly experiencing the worst megadrought in 1,200 years, made more intense by climate change.
[T]he dry conditions that began anew in 2020 are demanding more conservation, as reservoirs such as Lake Oroville and Shasta Lake remain below historical levels and less water from melting snow is expected to trickle down the mountains this spring.
Current predictions estimate the state will have about 57% of its historical median runoff this April through July, said Alan Haynes, hydrologist in charge for the California Nevada River Forecast Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Melted snow traditionally provides about a third of the state’s water supply.
A very wet December put water content in the snow at 160% of normal levels, but isn’t resulting in as much water runoff as expected because warmer temperatures are causing some of that water to evaporate rather than flow into rivers and streams as it melts, said Nemeth, the Department of Water Resources director.
A persistent lack of water could produce a range of negative consequences for California, including farmers fallowing fields and endangered salmon and other fish dying.
Paul Hirt, a water, energy and sustainability scholar and professor emeritus at Arizona State University, writes at the Arizona Republic, “Lawmakers won’t protect our groundwater, so we’re taking this fight to voters”, https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2022/03/22/asking-voters-protect-rural-groundwater-willcox-douglas-ama/9457686002/
March 22 is World Water Day, an annual commemoration bringing attention to the more than 2 billion people who lack secure access to clean water. Some of these people live right here in Arizona.
This year, World Water Day is focused on groundwater, a crucial source of drinking water and crop irrigation accumulated in underground aquifers. Because this water is saturated in sand and rock, it is replenished slowly and easily depleted by pumping.
Dependence on overexploited and declining groundwater supplies is a long-standing problem in Arizona. Venerable Arizona author Charles Bowden wrote an insightful book about groundwater depletion in 1977 titled “Killing the Hidden Waters.” He was not alone in his concern.
The Arizona legislature debated the issue as long ago as the 1940s. But not until 1980 did it finally pass a meaningful law – the Arizona Groundwater Management Act – which created “Active Management Areas” (AMAs) to address groundwater overdraft. But after four decades of concerted effort, groundwater pumping in most AMAs remains well above what is considered “safe yield.”
Rural Arizona’s water situation is dire
The situation is even worse in rural areas outside the AMAs where communities are often 100% dependent on groundwater yet lack any meaningful groundwater withdrawal regulations.
Cochise County in southeast Arizona is ground zero for this issue. It has one small city (Sierra Vista), a scattering of rural communities, an army base, and a strong agricultural and tourism economy. But it is entirely dependent on shrinking aquifers, leaving its future insecure.
In Cochise County’s Sulphur Springs Valley, a recent expansion of megadairies and alfalfa crops owned by Riverview Farms of Minnesota has led to some of the fastest groundwater decline and worst land subsidence in the state. Many homeowners’ wells there are going dry. Drilling a deeper well can cost more than $40,000 – prohibitive for many residents who are retirees or on low fixed incomes.
The situation is growing dire. Yet the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) has declined to act, even though it has the authority to designate new AMAs.
This could be the first AMA created by voters
Arizona legislators are aware of the groundwater depletion crises unfolding in the Sulphur Springs Valley, in Mohave County, in the upper Verde Valley and elsewhere. They have introduced many bills, but partisanship and competing interests have stalled progress.
Residents in Sulphur Springs Valley have launched petition drives to get two measures on the local ballot that would force ADWR to designate the Willcox and Douglas groundwater basins as AMAs. If successful, they will be the first AMAs designated via ballot and would set a precedent for citizen action in other areas of the state.
The Arizona Water Defenders, which led the petition drive, submitted the first petition for the Willcox basin AMA to the County Elections office on March 18. If enough signatures are verified, an election will be called later this year and residents of the valley will have the chance to vote on whether to advance water sustainability through tools available in the Groundwater Management Act.
Another group with members associated with Riverview Farms has proposed creating a SE Arizona Water Improvement District that would dig several deep wells, build a delivery infrastructure, and provide water to residents within the district boundary for a monthly fee. This would solve the short-term issue of people losing access to water but would do nothing to address its root cause: groundwater overpumping.
Groundwater needs limits to sustain us long-term
If we want to build sustainable communities and businesses, we must adopt limits to our consumption of groundwater. And we should use the democratic tools at our disposal to accomplish that.
Deep-pocketed out-of-state investors see rural Arizona as a wild west of cheap land and unregulated groundwater. Their 30-year investment horizons do not build sustainable communities. When the water is gone, they will move their enterprises elsewhere. Without water, those left behind have no future.
Our quality of life, indeed our very survival, requires careful stewardship of groundwater.
Arizonans who aim to set down permanent roots and build communities that will flourish seven generations hence must act together to save our hidden waters.
“greedy people just want to keep making money now and let future Arizonan’s clean up the mess later”. No surprise there Sharpie. Here we are amidst a historic drought and the cement heads are building their stick and mud houses like there’s no tomorrow. Of course the home building company owners reside where water supplies are not a problem.
Joanna Allhands at the Arizona Republic writes, “4 utterly important water questions for Arizona that almost no one is talking about”, https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/joannaallhands/2022/03/21/arizona-water-authority-questions-no-one-talking-growth/7097771001/
Is creating a powerful water authority the best way to find additional water for the state? [Um… NO.]
Plenty of folks are struggling to answer that question, based on nearly 70 pages of comments from cities, private water providers, farmers and homebuilders on the idea.
And for good reason. Because while the proposed water authority raises fundamental questions about who should get the water, a draft legislative proposal has few substantive answers for them.
The answer, it seems, is to simply create the water authority – which could buy and own water, offer loans and bonds, make deals with private investors and even use eminent domain – and let its six appointed members figure out the ground rules later.
That’s a tough pill to swallow.
1. How much new water does Arizona need?
It’s unclear how much new water we might need.
A statewide study group estimated in 2011 that Arizona could be short 600,000 acre-feet a year on the low end by 2035 and up to 3.3 million acre-feet a year by 2110, with three-quarters or more of the gap between supply and demand occurring in the state’s urban areas.
And, again, that was in 2011 – before shortages emerged on the Colorado River and water issues in rural areas were not nearly as widespread. It’s anyone’s guess how big the imbalance might be now, though state officials presume it is greater than it was in 2011.
There’s no way we can find enough new water to cover those gaps – and if we could, it would probably cost several times more than the $1 billion the authority may be given to invest.
Because keep in mind: Most major projects we’ve talked about to date are estimated to generate about 200,000 acre-feet a year – pots of water that, in the case of Mexican desalination, would be shared by a lot more entities than just Arizona.
2. Where would that water go?
We do know that most of the $1 billion would be earmarked for loans to finance major augmentation or conservation projects. The rest would be used for loans to finance smaller projects in rural areas – most likely, agricultural efficiency or stormwater capture and aquifer recharge efforts.
But rural Arizona is unlikely to get much of the water from a major project. Even if we had a way to deliver it to them (which for most areas that are wholly reliant on groundwater, we don’t), most users there would never be able to afford it, unless it were heavily subsidized.
In fact, most urban areas are unwilling to pay 10 times as much for this water now, though they might be more willing in a decade or two when water is scarcer.
Proponents argue that the authority could hold those supplies in trust, perhaps by storing them underground, until major users are ready to pay for them.
But given that there probably won’t be enough to go around, would that water be allocated primarily to shore up deficits for existing users or to help sustain new growth?
3. What about growth? (No, it’s not that simple)
It’s easy to say, well duh, we should just stop growing. If we don’t have water, we cut off any new homes and businesses from coming here.
But it’s not that easy. It’s been said that cities are like sharks – they either keep moving, keep attracting new people and new investment, or they die. And we’re already beginning to experience the consequences of slow swimming.
We have a housing problem and, even worse, an affordable housing problem. There aren’t enough units to satisfy demand, which means it now costs more to rent a one-bedroom apartment than I pay for my three-bedroom house. I have a good job, and if I wasn’t lucky enough to have locked in a mortgage years ago, I couldn’t afford to live here.
Cutting off growth completely could lessen housing demand, which might lower prices. But if people can’t live here, they also aren’t going to invest here. And what, then, does that mean for existing residents’ quality of life?
That doesn’t mean we keep growing as we have for decades. Even if we find more water, we’re going to have to use less of it.
But how we grow is inextricably linked to how we decide who gets water, which means it’s a central question in creating a statewide water authority. It’s a shame that this legislation hasn’t spurred that level of debate at the state Capitol.
4. How do we ensure a ‘statewide benefit’?
The authority would have the power to study how much water we need, and where, and which types of projects it might find most favorable. It could set the criteria for proposals to demonstrate a “statewide benefit.”
But that’s weighty policy. And proposals are already coming out of the woodwork at the mere mention of $1 billion.
If lawmakers don’t clarify their intent for how the authority approaches these decisions, it’s likely that in-depth study will go by the wayside and whoever has the most detailed proposal will get the cash.
Is that really what we want, if private investors would not be required to publicly release proprietary information, and a legislative review committee for projects over $100 million wouldn’t necessarily be able to stop – or even prioritize – those investments?
I don’t know. But let’s have that debate.
“3. What about growth? (No, it’s not that simple)”
So there are only two choices? Grow or die?
Okay.
That argument seems to actually be “greedy people just want to keep making money now and let future Arizonan’s clean up the mess later”.
Either or arguments that simplistic just piss me off to no end.
Tell it to Joanna Allhands.
The Arizona Republic reports “How low can the Colorado River go? Drought forces states to face tough choices about water”, https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2022/03/21/climate-change-dries-colorado-river-force-new-rules-users/9453476002/
Water managers from across the Colorado River Basin are preparing to negotiate new rules for allocating the river’s dwindling flow and sharing the pain of a deepening shortage.
They’re adapting the 100-year-old Colorado River Compact to a river that little resembles the bountiful gusher that negotiators from seven states and the federal government in 1922 thought — or hoped — would bless the Southwest forever. The stakes rise with every foot that Lake Mead and Lake Powell fall, as the states and the water users within them recognize they’re due for a tighter squeeze.
Arizona gets more than a third of its water from the river, growing abundant crops around Yuma and homes around Phoenix and Tucson. The Las Vegas area gets most of its water from the river and has built a deeper pipe in Lake Mead to assure its continued access. Late-developing states like Wyoming use water for ranching and energy development, and are hoping to continue growing on it.
“We’re all going to lose,” Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager John Entsminger told his counterparts from across the watershed on Friday at a river law symposium at the University of Utah’s Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment.
His warning was less a lament than a call to action on behalf of a river that some 40 million people from the headwaters in Wyoming and Colorado to the delta in Mexico are using up.
“We’re up to the challenge because we don’t have a choice,” said Entsminger, whose agency in Las Vegas has embraced water austerity by banning most new grass lawns and golf courses and restricting new pool sizes.
Re-thinking the river’s flow
Before the states, Indigenous communities and water districts can agree on a new plan to more conservatively divvy the water, they’ll need to agree on how low the river might go.
The 1922 negotiators asserted that the river could supply more than the 15 million acre-feet distributed among the seven states that share it, with some left over to flow into Mexico. The 2022 negotiators are debating whether they should plan for just 11 million acre-feet, as Entsminger’s Nevada agency already has penciled into its water security plans.
Today in Arizona, a 326,000-gallon acre-foot is about enough to supply three households for a year.
Since 2000, the river has delivered on average 12.3 million acre-feet a year, which is generally a couple of million less than the region has used. Consequently, the giant reservoirs that were full back then have tanked, Lake Mead to about a third of capacity, Lake Powell to a quarter.
Although the compact assigned specific shares to the upper and lower basins of the 1,450-mile river, the U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation in 2007 agreed with the states on an adaptive plan that reduces some users’ deliveries when reservoirs dive past certain thresholds. States including Arizona have built on those rules, sometimes paying tribes and other users to keep water in Lake Mead. But the guidelines expire at the end of 2025, and the states, tribes and water districts will spend the next few years debating a new, likely harsher, blueprint.
A federally declared shortage based on the 2007 rules already has fallen hard on some users who aren’t high on the river’s list of first-in-time, first-in-right appropriations, such as central Arizona farmers.
Planning for a regular supply of just 11 million acre-feet would obliterate long-held assumptions about how much water some or all of the users thought they were entitled for future growth. Contingencies for that level could severely limit growth potential in the Upper Basin, where Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah are far from fully developing their collective 7.5 million acre-foot share outlined by the compact.
Those states are required to send on average another 7.5 million acre-feet downstream to the Lower Basin states of Arizona, Nevada and California, with another 1.5 million acre-feet promised to Mexico. If the states and water users agree, the Lower Basin could cut deeply into its already developed share, which many observers believe would spread the suffering more fairly. Failure to agree would leave the decision solely to the U.S. Interior secretary, or to the courts if states sue each other.
‘We have to plan for less’
While the water experts who gathered in the S. J. Quinney College of Law’s moot courtroom know they must plan on less water, some aren’t ready to publicly commit to a number that will alarm water users back home. Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke, for instance, needs legislative approval for any deal he might make.
“I won’t say 11,” Buschatzke quipped from the symposium stage, “because I might get arrested when I get off the plane in Phoenix tonight.”
Climate scientists who study and project the Colorado’s flows as the region warms believe even 11 million acre-feet could be wishful thinking. Some studies suggest heat’s toll on the water supply will drop the river to just 9 million acre-feet in coming decades, said Brad Udall, a Colorado State University researcher who has focused on the river for 20 years.
“I could live with 11” as a planning guideline, even if it’s optimistic, Udall said. That projection is stark enough to require bold action that water managers could later build upon. It would follow the trajectory that scientists like Udall say represents the region’s heat-induced aridification, as opposed to temporary drought.
Others think it would be wise to plan contingencies to protect a river that might deliver only 9 million acre-feet. Without adjustments to the Lower Basin’s guaranteed deliveries, a river that’s routinely that small would leave the Upper Basin less than half what it currently takes out.
“We have to plan for less,” said Colorado River District General Manager Andy Mueller, who represents water users in western Colorado. “You don’t plan a system on hope or politics.”
The expanded role of tribes
Tribal representatives and attorneys said federal and state negotiators must include Indigenous perspectives in these talks, far more than in past rounds. The original compact, in particular, did not consider the needs of tribes who now hold or, in some cases, expect to hold sufficient water rights to make critical contributions to climate adaptation and conservation of reservoir storage.
Everyone who shares the river must use it responsibly and in a way that protects a semblance of nature and harmony, said Nora McDowell, a member of the river’s Water and Tribes Initiative and former chairwoman of the Fort Mojave Tribe on the Lower Colorado.
“We have a responsibility to change what we’ve learned in the past hundred years of this compact being in place,” McDowell said. Tribes need a voice to ensure that the river itself is no longer an afterthought, she said. “It is time.”
Whatever volume the parties pick and plan for, those in the Upper Basin will want to alter the hard requirement that they deliver a set amount of water to the states below Glen Canyon Dam near the Arizona-Utah state line. And some in the Lower Basin concede they’ll likely have to bend on that provision to reach a deal.
Entsminger told The Arizona Republic that water users in both the upper and lower regions will have to bend, or they won’t reach an agreement. Asked if that meant the Lower Basin might have to cut back enough to allow for an even split of future flows with the Upper Basin, he said he was not ready to discuss how to allocate the water.
“A 50-50 split would go a long way to solving problems,” said Amy Haas, who directs the Colorado River Authority of Utah.
That’s certainly true for her state, but an even split would likely deepen the pain in Arizona, where the state has already maxed out its use of the river and would have to cut further to allow upstream development. Arizona’s Buschatzke, like Nevada’s Entsminger, has not put numbers on a preferred rationing plan, but said all of the river’s users must share the benefits and the pain.
“We need a discussion about equitable shares of the river,” said Udall, the Colorado State researcher. The Upper Basin states are still using less than two-thirds of what they were promised in 1922, and could not have foreseen back then how climate change would penalize them for their slower development.
Still, he told The Republic, the states will likely need to agree on a deal that doesn’t force an even split on the Lower Basin, where California and Arizona have the watershed’s largest populations.
The Bureau of Reclamation in coming weeks will invite suggestions for what the new guidelines should consider, and it will launch a formal environmental review next year. The agency must balance the needs of seven states and 30 tribes while honoring treaty obligations with Mexico during, the agency’s program manager Carly Jerla said, and will need those partners to pull together.
“Our job here has never been harder,” Jerla said.
You spent an enormous amount of pixels telling us what we already know. Care to opine a solution that rural and non-rurals can agree on? I say rurals and non‐rural because this is not an R vs D issue.
Thus far, only a small number of Rs are advancing a solution which is limited to seeking expensive new water and the Ds are saying nothing. Rep. Cobb and a small number of members including myself are pushing for more restrictions on groundwater usage.
We are getting nowhere very slowly. Where is your opinionated passion AZBM?
A climate change denier is going to write water policy for the state of Arizona? OMG, we are definitely fucked now! I should go into the moving van business to cash in on all of the Arizonans who will be forced to flee the state as climate refugees when the water runs out.
Start with stopping indiscriminate pumping in rural basins. There should not be a “pump it until its gone” mentality from out of state and out of Country investors. Stop trying to placate ambitious land owners in Maricopa and Pinal counties, by fighting to transfer non metro water in Western Arizona for subdivisions in Queen Creek and Buckeye. CAP is 4th prioriry water. Conserve, outlaw all lawns. There are some starts.
“Antarctica, Arctic undergo simultaneous freakish extreme heat”, https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/antarctica-arctic-undergo-simultaneous-freakish-extreme-heat-rcna20747
Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.
Weather stations in Antarctica shattered records Friday as the region neared autumn. The two-mile high (3,234 meters) Concordia station was at 10 degrees (-12.2 degrees Celsius), which is about 70 degrees warmer than average, while the even higher Vostok station hit a shade above 0 degrees (-17.7 degrees Celsius), beating its all-time record by about 27 degrees (15 degrees Celsius), according to a tweet from extreme weather record tracker Maximiliano Herrera.
The coastal Terra Nova Base was far above freezing at 44.6 degrees (7 degrees Celsius).
It caught officials at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, by surprise because they were paying attention to the Arctic where it was 50 degrees warmer than average and areas around the North Pole were nearing or at the melting point, which is really unusual for mid-March, said center ice scientist Walt Meier.
“They are opposite seasons. You don’t see the north and the south (poles) both melting at the same time,” Meier told The Associated Press Friday evening. “It’s definitely an unusual occurrence.”
“It’s pretty stunning,” Meier added.
“Wow. I have never seen anything like this in the Antarctic,” said University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who returned recently from an expedition to the continent.
“Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing happen,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara.
Lazzara monitors temperatures at East Antarctica’s Dome C-ii and logged 14 degrees (-10 degrees Celsius) Friday, where the normal is -45 degrees (-43 degrees Celsius): “That’s a temperature that you should see in January, not March. January is summer there. That’s dramatic.”
Both Lazzara and Meier said what happened in Antarctica is probably just a random weather event and not a sign of climate change. But if it happens again or repeatedly then it might be something to worry about and part of global warming, they said.
The Antarctic continent as a whole on Friday was about 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than a baseline temperature between 1979 and 2000, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, based on U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather models. That 8-degree heating over an already warmed-up average is unusual, think of it as if the entire United States was 8 degrees hotter than normal, Meier said.
At the same time, on Friday the Arctic as a whole was 6 degrees (3.3 degrees) warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average.
By comparison, the world as a whole was only 1.1 degrees (0.6 degrees Celsius) above the 1979 to 2000 average. Globally the 1979 to 2000 average is about half a degree (.3 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average.
What makes the Antarctic warming really weird is that the southern continent — except for its vulnerable peninsula which is warming quickly and losing ice rapidly — has not been warming much, especially when compared to the rest of the globe, Meier said.
Antarctica did set a record for the lowest summer sea ice — records go back to 1979 — with it shrinking to 741,000 square miles (1.9 million square kilometers) in late February, the snow and ice data center reported.
What likely happened was “a big atmospheric river” pumped in warm and moist air from the Pacific southward, Meier said.
And in the Arctic, which has been warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe and is considered vulnerable to climate change, warm Atlantic air was coming north off the coast of Greenland.
UPDATE: The Conger ice shelf in Antarctica, which had an approximate surface area of 450 square miles, collapsed around March 15, scientists said Friday. “Ice Shelf Twenty Times the Size of Manhattan Collapes in Antarctic Heat Wave”, https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-shelf-twenty-times-the-size-of-manhattan-collapes-in-antarctic-heat-wave?ref=home
Record high temperatures in Antarctica are believed to have contributed to the complete collapse of an ice shelf 20 times the size of Manhattan.
The collapse was recorded in a series of astonishing satellite images with the process accelerating following record high temperatures in recent weeks, with reports of temperatures as high as 10F on March 18, when it would more typically be -50F. Catherine Colello Walker, an earth and planetary scientist at NASA, told The Guardian, “It is one of the most significant collapse events anywhere in Antarctica since the early 2000s, when the Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated. It won’t have huge effects, most likely, but it’s a sign of what might be coming.” She said the shelf had been shrinking gradually for two decades but the process accelerated dramatically in 2020.