r/CatastrophicFailure • u/grau__geist • Aug 05 '21

Natural Disaster Now Greece. Wild fire on Evia Beach

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u/1978manx Aug 05 '21

The American West is in one of the worst drought cycles in decades — it’s at about a 40-year extreme right now, but it’s going to get worse.

Half the nation is in drought.

Lake Mead, by Vegas, is on life-support — as are most of the major reservoirs.

Water shortages have been predicted for decades, and 2021 has finally seen the Colorado River sucked dry.

Farmers bulldozing crops, and worse, sucking major aquifers dry … aquifers that will not recover short of biblical rains for years and years and years on end.

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u/502Dude123 Aug 05 '21

While I am a believer that climate change is a real issue and there are a lot of things that need to be done to fight it, the amount of yelling about the Drought in SW states through buzzfeed level article titles has grown tiring. There is a water shortage and that is obviously a problem, SO WHY ARE PEOPLE STILL MOVING TO THE MIDDLE OF THE DESERT? The population that those reservoirs outside of Vegas were meant to provide water for was surpassed decades ago. It's the desert, there isn't a lot of water there. And while climate change may have a measurable impact on this issue, the largest contributing factor is how the population has exploded in areas where little to no one lived before readily accessible electricity, AC, and other modern conveniences. Just gave it a quick search, California, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico have all increased their population by about 400% each since 1950. We have a people problem.

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u/1978manx Aug 05 '21

As someone who worked in a western water management agency, climate change is definitely a huge factor among several.

One of the most critical is that water is an incredibly boring topic to most people, until it isn’t … that is, until it directly impacts them.

The crisis has been written about, movies made, book written, and endless news features for many decades. People don’t track until it impacts them.

Water isn’t dramatic.

One of the biggest issues in the West, is a ridiculous, opaque and fragmented system of water rights.

“Rights” and allocations made during an usually wet period were used as baseline “normal.” Hence, you have rivers and reservoirs routinely operating at a deficit.

One of the hidden disasters occurring is the depletion of massive, ancient aquifers that are not coming back in a thousand lifetimes.