Lake Mead
Meanwhile, drought.
A once-in-a-lifetime drought in the western part of the US is turning up dead bodies – but that’s the least of people’s worries.
It’s not once-in-a-lifetime any more. Lifetimes are going to be radically different in the future (the future meaning now and tomorrow and so on – not some distant prospect beyond the horizon).
Sitting on the Arizona-Nevada border near Las Vegas, Lake Mead – formed by the creation of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River – is the largest reservoir in the United States and provides water to 25 million people across three states and Mexico. Here, the stunning scale of a drought in the American west has been laid plain for all to see.
Used to provide.
If the lake keeps receding, it would reach what’s known as “dead pool” – a level so low the Hoover Dam would no longer be able to produce hydropower or deliver water downstream.
And why would it not keep receding? It’s not as if we’re doing anything differently.
Nasa, which monitors changing water levels, is warning that the western United States is now entering one of the worst droughts ever seen.
“With climate change, it seems like the dominoes are beginning to fall,” Nasa hydrologist JT Reager told the BBC.
“We get warmer temperatures, we get less precipitation and snow. The reservoirs start drying up, then in a place like the West, we get wildfires”.
Not next century or next decade or next year but now.
75% of Lake Mead’s water goes to agriculture. 75% of not much is not much.
Over a third of America’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts are grown in California. But tens of thousands of acres lie idle because farmers can’t get enough water to grow crops.
There it is – the bottom line I keep mentioning in climate disaster posts: crop failures. Something the most obliviously optimistic of humans can’t ignore forever.
If only people hadn’t started growing anything in areas that required more water than was already there, it wouldn’t be so bad. The problem is, there’s less water than there was to start with in some areas that had sufficient quantities already. Areas that weren’t sustainable to start with will go first, followed by places that are no longer sustainable. Whether there will be enough areas that might become sustainable to make up for those areas that are no longer productive for human agriculture. Of course it’s nice to have a stable climate, one where you know you can reliably grow things year after year. Farms aren’t really very mobile, unless you’re thinking of the next Dustbowl, when they just blow away. Unfortunately, one of the effects of anthropogenic climate change is climate instability. We’ve crossed a threshold where even if we were to stop emitting CO2 altogether right now, we’ve already dumped enough that we’re committed to a certain degree of warming, which will be exacerbated by the knock-on effects of thawing permafrost, release of methane clathrates etc. Stability isn’t going to show up for quite some time. This doesn’t even include the impact of degraded or destroyed biospheric services on human agriculture. Not to mention that the rest of life on Earth, which does not get a vote or a say in what we inflict upon it, has, I believe, some right to a space and a living on this planet as well. I would argue that the rest of life on Earth has a greater claim than we do to a habitable planet. Most of it was here before we showed up. We’re the boorish, libertarian arrivistes, breathing air we can’t make, drinking water we can’t create, cultivating soil that takes centuries to accumulate, thinking that we are a self-made, self-sufficient species, and that all of everything else is for us. Funnily enough, it turns out our ability to live here at all depends upon everything else living here too, so even for our own selfish needs, we need the rest of the biosphere. In fact, we need it more than it needs us.