Before I get into the topic I want to discuss today, I want to mention that it occurred to me that Donald Trump’s disease is starting to spread. Trump insists he “won” the election and is backing wild election fraud conspiracies to “prove” it. Now we see Amber Heard insisting that she really “won” the defamation trial, and now she and her lawyers are peddling wild conspiracy theories to “prove” it.
But in the grand scheme of things, those are not the dumbest things we “amber heard” lately; Let’s talk about climate change and water after the U.S. Supreme Court, in another predictably crazed "culture war" move to go along with overturning Roe v Wade and allowing Oklahoma law enforcement to ignore Native American treaty rights, have now caved in to the fossil fuel sector’s moaning about EPA regulations on pollution mitigation and attempts to hasten the transition to green energy solutions by gutting the EPA’s enforcement mandate. Of course it is all about short-term profits for the fossil fuel industry, the second worst polluters in the country. People be damned, whether it is artificially-inflated gas prices, or hastening its destructive effects on health and the environment.
But wait, some people may say, look at the Pacific Northwest, where I live, at least west of the mountains. Where is this “global” warming after a practically winter-like spring, and all this rain? In fact the average yearly rainfall actually increased by two inches over the past decade. We already passed the 45 inch mark for the October-September period, 5.5 inches above the updated higher normal and it’s still only the beginning of July. The snowpack in the mountains, which supplies the major sources of water for Western Washington, is well above normal.
But we are told by an Environment & Energy News article that appeared in Scientific American last year that excess storm water that falls is not only not very useful, but is “dangerous.” We hear about the phenomenon of “atmospheric rivers” more and more often around here, and we are told that “Atmospheric rivers are a major supply of precipitation to the West Coast—and at first glance, it may seem as though heavier rainfall would be a boon to the region. But that’s not necessarily the case. The damage caused by extreme rainfall events sometimes can cancel out their benefits.”
This includes “wiping out” the snowpack that supplies fresh water. This occurs around here when there is heavier than normal rainfall at the wrong time, such as in May when we saw the second highest rainfall total in almost a century. Even though the rainfall didn’t all fall at once as usually does in flooding events, there was flood warnings because of the effect the rain was having on the snowpack. You can see this effect when you see snow piles that just sit there slowly melting, but when hit by heavy rain disappear much more rapidly, regardless of the temperature.
Locally, excess rainfall also brings with it flooding and landslides, and the problem of excess storm water runoff is that it carries with it more pollutants and dangerous chemicals from the land and into streams, rivers and into Puget Sound. But even areas that receive seemingly too much rain are subject to wildfires if there is a prolonged period of dry, hot weather as we saw last summer. Excessive periods of heat can damage vegetation and the soil, making them “hydrophobic,” preventing rain water from seeping into the ground to be absorbed into groundwater reservoirs.
But being excessively “wet” must be better than excessively dry; although I’m sure we wouldn’t mind spreading the “wealth” around, but that is just not how nature works. Ocean currents and rain shadows have their will of it, but megadrought conditions in the West have been blamed on global warmings’ effect on the atmospheric circulation system known as the Hadley Cell, which is primarily responsible for desert conditions, and causing it to expand further into the Northern Hemisphere.
While some people might consider that “nice” weather as long is there is a reliable water supply around, for those who are responsible for insuring that there is enough water to supply people’s needs would rather wish they had our problem. Decreasing snowpack in the Rockies and increasing human consumption has massively depleted the Colorado River and the major reservoirs it supplies, Lake Mead and Lake Powell—to the point where the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is calling for “immediate action” in formulating plans to reduce water usage, currently based on agreements made over a century ago that have no basis in reality today. Here is an idea of just how much of its capacity that Lake Mead has lost over the past few decades:
Even worse is the reduction of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which has shrunk a shocking two-thirds in the past three decades:
That lake is fed by four rivers from the mountains, but because none of these rivers serves as an “outlet,” it means that it isn’t naturally “cleansed” of minerals and salt that are brought in from their sources (different from small lakes fed by rainwater, or the Great Lakes fed by thousands of rivers and streams, and whose outlet eventually is the Atlantic Ocean); they remain and accumulate. The fear is that the more the salty lake bed is uncovered, the more likely winds will blow the salt into not only farmland--causing the soil to be poisoned--but also into urban areas where there will be health effects.
That isn’t the only water problem. This map shows the decline in the water level of groundwater aquifers in selected wells in the West; this map is dated 2003, so it is probably worse now:
Groundwater, according to the Nature Conservatory, provides 38 percent of all drinking water in the U.S., and 70 percent of all groundwater usage is for farms. A 2021 report in the Journal of Hydrology warns that it takes 3 years for an aquifer to recover from normal drought conditions as long as it is not being used for human consumption--and the deeper the well, the longer it takes. What we are seeing, however, is sustained droughts and increased human consumption in most parts of the West—meaning at present rates of usage, these aquifers will probably never recover. Last year the LA Times reported that people desperate for water led to a “frenzy” of shallow well drilling that resulted in nearly 1,000 wells dry and many households with no water coming from their taps.
And it isn’t just the West that is having problems. “Dire warnings” are afoot for citizens of Chicago and the surrounding areas about turning a blind eye toward rapid depletion of groundwater for drinking water. The city of Joliet, population 150,000 and fast growing, is due to empty its aquifer in less than ten years—and nobody seems to have a “plan” about doing anything about it.
It is certainly odd to think that you can have both too much and too little water in the same place, and it is easy to forget that what we would call “nice” weather is actually very bad weather if it means no precipitation at all. What’s it going be like in another 10, 20, 30 years? It seems to me that people would prefer not to think about it.
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