To run for office in Minnesota, you gotta know ethanol. In Colorado, you're DOA unless you understand water rights, which are considerably more important and complex.
This week, the Colorado River Water Conservation District officials said water shortages caused by "regional climate change" could affect every water user in the basin. Stream flows are declining. Flows into Lake Powell, essentially the watershed's lock box for paying off calls on downstream water rights, are expected to be 59 percent of normal — the seventh year out of eight with below-average in-flow.
Colorado, Utah and Wyoming might have to cut back on their water use if the reservoirs can't deliver what's owed to Arizona, Nevada and California. Meanwhile, there's a lot of energy production upstream that is very thirsty, with water rights that supercede those of more recent immigrants to the West.
Growing up, my hometown had an expression: "Be sure to flush. Rifle [a town downriver with notoriously vile water] needs the water."
It's not so funny any more.
*****
That's not all.
The New York Times reports that the cool alpine towns high above the Arizona desert are starting to break down. Trees are dying and fires are more prevalent and destructive.
“A lot of people think climate change and the ecological repercussions are 50 years away,” said Thomas W. Swetnam, director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “But it’s happening now in the West. The data is telling us that we are in the middle of one of the first big indicators of climate change impacts in the continental United States.”
[...]“The West has warmed more than any other place in the United States outside Alaska,” said Jonathan T. Overpeck, a University of Arizona scientist and co-author of the recent draft by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last month in Paris.
A trip up to any one of the 27 sky islands shows the ravages of heat on the land. The forests are splotched with a rusty tinge, as trees die from beetle infestation. Frogs with a 10,000-year-old pedigree have all but disappeared. One of the sky islands is the world’s only habitat for the Mount Graham red squirrel, an endangered species down to its last 100 or so animals.
For the squirrel, the frog and other species that have retreated ever higher, there may be no place left to go.
“As the climate warms, these species on top of the sky islands are literally getting pushed off into space,” Dr. Overpeck said.
Yah, but we'll playing golf in December in Minnesota, so...
