Colorado River plummets as lakes Powell and Mead drop to record lows | Hacker News Reader

Colorado River plummets as lakes Powell and Mead drop to record lows

nytimes.com

49 pointsjohntfella73 comments

When the West was settled it was widely believed that the act of building a town attracted rain. The 'atmosphere' of human buildings in an area would naturally attract and collect rain from the heavens. Many of the original methods used to estimate water, rainfall, and other essentials for human survival were wrong.

Most of them are catalogued in the outstanding Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - an excellent book with an outstanding audiobook too.

https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing...

I’ve heard this idea referred to as “rain follows the plow”, which as they found out in the 19th century, does not hold true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_follows_the_plow

Meh, everyone knows that if you need rain you call in the Wizard: https://wizard.gen.nz/adventures/the-rain-dance-kid/

Yes, New Zealand has an official Wizard: https://wizard.gen.nz/photo-galleries/official-documents/

19th century Law of Attraction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Thought

Wasn't that the result of active misinformation by companies with vested interest in transporting everyone out West?

In part, yes.

Who would’ve thought that growing water intensive crops in the middle of the desert and growing cities like Phoenix with suburbs with lush green lawns at a much higher rate than rest of the country was going to be without consequences.

Most of that is recycled waste water allowed to recharge the aquifer. People won't drink purified waste water directly. Have to pour it on the ground first.

The Saudi's 5 crop a year alfalfa is really the major problem

How much do the lawns in Phoenix actually contribute to this problem?

Comparatively very little, when stacked against the massive usage of water by agricultural irrigation. Source: https://conormclaughlin.net/2023/03/visualizing-water-consum...

Using an unsustainable amount of water to grow cattle feed and romaine lettuce in one of the most arid places on Earth is a questionable choice. It seems like the choice will be made for us, soon.

What about golf courses?

Good question. I wouldn't know if that falls under "public supply" or "domestic". The article doesn't mention the word "golf."

Everything contributes but residential use is a much smaller share in total. Arizona water utilization by class [0]:

   6%  Industrial
  22%  Municipal
  72%  Agricultural

0. https://mapazdashboard.arizona.edu/article/arizonas-water-us...

Just another form of debt we’ve been living off of, since the compact was established, knowing it wasn’t sustainable long term.

Vox did a great video on this a few years ago. [1] Bottom line, growing cow feed in the desert is wasteful and stupid. Blaming cities and industry is just a diversion.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gN1x6sVTc

The shrinking reservoirs are the immediate result of record-low snowpack this winter, which was erased by record heat in the spring. Melted snowpack creates most of the Colorado’s flow during the dry summer months. But as the Southwestern climate has grown hotter and drier, the river’s flow has become smaller and less reliable.

Legitimate question: I can understand that record-low snowpack would cause less water to flow into the lake, but the "erasure" of the snow pack by heat is just melting that would be captured in the lake, right? So if the record-low snowpack had been followed by record cold, would we have even less water in the lake?

In the mountain west warm dry springs coincide with higher winds. The blowing warm dry air leads to dramatically increased evaporation of snow melt, drying of soil, as well as increased transpiration in plants, so the total moisture loss is much higher than what you might expect simply from modeling simple heat evaporation of open water bodies.

university of utah has several studies on the matter. a substantial percentage of the snowpack sublimates during a heatwave, never has a chance to melt. Of the remaining snowmelt, it has to saturate the ground before any can flow to an adjacent stream to feed the water table, and the bone dry soil around here can absorb a significant amount of water.

Not all of the erasure is captured. For example, if the ground is dry, than most gets absorbed into soil and won’t make it to the river. Or the snow may sublimate and go straight to vapor at heat.

Record cold would lead to more water. It would melt out fast later and since the soil was already recharged it would flow to rivers.

Worth noting this is generally glacier free landscape so the snow melts fully each year.

Aside from melting at historically fast levels, the snow itself is at record low levels. Less snow -> less snowpack -> less water.

For data, check out the second visualization here:

https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/ftpref/support/states/CO/produ...

There's no snowpack left, earlier in the season, because there's way less snow, and it's being consumed faster.

Good news! The El Nino that's forming is predicted to cause record snowpack in the West this winter...

https://nypost.com/2026/08/16/science/super-el-nino-odds-for...

So long as it goes down as snow instead of rain. Given high current temps (NEP25A) I’m not hopeful but we’ll see.

long range forecasts suggest drier conditions for northwest/west this winter https://www.severe-weather.eu/long-range-2/atlantic-anomaly-...

I wonder if I'll live to see the evacuation of Phoenix and Las Vegas. (Or Abu Dhabi, for that matter.)

If you are in your 30s, I would think you would have a good chance to see that happen.

To me, the big issue no one talks about will be people who live below say the Mason Dixon Line migrating north, probably starting maybe 50 or so years from now.

More than the Mason Dixon line, I'm more worried about the people in the Global South having to migrate in unprecedented scale because of climate change, and I am certain to see this happen within my lifetime. It will not be pretty.

I was including all countries too, I did not what to name them because this would end up as an endless thread about Immigration instead of Climate Change.

We're going to build a wall and we're going to make them pay for it.

The epitaph for all three (the Encyclopedia Dramatica motto):

And nothing of value was lost.

There is enough water for human consumption, but agriculture is over in the basin. There simply isn’t enough water forward looking for the water intensive crops in question.

https://coloradoriverscience.org/Agricultural_water_use

Life will be fine. Exporting alfalfa from the Imperial Valley, however, might be done for.

Not sure if it's different over there, but farming in Australia (whether with questionable water reliance or not) is considered sacrosanct and pushback would be a political risk. Any foreign-owned alfalfa exporters would just throw lobbyists behind broader farming coalitions (small farmers, ranchers, locals, etc) to protect themselves. Residents will cop water restrictions before then, as has happened before.

That's been the same playbook up here but we're on the verge of uncharted territory as the hydro generators will soon be forced to shut down outside of Las Vegas. It's one thing to ask everyone to take shorter showers and xeriscape their yard, but it's a whole different level if nobody can afford to run the AC in 110F/43C heat.

Water rights unfortunately don't really work like "residents > business."

No, but voters do. And the veneers are coming off around water conservation.

I wish I shared your optimism about the power of American democracy.

Just as the residents' needs get more existential, so do the businesses'

It's not only water, power prices are going to spike when there's no hydroelectric coming from Glen Canyon or Hoover Dams. How many 10's of millions of people get some of their power and or water from this one river?

We don't disagree on the problem. We disagree on whether that means suddenly residents' needs will overcome business interests. They haven't for 100 years in the Southwest. Why would they now?

No, the last thing to survive will be alfalfa in the Imperial Valley. We'll see the elimination of Social Security before those water rights are imperiled.

they'll just start pumping groundwater again which will cause huge earthquakes

I do believe people in general will be fine in the soutwest for years to come. Agriculture will be cut back, natural landscapes will take over, de-sal in socal and better water treatment plants will come online.

The ecological effects of this, though, seem so disastrous. If the Colorado river dries up, what then? The whole of the Southwest just like, dies?

> The ecological effects of this, though, seem so disastrous. If the Colorado river dries up, what then? The whole of the Southwest just like, dies?

The lakes behind the Hoover dam are are the ecological catastrophe. Releasing the dam water just restores the river canyon to its natural state.

Draining the river is bad, but it's just as bad downstream of the dam. The dam by itself doesn't do anything but hurt the ecosystem it already destroyed.

I recommend folks here read "The Dreamt Land" by Mark Arax. I just started it so it might be a premature recommendation, but it has been doing a great job for me as a new California resident of explaining the interaction between business/agriculture and the desert landscape.

This year was the first year I finally realized how things are going to be from now on and only getting worse. I’m a gardener and the plants are having such a tough time, many trees in my neighborhood are already bare from dropping their leaves from the heat. I’ve been looking into just landscaping with native plants moving forward that can handle the heat. I have drip irrigation, but that does nothing when air temps stay above 100 for days on end. The world isn’t prepared for this in any way. What happens when the breadbasket of your country gets like this?

The west is facing a dire water crisis and likely will for decades to come. Meanwhile in places like NYC suburbs in the east everyone waters their lawns with drinkable water because high quality fresh water is in abundant supply. People are literally watering their grass with water that’s better than what probably 99% of the global population has available to drink.

The disparity is quite stark when you drill into it, but water access is going to rewrite the future of the west.

I just watched a short documentary, with cooperation from City of New York officials and their Fire Department. It documented how the city has a long-standing "culture/tradition" of opening fire hydrants for recreation during the hot summer months.

I knew that this was a custom and it seemed utterly tolerated, but it seems that nobody with the City, or LEO or first responders, is empowered to slow it down. The FD actually distributes "sprinkler caps" to anyone over 18, which can replace the plug so that the water is sprayed in a recreational pattern, and not just dumped into the street.

https://youtu.be/rNWmLNlPq1I?si=zZHGQY-_24qehqdy

There was also a segment that explains how and where NYC obtains its water. Folks were asking, "is this hydrant water safe to drink?" and the City answers that not only is it potable, it's essentially fresh mountain spring water, straight from the source.

This kind of stuff seems appalling to Phoenicians until we consider that our hot-weather desert customs include evaporative coolers and misters. Yes we have literally set up spray systems on patios, shopping malls, and other outdoor gathering spaces, where clean potable water is just sprayed into the air to make it a bit cooler for a while.

Speaking of Phoenix, a few more water crises have been uncovered beyond this headline. The mayor of Scottsdale announced calmly, "we're not running out of water; we're just running out of cheap water!"

As a longtime climate activist, I'm at the point where, reading this, I feel nothing anymore.

The coming shock is not going to be fixed with geoengineering, simply because GE takes more time than we have left. This is because it will take another five to ten years for the necessity to become widely apparent, and another five to ten to get the geopolitics and geoeconomics sorted (if ever.)

We'll be going into it also having splashed out for datacentres instead of cloud seeders or whatever.

And all this ignores how utterly fscked GE is as a strat anyways. The most plausible variant involves white skies and drought in places we can't afford it, and the less plausible variants are almost laughably worse, or involve breakthroughs that might not happen, even with AI, and almost certainly won't arrive on our preferred (ie. desperate) schedule.

I am afraid, and rightfully so; the shock is on its way, and behind it, the Great Bottleneck.

This year's coming El Niño famine in the global south is just the start.

It seems more and more likely the next Great War will be fought over water.

As a Canadian, I get nervous when I see the US running out.

The US is nowhere near running out. Big Ag might have to cut back on growing thirsty crops in the middle of the deserts, though.

Wars will be fought over water, but of all the foolish reasons the US could invade Canada over, water isn't one of them. The US has ample shoreline on every Great Lake, and essentially none of the Mississippi watershed lies north of the border.

One of the great lakes alone (Ontario) contains enough fresh water that it could supply the lifetime water requirements of 28 billion people.

Yeah, about that

https://www.earth.com/earth-science/scientists-determine-the...

And how much foreign-owned Alfalfa? Because people are something like 10% of the water use here.

Sounds like an excellent business opportunity for Nestlé.

First it is only the South West area of the US, East of the Mississippi river and the Northwest has plenty of water.

It is the fact that everyone wants to live and companies are moving to a desert that is causing the problem.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/fresh-wat...

You have nearly 10 times the freshwater per capita compared to the US. How selfish /s.

Let's thinks of a casus belli. How about something like: "Trillions of gallons of fresh water flow uselessly into the frozen northern seas every year due to Canadian inaction. We are stepping in to build the infrastructure needed to save that water and feed the continent. "

It was a proposal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...

So was damming the Strait of Gibraltar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa

Both ideas are equally as likely to be implemented.

So what you're saying is, we have a blueprint and it's theoretically possible. That makes it worse.

Co-operation from our northern neighbor would be appreciated. But, perhaps, not required, given a thirst great enough.

It was a political stunt, not a serious proposal.

> The Corps of Engineers studied this project in the 1950s and 1960s, but no official proposal was ever developed.

Alfalfa farms consume 26% of the Colorado River’s water (2024 statistic).[0]

Alfalfa and hay production uses up to 68% of Utah’s water, and amounts to 0.2% of the state’s GDP (2022 statistic) [1].

These feed crops are extremely water inefficient, consuming 18-36 acre-inches (≈ 489,600-979,200 gallons) of water per acre of harvested alfalfa [2]. Utah averages 4 tons/acre in harvest [3], which by my math works out to about 510-1020 tons of water used per 1 ton of alfalfa harvest. If that seems high you, you may appreciate looking up numbers on water consumption per pound of beef accounting for feed.

The USDA reports about 46 million acres of US land are foreign owned [4](although 2024 reporting suggests not all foreign ownership of farm land is being reported [5]). While there are not accurate public numbers on the percentage of that foreign held land which is used for alfalfa farming, water use by foreign entities has been widely reported on [6], and has prompted legislation in the example state of Utah among others [7].

[0] https://www.sustainablewaters.org/why-do-we-grow-so-much-alf... [1]https://waterdesk.org/2022/12/one-crop-uses-more-than-half-o... [2] https://ecobuilderz.com/how-many-gallons-of-water-are-requir... [3] https://www.progressivepublish.com/downloads/2025/general/20...

[4] https://www.fsa.usda.gov/documents/foreign-holdings-us-agric...

[5] https://www.dailymail.com/galleries/article-12985003/Foreign...

[6] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...

[7] https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/hbillint/HB0186.pdf

Of that 510-1012 tons of water only 50-100 pounds of water actually ends up in the plant. I wonder how much of the rest could be recovered and reused?

uh oh this doesn't seem good. but I feel like we've been inundated with articles like this for years so it's hard to tell when it's actually an emergency

It's been an emergency for years.

Emergencies are things that must be dealt with immediately or there will be immediate consequences.

So a broken ankle in the wilderness isn't an emergency?

Having only 10 days of food when you expect to be 30 days away from resupply isn't an emergency?

Would hate to be stuck in a tricky situation with you (which... it turns out I am)

Emergencies are problems where the consequences emerge close to or earlier than the time required to mitigate it.

Notice how neither of your examples are measured in years?

Notice how neither example takes years to reverse course or mitigate?

Let's just rattle a few more off, across the successfully-mitigated and not-yet-mitigated or failed-to-mitigate categories:

- Hormuz oil shortage (likely to materialize within months if unaddressed now)

- Related LNG → fertilizer shortage → food price shocks (significant shocks over the next few years are already baked in)

- Ozone depletion (successfully mitigated in time)

- Dust bowl (materialized after more than a decade of warnings)

- Military buildup and political entanglements across Europe materializing into WW1 and WW2 after years of warnings

- Bengal famine (materialized after more than a decade of warnings)

- Flint water crisis (materialized after several decades of warnings)

Which of these were not emergencies well before they materialized into direct negative outcomes?

The idea that there's any absolute definition of "problem happening soon" is flatly ridiculous. Obviously the definition of soon is relative to how long does it take to avoid the problem.

A car stopped 100 feet ahead of another car is not an emergency.

A car stopped 1,000 feet from a train is an emergency.

A car stopped 5 miles from a landing 737 is definitely an emergency.

Even if each of these takes the same 2-3 minutes to actually result in a collision.

Very much appreciate you driving this home. I had penned a lengthy response about relative timescales, but you summed it up nicely.

If I see a glass off water on my coffee table placed precariously close to the edge it's concerning.

When my dog starts running around the living room swinging her rope around, it becomes more urgent.

When she bumps the table and the glass starts falling, it's an emergency.

When the glass hits the floor and breaks, it's a crisis.

> When my dog starts running around the living room swinging her rope around, it becomes more urgent.

Because you can intervene before the consequence gets baked in

> When she bumps the table and the glass starts falling, it's an emergency.

Because it will take longer to intervene than it would for the consequence to arrive

> When the glass hits the floor and breaks, it's a crisis.

Because the consequence has arrived

Thank you for demonstrating my point.

There have been consequences every single year. You're just not paying attention.

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