Should iconic Lake Powell be drained?

By Brittany Patterson 27 October 2017 GLEN CANYON NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, Utah (Scientific American) – Like many places across the West, Lake Powell seems impossibly large, mythical almost, with its rich red rock canyon walls standing in dramatic juxtaposition to the expanse of cerulean below that seems to stretch on forever.Dramatic is an apt way […]

Global warming may make Phoenix uninhabitable by 2050 – “It’s currently the fastest warming big city in the U.S.”

By Steve Hanley 29 September 2017 (CleanTechnica) – Phoenix, Arizona, is America’s fifth largest city. As you fly in to Sky Harbor airport, the city stretches from horizon to horizon beneath you. It’s hot in Phoenix. Always has been. The people who live there laugh about it, calling it a “dry heat” because there is […]

Global warming saps the Colorado River – Flow could fall 55 percent by 2100

By John Fleck19 February 2017 (inkstain) –  A warming climate is already reducing the flow in the Colorado River, and the future risk is large, with a worst case of the river’s flow being cut in half by the end of the century, according to a new study from a pair of the region’s leading […]

Shrinking Colorado River is a growing concern for Yuma farmers and millions of water users – ‘They believe there’s a target on their backs’

By William Yardley18 July 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – The Colorado River begins as snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains and ends 1,450 miles south in Mexico after making a final sacrifice to the United States: water for the farm fields in this powerhouse of American produce. Throughout the winter, perfect heads of romaine, red-and-green lettuce, […]

California drought is part of a much bigger water crisis

By Abrahm Lustgarten, Lauren Kirchner, Amanda Zamora, and ProPublica26 June 2015 (Scientific American) – Why do I keep hearing about the California drought, if it’s the Colorado River that we’re “killing”? Pretty much every state west of the Rockies has been facing a water shortage of one kind or another in recent years.  California’s is […]

40 million people depend on the Colorado River, and now it’s drying up – ‘Quite honestly, we are alarmed and concerned about the implications of our findings’

By Tom Philpott4 August 2014 (Mother Jones) – Science papers don’t generate much in the way of headlines, so you’ll be forgiven if you haven’t heard of one called “Groundwater Depletion During Drought Threatens Future Water Security of the Colorado River Basin,” recently published by University of California-Irvine and NASA researchers. But the “water security […]

America’s largest reservoir drains to record low as Western drought deepens

By Brett Walton7 July 2014 (EcoWatch) – Lake Mead—America’s largest reservoir, Las Vegas’ main water source and an important indicator for water supplies in the Southwest—will fall this week to its lowest level since 1937 when the manmade lake was first being filled, according to forecasts from the federal Bureau of Reclamation. The record-setting low […]

Colorado River: 14 years of drought nearly unrivaled in 1,250 years – ‘If Lake Mead goes below elevation 1000, we lose any capacity to pump water to serve the municipal needs of seven in 10 people in Nevada’

By MICHAEL WINES5 January 2014 LAKE MEAD, Nevada (The New York Times) – The sinuous Colorado River and its slew of man-made reservoirs from the Rockies to southern Arizona are being sapped by 14 years of drought nearly unrivaled in 1,250 years. The once broad and blue river has in many places dwindled to a […]

Dust, global warming portend dry future for the Colorado River – Rocky Mountain snowpack melts six weeks earlier than in the 1800s

14 November 2013 (CIRES) –  Reducing the amount of desert dust swept onto snowy Rocky Mountain peaks could help Western water managers deal with the challenges of a warmer future, according to a new study led by researchers at NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder. With […]

Colorado state climatologist says the High Park Fire gave him the courage to talk about climate change – ‘I have feared persecution at times in the past. I don’t fear it now.’

By Bobby Magill 23 May 2013 (The Coloradoan) – Nolan Doesken used to have a hard time talking about climate change. The topic has become so politically combustible that some scientists and researchers find it difficult to speak of or write about. But, after the High Park Fire swept the foothills in 2012, Doesken decided […]

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