Climate Change? Nahhh ...

If and when it gets to that, the civil wars over water rights will be vicious.

 

I’m very glad I live near three rivers.

 

The American Southwest was designed by nature to be very sparsely populated by humans. Nature, as the old saying goes, always bats last.

 

The Central Arizona Project canal system, established through legislation sponsored by Barry Goldwater among others, set up a very good water distribution system for the Phoenix area and other parts of the state -- provided the tributaries of the Colorado River received their usual annual runoff.

Water supply wasn't a huge issue until the lack of mountain snow and rainy-season rainfall in recent years.

 

I assume that was in the 1950s? The Phoenix metro area had 375,000 people in 1950. That doubled by 1960. Today it's 4.8 million.
Other cities in the Southwest have experienced similar exponential growth. Las Vegas/Clark County went from 127,00 people in 1960 to almost 2.3 million in 2020. Los Angeles was already huge, but its population has more than doubled since 1950, to about 10 million. Los Angeles County had about 170,000 people in 1900.
The water issue in the Southwest, it would seem, has as much to do with that region's population explosion as it does fickle and scarce resources in a desert climate.

 

Climate and weather are 2 different critters, so I'll post this under climate.

Dallas has continued an amazing streak this year. Never has a year passed without at least a trace of snow since records in DFW started being kept in 1898. That streak continued with traces being recorded on Nov. 18-19.

The reason this is surprising is that many places to the north of DFW, including Little Rock, went without snowfall from 1997-2000 and again from 2004-2008.

 

When the compacts between the Mexico and the seven states that border the Colorado River were set up in the 1920's 16 million acre feet were handed out to seven states and Mexico. Agriculture accounts for 70-80% of each states consumption. Recent flows have been about 13 million acre feet a year.

Which is not to villainize agriculture. I eat food from those irrigated fields. But to make the point that even if the entire population of the Southwest moved back to wherever they came from there would barely be enough water even if the flows stabilized.

As snow packs in the Rockies continue to decline due to global warming river flows will continue to decrease. Yeah, it will be ugly.

 

What a way to wake up in Ferndale this morning. 6.4 mag earthquake at 2:30 a.m. Definitely a Eureka moment.

Magnitude 6.4 earthquake shakes parts of Northern California, 70,000 without power

 

I'm told the collapse of agriculture in this hemisphere due to climate change won't be as terrifying as a family in Kansas being asked to install a heat pump.

 

I laughed at this only because I covered a public hearing this fall about requiring heat pumps in all new homes built in Washington state.

Not retrofitting in existing homes. Just on new homes as of July 2023.

You’d have thought Inslee was asking for the sacrifice of first-born sons the way builders and the natural gas industry reacted.

 

The heat pump plumbing might be worth one EF rating to keep the house from spinning off to Oz.

 

Kansas heat pump.

Keystone pipeline raises concerns after third major spill in five years