...especially given that I have no income.

This one sounds good:

Every scientific study confirms that global warming will cause the amount of water in the Colorado River to decline, yet because we already use every drop, there is none to spare. To fill reservoirs takes surplus water and there is no surplus. Within a couple of decades, the Colorado River system will have too little water to maintain two large reservoirs even half full, requiring us to sacrifice Lake Powell in favor of Lake Mead. But don’t expect to hear it from the US Bureau of Reclamation: it continues to deny the significance of global warming, promising that there will always be plenty of water in the Colorado River and its reservoirs, the moral and scientific equivalent of the promises of the Corps of Engineers that the levees would protect New Orleans. Why do we have federal water agencies that we cannot trust?

— James Lawrence Powell, on his book Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West

Reviewing Dead Pool, The Salt Lake Tribune made the following observations:

For eight years under George W. Bush, the Bureau of Reclamation has refused to acknowledge the effects that global warming is having and will yet have on the Colorado, in spite of record temperatures and the recent 500-year drought that nearly brought Lake Powell to its knees. Instead, the bureau continues to use only data from the last century, the first half of which was one of the wettest periods in the known history of the Colorado. According to Bush’s BOR, in 2050 Lake Powell, which reflects the health of the river as a whole, will stand at 3,660 feet, just 40 feet below full pool.

Studies done by climate scientists suggest an entirely different future. Recent tree-ring studies have shown that the true multicentury average flow of the river is well below that used by the BOR. They also show periods when river flow, even without the effects of global warming, was lower than that experienced in our 500-year drought.

When one adds to this natural variability and drought-prone history even a conservative estimate of projected global warming effects, the results are devastating. Current estimates of how much the flow of the Colorado might be reduced range between 6 and 30 percent. Using just a 10-percent figure, and accepting the bureau’s own estimates of increased demand and new draws such as the Lake Powell pipeline, Powell gives a harrowing scenario in which Lake Powell drops to “dead pool” by 2022, rendering projects such as the pipeline useless almost as soon as they become operational.

But far scarier is the possibility that in this time frame the effects of the devastation of the Colorado due to overuse and reduced flow could well render life in today’s desert megacities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas impossible. What Powell’s book shows is that global warming is without any stretch of imagination capable of rendering life in western America unrecognizable not in our grandchildren’s lifetime but in ours.

I’m gonna have to work my review copy mojo, looks like. Hope I made sure to move my wand to the storage locker.

1. 
   Larry Hogue 2009 01 25 at 1:33:59 pm

   Let’s all move to Oregon! Should be plenty of rain there, right?

2. 
   Larry Hogue 2009 01 25 at 1:38:35 pm

   And dammit, now you’ve made me buy another book—two books actually, to get the super saver shipping. :)

   I wish swaptree would let me trade away two books and get one back.