Scientists: Mead, Powell dry by 2021
By: GIG CONAUGHTON - Staff Writer
Water officials dispute Scripps' Colorado River study | ∞
This NASA satellite photo shows Lake Powell, the reservoir along the Colorado River straddling the Arizona-Utah border, in May 2006, after about six years of drought. A new report says the reservoir has a 50-50 chance of drying up by 2021.
Photo courtesy of NASA
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Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the massive Colorado River reservoirs that help keep Southern California wet, could run dry by 2021, according to a report released Tuesday by two Scripps Institute of Oceanography researchers.
Their dire predictions were immediately challenged by federal and local water officials.
Researchers Tim Barnett and David Pierce said there was a 50-50 chance that the reservoirs will be dry by 2021 --- but that they were not predicting that would actually happen.
Instead, Barnett said, the report predicted only that the chance the lakes will run dry by 2021 could be reduced to a coin flip -- one chance in two -- because people were using too much of the Colorado River's water and global warming was eating away the southwest United State's "normal" precipitation.
Officials from the federal Bureau of Reclamation that manages the Colorado River and its reservoirs immediately challenged the report.
The agency's regional director, Terrence Fulp, said the agency's own studies predicted that Mead and Powell would be a little less than half full in 2021 -- levels that would provide enough water to supply California, Nevada and Arizona for two years even if the river stopped flowing.
Meanwhile, water officials in Los Angeles and San Diego County said the public should not panic over the Scripps report. They said agencies were already working to cut water use.
They also said the Colorado River was poised to end its current eight-year drought.
"Right now we're sitting on the best snowpack in 11 years -- 128 percent of normal," said Roger Patterson, assistant manager of the Metropolitan Water District, Southern California's main water supplier and the agency that built the Colorado River aqueduct.
However, Barnett, a geophysicist, said the Scripps study looked past today's conditions and into the long-term reliability of the Colorado River, which has been the key water supply of the populations and economies of Southern California, Nevada and Arizona.
Barnett said federal statistics show that California and other states are currently taking 1 million acre-feet of water a year more out of the Colorado River than the river's flows provide.
That, he said, eats into Mead and Powell's storage. An acre-foot is enough water to sustain two households for a single year. Barnett said there was 13 million acre-feet of water in Powell and Mead as of July 2007, and that if people continued to overuse the river by 1 million acre feet a year, the reservoirs would be empty in 13 years -- 2021.
Barnett said that if Mead and Powell ran dry, it would cut hydroelectric production important to the entire West, and make the Colorado River's supplies "highly unstable" because they would be based on year-to-year flows, not stored supplies. Barnett said the Scripps report relied on a Princeton study, which relied in turn on more than a dozen climate studies that showed global warming would decrease rain and snowfall runoff in the Southwest by 10 percent to 30 percent in the next half-century. He said that even if people cut their water use, global warming-caused reductions of runoff would eventually make the river an unstable supply.
"You have to wonder if the civilization we've built in the desert Southwest is sustainable in the future," Barnett said.
Patterson, however, said the Scripps study was based on the idea of a continual decline and did not consider that the Colorado River's flows would rebound, despite global warming.
He said the current snowpack could mean that there would be 3.5 million more acre-feet in the river -- even after California and other states take their allocations in 2008 -- more than reversing the 1 million acre-foot a year deficit in the Scripps study.
"If we have back-to-back years like that, we're back in a surplus condition," Patterson said, meaning that Powell and Mead would be largely restocked.
Patterson and Ken Weinberg, the water resources manager of the San Diego County Water Authority, said that water agencies were taking steps to cut water use.
"No one is planning to continue to use the river the same way they have been historically," Weinberg said.
He said an illustration of that effort came in December, when California, Arizona and Nevada agreed to a drought allocation plan that would call for states to voluntarily take less water from the river if levels in Mead and Powell got too low. The plan was the first such emergency-rationing strategy in the river's history.
-- Contact staff writer Gig Conaughton at (760) 739-6696 or gconaughton@nctimes.com.
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Sensationalism != Science wrote on Feb 12, 2008 11:35 PM:First: A 50:50 Chance, in scientific terms is the definition of "We don't know". Anyone who makes a press release about that is not a scientist, but an activist.
Second: the NWS has a hard time predicting the weather 2 weeks hence, please explain how predictions for the next 4 years are to be believed?
Last, but by no means least: No less liberal and chicken little about "climate change" an authority than National Geographic has, in its latest issue, a serious discussion of the drought and flood cycles of the Colorado river. I strongly suggest that all readers of this paper, and perhaps, if they are interested in being worthy of the title, its journalists, read it.
michael a. wrote on Feb 13, 2008 2:09 AM:Real Estate Developers First, Citizens Second
Ignoring these Drought warnings is like ignoring the Earthquake risk in the LA Basin. It's stupid.
But I guess it makes sense from the politician's point of view. To prepare for an "empty" Lake Mead would mean an immediate halt to all new building permits. And local politicians get most of their money from Real Estate Developers. Better to let people suffer in the future than to prepare for a disaster now.
It's kinda like going to war in Iraq even after you were warned you didn't have enough forces or an exit strategy. Typical Conservative Politician.
12 million wrote on Feb 13, 2008 7:25 AM:less non American citiznes using 12 million less water, would that help?
Tony A. wrote on Feb 13, 2008 7:26 AM:I have to agree with Sensationalism's comments....and wonder who's political agenda Michael is campaigning... last time I checked Michael, our population is increasing.....citizens do that, not developers. Our society is going to use more water in the upcoming years, the question is, where will it come from? Will it all come from the Colorado is the question. Probalby not, the Colorado has a limited capacity. We as a society need to develop alternatives. But these guys from the Institue are predicting that the river is going to dry up because of man made GLOBAL WARMING, maybe, well, flip a coin and you decide...that's not Science, that is Politics with an Agenda plain and simple. Publish or Perish...Global climate preditions are based upon assumptions (good or bad), and looking at past climate patterns to try to predict what will come in the future (probably the most accurate method). The past climate cycles do not support today's political positions for Global Warming if its caused by man's use of oil products. They support Global warming and cooling as normal cycles in our planets history caused by Solar cycles. (how many Ice ages has the planet had?) That's the one variable that you can't predict is the energy output of the sun, which is what powers our planet's ecosystems and weather patterns. One last math problem for Michael...if you took all the carbon that is contained in all the oil that has been known to exist on the planet in mans history, it only amounts to about one third of the recent increase in atmospheric Carbon levels (CO2). So if all the oil reserves can only make up for one third of the recent increase, then where is the rest of it coming from? It cant be mans use of oil, we are not creating carbon, we are using it...so where is the rest of this carbon increase coming from (hint: look out to the west at sunset).
Concerned-1 wrote on Feb 13, 2008 8:23 AM:Wow, what's next? NCT headline: "World to End Tomorrow!" And great picture, the guy standing in front of a big picture of Earth with red and yellow all over North America. Hmmm, do you think it could be global warming? It's great fodder for posters like Michael. I do believe Global Warming is going to kill us, but it won't have anything to do with the temperature of Earth.
Concerned-1 wrote on Feb 13, 2008 8:30 AM:Earth to Gig and the NCT: Water is a major issue in Southern California and needs to be discussed at length. Fear mongering headlines is one way to get the public's attention. However, I would suggest a little rationality as well.
George wrote on Feb 13, 2008 8:47 AM:don't be fooled by the democrats. The planet is global cooling, not warming. It is getting colder each winter.
That river in Egypt wrote on Feb 13, 2008 10:05 AM:Just keep on overwatering your desert lawns (and all the concrete). I'm sure the water will materialize out of SOMEWHERE. But as long as y'all keep your heads in the sand you won't see the Colorado drying up anyway.
Steve wrote on Feb 13, 2008 10:15 AM:The idea that global warming will reduce rainfall is backwards. Global warming will actually increase rainfall, because it causes the oceans to warm up. Global warming is supposed to increase the "El Nino" effect, not reverse. The desert conditions we have in SoCal are caused by colder ocean temperatures, leading to reduced rainfall.
I refuse to discuss wrote on Feb 13, 2008 10:48 AM:global warming or cooling until we come to a decision regarding the ozone layer. First commercialized by DuPont in the early 1930s under the trade name Freon, CFCs appeared to be the perfect industrial chemical: nontoxic, nonflammable, and odorless. But in 1973, a pair of chemists at the University of California, Irvine--Sherwood Rowland and his postdoctoral fellow Mario Molina--began to explore the fate of the CFC gases that were being emitted into the atmosphere. Molina began the investigation of CFCs in October of that year, and by Christmas, the researchers had their answer: the CFCs were breaking down in the atmospheric ozone layer, which begins 15 kilometers above the earth, ends roughly 30 kilometers later, and absorbs much of the sun's deadly ultraviolet radiation.
Concerned-1 wrote on Feb 13, 2008 11:06 AM:Ozone layer. Now there's a term we don't hear much about anymore. I think the Co2 must have replaced CFCs as the drug of choice for the left. After all, it is much more readably available. Ooops, I just exhaled...
to Steve wrote on Feb 13, 2008 11:14 AM:Global warming -- more accurately climate change -- doesn't do either increase or decrease rainfall, it does both. That is, it increases it in some places and reduces it in others, because it alters the historical climate zones and patterns. Some places in the world will get much colder and drier than now, others will get wetter and hotter. SoCal might get wetter and hotter, but SoCal isn't the source of the Colorado River, the Rocky Mtns are. And if they get drier, the river is screwed. Even if SoCal gets wetter, we don't have the infrastructure in place to capture and store that water. Not enough of it anyway.
Concerned-1 wrote on Feb 13, 2008 12:31 PM:While I'm at it, the headline for this story is not only totally false, it's a "dead head!" A dead head is a headline that has no verb. Journalism 101. Oh, but you did get our attention. "Mission accomplished!"
Very exciting wrote on Feb 13, 2008 1:06 PM:These are very exciting times, biblical perhaps. Nothing can save us from ourselves. If current childbirth rates continue to soar mother earh will have to fight back in the form of weather related catastrophes & disease brought on by these conditions.
Hey I was kidding wrote on Feb 13, 2008 2:15 PM:about the ozone layer, just want evrybody to remember there has always been wacky ideas given to the people by its governments. Example, bird flu, the only ones I see taking a hit on it is the birds themselves being killed by man. And what about Y2K, how many of you are still using toliet paper stored up for the crash of civilization? We can go on and on back to when the earth was flat. What we need is a new fad, how about HAARP and the eletro magnetic field the human body has??? I can think of some good fairy tales for that one.
dave wrote on Feb 13, 2008 3:53 PM:Its just a hoax, They just want to build Desal plants in case we run short
aDAMANT wrote on Feb 13, 2008 7:41 PM:all we need is more science mumbo-jumbo. I"m sure they believe in Global warming as well,,that is a huge theory.
Mike wrote on Feb 13, 2008 9:27 PM:So depressing to read so many comments by those determined to be personally ignorant about science and about rational thought. Human caused global warming is real and is the greatest danger to the continued existence of humanity that we have faced in the 100,000 plus years humanity has existed. I have read thoughtful answers to each objection the head in the sand folks put on the comment page. But facts and information do not seem to change your mind. All of us who think rationally would love to believe that oil appears magically "abiotically" and replenishes itself. We would like to find evidence that our massive unprecedented release of fossil carbon would have no impact on the earth’s atmosphere. We would love to find evidence in the half a million year accumulation of atmosphere samples in ice cores that the earth has had this much carbon dioxide at any time in those 500.000 years. The current level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is higher than any time in the last 500,000 plus years. We are now living on a new and different planet as regards to our atmosphere according to Dr. Lawrence Krauss who was invited to speak at the American Enterprise Institute this week! The AEI is the most conservative “think” tank in America. All the candidates for president including the Republican one understand the danger from human caused global warming. The ostrich statements made in the NCTimes comment section are so very sad. What makes people unable to change their minds? What is it? Who are they helping by their intransient defense of ignorance? Why are they so thrilled to be so misinformed? Over and over on these pages rationals answer every one of their silly ‘points.’ No matter how careful or thoughtful the answer the ostriches do not take their heads out of the sand to listen and think. They make no changes to their views. I grieve for our future. We could have solved the problem with just a little reason and a little sacrifice if we had started two decades ago. I hope there is still time.
Who cares ? wrote on Feb 13, 2008 9:30 PM:Denial its not a river in Egypt it is an ignorant stance taken by those who choose to deny the obvious ie glaciers melting, massive ozone depletion over iceland, tornados in february etc etc etc. The burning of fossilized fuel has made a significant negative impact on our world & could be expediting our demise
Tom wrote on Feb 13, 2008 10:02 PM:> First: A 50:50 Chance, in scientific terms is the definition of "We don't know".
In your opinion.
> Anyone who makes a press release about that is not a scientist, but an activist.
In your opinion.
> Second: the NWS has a hard time predicting the weather
> 2 weeks hence, please explain how predictions for the next
> 4 years are to be believed?
Predicting the weather 2 weeks hence and understanding overall *climate* are not the same thing.
I can't tell you that American Marines will take a given corner in Baghdad, but I think I can say with confidence that Marines can win the war.
In fact, it is easier to understand climate and climate change than it is to predict weather changes over a few weeks timeframe. The variables in climate change are smaller in number than they are in weather changes.
> Last, but by no means least: No less liberal and chicken little
All you have to do is say "chicken little" and I know you are full of &^#%$@$.
ed wrote on Feb 14, 2008 2:09 PM:Wow! After reading this I am trading in my hummer for a cruiser bike and I will look for a cave to live in. I don't want to contribute to the problem so I am going to make all the sacrifices. Don't bother replying to my comments because I will be getting rid of my computer as well.
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