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...
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.
6% Industrial
22% Municipal
72% Agricultural
The Saudi's 5 crop a year alfalfa is really the major problem
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?
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.
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.
https://nypost.com/2026/08/16/science/super-el-nino-odds-for...
And nothing of value was lost.
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.
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.
The disparity is quite stark when you drill into it, but water access is going to rewrite the future of the west.
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!"
Just as the residents' needs get more existential, so do the businesses'
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...
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.
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.
As a Canadian, I get nervous when I see the US running out.
It is the fact that everyone wants to live and companies are moving to a desert that is causing the problem.
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. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...
Co-operation from our northern neighbor would be appreciated. But, perhaps, not required, given a thirst great enough.
Both ideas are equally as likely to be implemented.
> The Corps of Engineers studied this project in the 1950s and 1960s, but no official proposal was ever developed.
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.