The Colorado River is drying up and with it , the dream of the West is drying up....As the Colorado no longer reaches Sea , in effect , fifty miles of the Colorado has been lost already ! In addition to losing the Colorado , the Eastern US is losing underground aquifers - overuse / overdevelopment leading to a disaster a terrorist couldn't cause this Nation ! Hey folks , when these underground aquifers go away , they may be gone for a thousand years . Water Wars ? ..

As the Colorado River goes , so goes California Agriculture ! In fact , you can write off the West if the river




http://silverdoctors.com/the-colorado-river-the-high-plains-aquifer-and-the-entire-western-half-of-the-u-s-are-rapidly-drying-up/#more-27068

From The Economic Collapse Blog:

A recent National Geographic article contained the following chilling statement…

The wet 20th century, the wettest of the past millennium, the century when Americans built an incredible civilization in the desert, is over.

Much of the western half of the country has historically been a desolate wasteland.  We were very blessed to enjoy very wet conditions for most of the last century, but now that era appears to be over.

To compensate, we are putting a tremendous burden on our fresh water resources.  In particular, the Colorado River is becoming increasingly strained.  Without the Colorado River, many of our largest cities simply would not be able to function.  The following is from a recent Stratfor article…

The Colorado River provides water for irrigation of roughly 15 percent of the crops in the United States, including vegetables, fruits, cotton, alfalfa and hay. It also provides municipal water supplies for large cities, such as Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, San Diego and Las Vegas, accounting for more than half of the water supply in many of these areas.

In particular, water levels in Lake Mead (which supplies most of the water for Las Vegas) have fallen dramatically over the past decade or so.  The following is an excerpt from an article posted on Smithsonian.com…

And boaters still roar across Nevada and Arizona’s Lake Mead, 110 miles long and formed by the Hoover Dam. But at the lake’s edge they can see lines in the rock walls, distinct as bathtub rings, showing the water level far lower than it once was—some 130 feet lower, as it happens, since 2000. Water resource officials say some of the reservoirs fed by the river will never be full again.

Today, Lake Mead supplies approximately 85 percent of the water that Las Vegas uses, and since 1998 the water level in Lake Mead has dropped by about 5.6 trillion gallons.

So what happens if Lake Mead continues to dry up?

Well, the truth is that it would be a major disaster…

Way before people run out of drinking water, something else happens: When Lake Mead falls below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam’s turbines shut down – less than four years from now, if the current trend holds – and in Vegas the lights start going out.

Ominously, these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts signed by President Obama in December 2011, Nevada gets only 23.37% of the electricity generated by the Hoover Dam. The other top recipients: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (28.53%); state of Arizona (18.95%); city of Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California Edison (5.54%).

You can always build more power plants, but you can’t build more rivers, and the mighty Colorado carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the water needs of an area the size of France, in which live 40 million people. In its natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acre-feet of water into the Gulf of California each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced the flow to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it; at its mouth, the riverbed is nothing but dust.

Nor is the decline in the water supply important only to the citizens of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. It’s critical to the whole country. The Colorado is the sole source of water for southeastern California’s Imperial Valley, which has been made into one of the most productive agricultural areas in the US despite receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.

You hardly ever hear about this on the news, but the reality is that this is a slow-motion train wreck happening right in front of our eyes.

Today, the once mighty Colorado River runs dry about 50 miles north of the sea.  The following is an excerpt from an excellent article by Jonathan Waterman about what he found when he went to investigate this…

Fifty miles from the sea, 1.5 miles south of the Mexican border, I saw a river evaporate into a scum of phosphates and discarded water bottles. This dirty water sent me home with feet so badly infected that I couldn’t walk for a week. And a delta once renowned for its wildlife and wetlands is now all but part of the surrounding and parched Sonoran Desert. According to Mexican scientists whom I met with, the river has not flowed to the sea since 1998. If the Endangered Species Act had any teeth in Mexico, we might have a chance to save the giant sea bass (totoaba), clams, the Sea of Cortez shrimp fishery that depends upon freshwater returns, and dozens of bird species.

So let this stand as an open invitation to the former Secretary of the Interior and all water buffalos who insist upon telling us that there is no scarcity of water here or in the Mexican Delta. Leave the sprinklered green lawns outside the Aspen conferences, come with me, and I’ll show you a Colorado River running dry from its headwaters to the sea. It is polluted and compromised by industry and agriculture. It is overallocated, drought stricken, and soon to suffer greatly from population growth. If other leaders in our administration continue the whitewash, the scarcity of knowledge and lack of conservation measures will cripple a western civilization built upon water.

Further east, the major problem is the drying up of our underground water resources.

In the state of Kansas today, many farmers that used to be able to pump plenty of water to irrigate their crops are discovering that the water underneath their land is now gone.  The following is an excerpt from a recent article in the New York Times…

Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

So what is going to happen to “the breadbasket of the world” as this underground water continues to dry up?

Most Americans have never even heard of the Ogallala Aquifer, but it is one of our most important natural resources.  It is one of the largest sources of fresh water on the entire planet, and farmers use water from the Ogallala Aquifer to irrigate more than 15 million acres of crops each year.  It covers more than 100,000 square miles and it sits underneath the states of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota.

Unfortunately, today it is being drained dry at a staggering rate.  The following are a few statistics about this from one of my previous articles…

1. The Ogallala Aquifer is being drained at a rate of approximately 800 gallons per minute.

2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “a volume equivalent to two-thirds of the water in Lake Erie” has been permanently drained from the Ogallala Aquifer since 1940.

3. Decades ago, the Ogallala Aquifer had an average depth of approximately 240 feet, but today the average depth is just 80 feet. In some areas of Texas, the water is gone completely.

So exactly what do we plan to do once the water is gone?

We won’t be able to grow as many crops and we will not be able to support such large cities in the Southwest.

If we have a few more summers of severe drought that are anything like last summer, we are going to be staring a major emergency in the face very rapidly.

If you live in the western half of the country, you might want to start making plans for the future, because our politicians sure are not.

and ........

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2010/07/29/colorado_river_aspen_environment_forum/

The Colorado River IS Running Dry

Posted by Tasha Eichenseher of National Geographic in Water Currents on July 29, 2010

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By Jonathan WatermanDuring a recent discussion of water at the Aspen Institute’s Environment Forum In Colorado, former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt told a packed house: “The American Southwest is not one of those regions where there is water scarcity. It’s hard to believe, given all the hyping in the national and local and regional press.”

Photograph: Pete McBride on the parched Colorado River delta, by Jonathan Waterman

The audience and his copanelists–Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project and freshwater fellow for the National Geographic Society, and Pat Mulroy, general manager ofSouthern Nevada Water Authority (overseeing Las Vegas water)–were taken aback by these statements.

Throughout the Southwest, and particularly in a region that I know, the Colorado River Basin, the so called “water buffalos” (those who line their pockets with virtual water) commonly talk about this river as though it has not run dry. If only because the water continues to irrigate 2,000,000 acres of agriculture, run 336 miles into Phoenix and Tucson, 224 miles to Los Angeles, or under the Rockies toward Denver through no less than 12 tunnels. So water-related business certainly isn’t scarce. That includes Kentucky Blue Grass lawns, water-consumptive cotton, and a mega dairyshed of cows eating Colorado River grown hay to produce countless gallons of milk.

Since my well pumps water out of the headwaters of this river, and my children will inherit whatever water remains, I have spent the last three years investigating the river’s shrinking pains. Supported by the National Geographic Expedition Council and New Belgium Brewing(which relies on Colorado River water to make beer), I paddled the 1,450-mile river from source to sea. After that five-month journey, I have been interviewing officials, visiting dams, and repeatedly flying over the river and its many diversions in small planes. My goal is to better understand what the U.S. Secretary of Energy, Dr. Stephen Chu, described as a crisis in the West that will match the rising of oceans on the coasts. (Read more about Jonathan Waterman.)

During my investigative journey in the headwaters, a rancher who believes (like many other Coloradoans) that he owns the river, tried to have me arrested for trespassing in my tiny raft. That section of the river in fact is sometimes drained to steam size by diversions to distant Denver.

In the Grand Canyon, I accompanied researchers who showed me how Glen Canyon Dam’s trapping of sediment and chilling of the river have vastly altered the ecosystem throughout our most scenic national park. Four native fish there are endangered.

In Las Vegas I interviewed Mulroy and saw the largest reservoir in the nation, Lake Mead, sunken to an alarming low tide. So low, in fact, that the Southern Nevada Water Authority is drilling a pipeline under the lake so that it can continue to take its share until the river-fed reservoir runs dry.

I saw a river being both depleted and salted thick by farms (78 percent of the river goes to agriculture). Few farmers are implementing sustainable water irrigation or crops more suited to the desert. At the Aspen conference, Postel described conservation measures as a silver lining: “There’s so much more that can be done with existing water.”

As I continued south on my run of the Colorado, I met citizens suing the Bureau of Reclamation for water polluted by e-coli and fertilizers, the Kwapa (or People of the River) Native Americans who have been disenfranchised by the lack of water, and an invasive and toxic plant called giant cane (arundo donax) that is growing over and literally consuming the last 200 miles of river-cum-farm ditch.

Fifty miles from the sea, 1.5 miles south of the Mexican border, I saw a river evaporate into a scum of phosphates and discarded water bottles. This dirty water sent me home with feet so badly infected that I couldn’t walk for a week. And a delta once renowned for its wildlife and wetlands is now all but part of the surrounding and parched Sonoran Desert. According to Mexican scientists whom I met with, the river has not flowed to the sea since 1998. If the Endangered Species Act had any teeth in Mexico, we might have a chance to save the giant sea bass (totoaba), clams, the Sea of Cortez shrimp fishery that depends upon freshwater returns, and dozens of bird species.

So let this stand as an open invitation to the former Secretary of the Interior and all water buffalos who insist upon telling us that there is no scarcity of water here or in the Mexican Delta. Leave the sprinklered green lawns outside the Aspen conferences, come with me, and I’ll show you a Colorado River running dry from its headwaters to the sea. It is polluted and compromised by industry and agriculture. It is overallocated, drought stricken, and soon to suffer greatly from population growth. If other leaders in our administration continue the whitewash, the scarcity of knowledge and lack of conservation measures will cripple a western civilization built upon water. “You can either do it in crisis mode,” Pat Mulroy said at this conference, “or you can start educating now.”

http://www.americanrivers.org/region/southwest/projects/colorado-river-basin.html

Colorado River Basin - Protecting The Flows

Drainage basin map of the Colorado River | Wikimedia Commons

One of our nation’s, and the world’s, greatest natural treasures, the Colorado River carves a spectacular course through the heart of the American southwest. The management history of the Colorado River and its tributaries is a complex one, and as the age-old Western expression says, “Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting.” 

From its headwaters in northern Colorado, the river meanders through the desert southwest before crossing the border into Mexico. Along its way, it creates habitats for a remarkable spectrum of wildlife, over 1500 plant species, and, historically, 49 species of native fish. The river’s delta supports well over 300 species of birds, and is a major refuge for migratory species in particular.

Until 1998, the Colorado River stretched all the way from its source in the Rockies to Sea of Cortez. Now, it dries up in the Sonoran Desert miles before it reaches the sea. The Colorado River is the lifeline of the west, fueling economies in seven states where people use the river's water for their material sustenance; millions more use the river itself for recreation. 

Thirty-six million people, from Denver to Los Angeles depend on Colorado River water. Under the Colorado River Compact, an interstate agreement signed in 1922, water from the Colorado is divided among the seven basin states. As a result, booming population centers like Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix and Las Vegas have blossomed in the arid desert-region, dependent on the river to quench their thirst.

The Colorado River irrigates nearly 4 million acres of land, which grow 15% of the nation’s crops. Of the Colorado’s annual flow  78% is diverted for agricultural use.  By drawing water from the river, we have raised thousands of acres of crops in the desert, creating lush green fields where little would have grown naturally.

Millions of tourists flock to the banks of the River and its tributaries each year for boating, fishing, birding, hunting, and hiking which adds up to a $26 billion dollar recreation economy. The businesses and communities along the river are integral pieces of this economy, and many livelihoods depend on the health of the Colorado and its tributaries.

Four federally listed endangered species of fish still cling to existence in the river; its water and wetlands provide habitat for migrating birds from the top of the basin all the way to the bottom; and bighorn sheep, elk, mule deer, bear, and mountain lion prowl its banks.

Several multipurpose projects on the Colorado River system include power plants which generate electricity distributed throughout the West. The power is marketed by the Western Area Power Administration (Western) of the U.S. Department of Energy and is sold to "preference" customers - public entities such as municipalities or rural electric cooperatives. These hydro plants have a total generating capacity of 4.1 bn kilowatts (kW). These large dams have impacts on natural and cultural resources in Dinosaur National Monument, Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and Grand Canyon National Park.

The Colorado River is often called one of the most controlled and plumbed rivers on the planet and more dams, and diversions are planned, especially in the upper basin in Colorado. Currently multiple projects are being proposed along the Front Range of Colorado that would remove over 300,000 acre feet of new water from the Colorado River and its tributaries - all of this would be removed even before the river reaches Lakes Powell and Mead.

Additionally, climate change will likely have profound impacts on the Colorado River basin. Warmer weather, less snow, a reduction in stream runoff, and changed timing of spring runoff are all likely impacts. Climate Change is expected to reduce Colorado River flow by 10%-30% by 2050. Currently scheduled water deliveries from the Colorado system are not sustainable in the future if anthropogenic climate change reduces runoff even by as little as 10%. A recent federal study looking at water supply options for the Colorado River Basin recognizes that climate change is making status quo management regime of the river untenable, and underscored the need for optimizing existing water infrastructure, and increasing conservation and efficiency measures.

Stressed by a changing climate, impeded by six massive dams, 

diverted, stored, and desalinated to meet the requirements of 

water users, the Colorado now shows the strain of human 

overconsumption. While this outlook may seem less than bright, 

American Rivers and our partners are working to improve water

management in the basin, promote water conservation and 

efficiency, and protect the river’s flows to ensure a healthy sustainable river for the benefit of people reliant on the river as

the well as the resiliency of the Colorado Basin ecosystem.

Fifty miles south of the U.S.- Mexico border, the Colorado River Delta and its once-rich estuary wetlands --€” reduced by 95 percent since the river was restricted by dams --€” are now as parched as the surrounding Sonoran Desert. (Peter McBride)

High Plains Aquifer disappearing......

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/05/20/1210425/-The-New-Dust-Bowl-High-Plains-Aquifer-Pumped-Dry

Three years of extreme drought, amplified by climate change, and decades of excessive withdrawal of groundwater from the high plains aquifer are turning the rich farm lands of southern high plains into a dust bowl with faint hopes of recovery. Water stored since the end of the last glacial period cannot be replaced. Temperatures in Texas soared to record extremes that cannot be explained by natural variability. The Texas beef cow inventory is a remarkable 1 million head (20%) smaller than two years ago.  When Cargill shut down it's beef processing plant in February because of a lack of supply of cattle 2300 workers in Plainview lost their jobs. The plant's annual payroll of $55.5 million was the base of the town's economy. Moreover, jobs that provided services to surrounding cattle ranches have also been lost as hot dry weather took its toll on the land and the herds. A million less cows in Texas translates to thousands and thousands of lost jobs across the state and hundreds of millions in economic losses.

In 2007, a team of climate scientists warned of imminent drought in the southwest.

Projections of anthropogenic climate change conducted by nineteen different climate modeling groups around the world, using different climate models, show widespread agreement that Southwestern North America - and the subtropics in general - are on a trajectory to a climate even more arid than now. According to the models, human-induced aridification becomes marked early in the current century. In the Southwest the levels of aridity seen in the 1950s multiyear drought, or the 1930s Dust Bowl, become the new climatology by mid-century: a perpetual drought.

This climate change prediction for the southwest was based on fundamental aspects of climate science, not hard-to-understand complexities.  The southern plains and the southwest will be devastated by a warming and drying climate as greenhouse gas levels rise.

Mechanisms of Southwest and subtropical drying

Drying of the Southwest and the subtropics are caused by large scale changes in the atmospheric branch of the hydrological cycle. There are two aspects of this:

The subtropics are already dry because the mean flow of the atmosphere moves moisture out of these regions whereas the deep tropics and the higher latitudes are wet because the atmosphere converges moisture into those regions. As air warms it can hold more moisture and this existing pattern of the divergence and convergence of water vapor by the atmospheric flow intensifies. This makes dry areas drier and wet areas wetter.

As the planet warms, the Hadley Cell, which links together rising air near the Equator and descending air in the subtropics, expands poleward. Descending air suppresses precipitation by drying the lower atmosphere so this process expands the subtropical dry zones. At the same time, and related to this, the rain-bearing mid-latitude storm tracks also shift poleward. Both changes in atmospheric circulation, which are not fully understood, cause the poleward flanks of the subtropics to dry.

Besides Southwestern North America other land regions to be hit hard by subtropical drying include southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East as well as parts of South America.

In 2007, Climate scientists warned of imminent drying in the southwest.

Texas and Kansas ranchers and farmers are confronting catastrophe. Without water, they have nothing.

“That’s prime land,” he said not long ago, gesturing from his pickup at the stubby remains of last year’s crop. “I’ve raised 294 bushels of corn an acre there before, with water and the Lord’s help.” Now, he said, “it’s over.” ....

Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

Human caused climate change is withering the rangelands, wheat fields and corn fields. Massive groundwater depletion is making the region waterless. Land that was formerly productive is becoming a second dust bowl. Like the first dust bowl, it is caused by human activities, combined with natural cycles. Poor land management methods, in particular excessive plowing, led to massive dust storms when the dry winds blew. The dust clouds heated the air and lowered the relative humidity. It became a vicious cycle of dust and drought. Today's second dust bowl is also caused by human activities, but this time they're greenhouse gas emissions. The lesson of the first dust bowl, that human activities can change the weather and the climate, has been willfully ignored.

Lamar Smith, Chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology isn't speaking out about the loss of water, food and jobs. He's not writing about the plight of the farmers in the high plains. He's denying that climate change is impacting Texas' economy.

Instead of pursuing heavy-handed regulations that imperil U.S. jobs and send jobs (and their emissions) overseas, we should take a step back from the unfounded claims of impending catastrophe and think critically about the challenge before us.

He's an oil man. He wants to import tar sands extracts from Canada to refine in Texas to export to central and south America. We get the spills and pollution, Canada gets the money and Mexico gets the gas.  Large areas of his state are turning into a desert, but he is advocating policies that will make the climate in Texas hotter and drier.  Lamar Smith, the Chairman of the House Science Committee, is whistling past the graveyards of the ghost towns of Texas.