The Colorado River is running dry and so are the stories about the cause
The current story about why the Colorado River is running dry is mostly wrong, and the science on the subject tells a very different story.
It’s the year, 2022, and the Colorado River hasn’t touched the Pacific Ocean for something like two decades. Demand for the river’s water feeds ecosystems, towns, and cities from the middle of Colorado to the northern tip of Mexico. The American news media is on it. But the cited cause is ignorant at best, corrupted at worst, and the more direct causes are apparently too complex or controversial for mass broadcast.
I have been watching and living the drama unfold about the Colorado River my entire life. I remember driving by while it was flooding at the Colorado-Utah border when I was a kid, and I’ve spent almost every vacation of my life somewhere in proximity to the river. As an adult, I’ve gone to talks by my favorite experts and photographers on the subject, who produced entire books about the river running dry. I’m close to this thing, because it’s integral to my existence and it inspired most of my personal and intellectual interests.
As the news reports ramp up on how Lake Powell and Mead are drying up, and water isn’t reaching farms near the Mexico border, the reports naturally attribute a cause. And the cause they’re conveying is “climate change.” Just… climate change.
Exhibit A. This news clip from ABC News on the Colorado River reaches a massive audience with a singluar, reductionist cause…
You might notice that in the interview with Alejandra Borunda, she attributes the shrinking Colorado River as a “climate reckoning,” and that it is caused by “the worst 22 year stretch of drought in at least the last 1,200 years, made 40% worse by climate change.”
News reports like this, and interviews of pseudo-experts, creates an immense problem in developing an understanding of what’s going on with the river and the reservoirs that are dependent on it. It is yet another piece of information being conveyed to the public that explains the cause of a serious problem with a single, monolithic variable – which obscures the real drivers of events like this one.
For a clearer explanation for why everything in the ABC interview is off in the misinformation-weeds, take a quick gander at the April 2020 “Western Water Assessment: Chapter 2, Colorado River Basin Climate and Hydrology” by NOAA, CU Boulder, and CIRES. Here’s the movie trailer version of what you’ll find:
Graphs that show that precipitation in the Colorado River Basin is variable and hasn’t changed much in the last 1000 years (extrapolated history from tree-ring data) - highs and lows look like a heart beat
There’s a gradual downward trend in precipitation and flow rates in the basin over the last 100-200 years
We’re still hovering around the 14-16 maf (million acre feet) line that even paleo-climate studies of the river basin have shown from the past - and it’s usually plus or minus about 3 maf off the trendline
→ See for yourself: https://wwa.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/2021-06/ColoRiver_StateOfScience_WWA_2020_Chapter_2.pdf
The reason we should excoriate this is that ABC and the interviewed researcher’s presentation of this issue looked at a variable that is present, and conveyed it as the leading variable of the issue when it’s not, and they conveyed this to a massive audience.
Climate change is undoubtedly impacting the Colorado River Basin’s conveyance of water, but so are invasive species causing parasitic water losses, water storage for growing cities, and substantial losses to evaporation during the irrigation process. It’s the leading variables we should be conveying, because we’re not going to make any headway on a solution until we develop a shared understanding of the real causes.
I realize that most of the audience of ABC’s viewership is not likely able to process an explanation that talks about more than one thing at a time – which is why we should be talking about the leading variables, rather than the contributing ones.
When production is in the range of normal, supply is low, and demand explodes…
When the amount of water made available in the Colorado River Basin via precipitation remains relatively unchanged, yet the supply decreases sharply downstream, it should reveal that supply may not be the cause of the change. And, if climate change is supposed to be impacting supply, yet the supply is still mostly in the realm of normal, then other variables must be more dominant.
The key fact that ABC and most of the other media outlets are missing right now is that consumption of water from the Colorado river has been on a continuously upward trajectory, and we recently started consuming more water than the basin produces.
When I say that consumption outstripped what the basin produces, I mean we’re now using more water from the River basin than it has produced on average for the entire period that the scientists understand. And we crossed that threshold in the last 2-5 years. Here’s a rough sketch of what that looks like:
In a logical mind, that fact should bring you circling back to ABC’s story – about how climate change is why Lake Powell is drying up. Hopefully the logical conclusion is that consumption is now outstripping what the basin produces - both historically and under the climate-changed condition. But what this means is that climate change isn’t the cause of this crisis – over-consumption is, and climate change is merely a variable that modifies other, more dominant variables.
When NOAA, CIRES, and CU Boulder show graphs of historic water production and stream flows in the Colorado River Basin, and they don’t show values that would cause mega-reservoirs like Powell and Mead to suddenly dry up, the conclusion should be that changes in supply aren’t the leading cause of the problem.
The hypothesis should evolve to suspect that leading variables, such as population growth (with its direct relationship to consumption), parasitic water losses along the river (e.g., tamarisk), or other industrial uses that may have changed.
Want to connect the dots about population growth in the West? Check out this Google Public Data Explorer link for more:
But ABC didn’t go there. Instead, ABC, and other media outlets find pseudo-experts to interview and help relay incorrect information to a public that regularly fails at locating good information and interpreting it correctly. My apologies to the interviewee in becoming an example in my writing here, but it’s painful to watch east coast-educated, pseudo-experts talking about Western lands, water issues, or anything else about the West — because there’s really no amount of classroom, research, or lab time that can educate about something they’re deeply and inherently disconnected from. Especially when they are presented as an authority on an issue and get all of the information wrong.
When I boil all of this down, I’m talking about multiple systemic issues – from the way media relays information, to the over- and erroneous-attribution of environmental crises to climate change, to the American public’s tendency to boil every problem down to one variable. There is a symphony of variables driving the Colorado River water crisis, with water use due to population growth exceeding production in the basin being the leading cause, and with climate change as mere modifier in the equation.
There are a few facts we can all likely agree on – the Colorado River is no longer reaching the Pacific Ocean, Powell and Mead are no longer filling at the rate they’re being consumed, there are measurable impacts of changing climate on the River, and the mega-reservoirs drying up are a massive dead canary in this water mine. But I hope there’s another fact we can start to agree on – the leading variable in this crisis is consumption that is now greater than the amount of water that falls in the basin.
A glimmer of hope for the right answer going mainstream…
When I survey the media landscape on this topic, I see a broad range of information being conveyed to the public – most of it wrong in one direction, totally wrong in another direction, but sometimes (and only just) they get it right. And, here’s a story that aligns with my rant above and looks at more than one variable as the cause of what’s happening …
Exhibit B. 60 Minutes gets the Colorado River story mostly right in under 15 minutes …
The 60 Minutes story gets a lot of this right, and there’s still a lot that’s missing. If they showed a simple graph of water production in the basin, water consumption, and the historic normal production of water on the river, the story would have been a slam dunk. Because that story shows that production is little changed, while consumption of the river’s waters have never been higher.
Certainly, we still need to consider climate change as a part of this, but based on the Western Water Assessment from 2020, we’re still in the range of what we understand to be the ‘normal’ for water falling in the Colorado River Basin, even though it’s undeniably on the lower end. We need our mass media sources to start telling the real story here, and talking about the effect of mass migration to the West — a place that cannot handle the number of people moving here, even with water conservation measures.
The media, public, and policymakers appear to be missing the fact that the West’s “megadrought” isn’t as much a climate phenomenon as it is radical overconsumption of a resource that has been known to be severely limited since colonists first started wandering Westward.
The Fleeting West is written by an opinionated and deeply rooted westerner with a critical eye for baloney and no time to write all the words that need to be written in rebuke.
It’s almost a guarantee that when someone uses the word “reckoning,” it’s being used jn a quasi-religious sense.