Scientists: The American Southwest Faces a “Megadrought”

[HuckleB]

“This will be worse than anything seen during the last 2,000 years," says the lead author of the paper. Also: "Megadrought" is a real term.
http://modernfarmer.com/2014/09/scientists-american-southwest-faces-megadrought/

"A new study published as a joint effort by scientists at Cornell University, the University of Arizona, and the U.S. Geological Survey finds that the chances of the Southwest facing a “megadrought” are much higher than previously suspected.

According to the new study, “the chances of the southwestern United States experiencing a decade-long drought is at least 50 percent, and the chances of a ‘megadrought’ – one that lasts up to 35 years – ranges from 20 to 50 percent over the next century.” Not so crazy, according to Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University who has helped pen many studies of historical megadroughts: “By some measures the west has been in drought since 1998 so we might be approaching a megadrought classification!” he says. The study points to manmade global climate change as a possible cause for the drought, which would affect portions of California (where a drought is currently decimating farms), Arizona and New Mexico.

..."


Umm. Yikes.

[villager]

1. This is eventually going to change the face of (over)development out here in my native West.

Maybe not even "eventually."

The Cornucopia myth is about to be derailed.

I think I've just mixed metaphors. Drought'll do that to ya.

[lovuian]

2. We need to get going on desalination plants

and a pipeline for water or the West will crumble and die

[BillZBubb]

3. How about first getting going on REAL conservation?

[HuckleB]

6. Including thought about where it makes sense for people to live.

The deserts of AZ and NM are just not made to have that many people live there.

[nationalize the fed]

8. +1 Much of the rest of the world has not only figured that out

but it can be done with renewable resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Existing_facilities_and_facilities_under_construction

Particularly Australia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater_desalination_in_Australia

And where do people think places like Saudi Arabia and Israel get water?

Israel

Israel Desalination Enterprises' Sorek Desalination Plant in Palmachim provides up to 26,000 m³ of potable water per hour (2.300 m³ p.a.). At full capacity, it is the largest desalination plant of its kind in the world.[102] Once unthinkable, given Israels history of drought and lack of available fresh water resource, with desalination, Israel can now actually produce a surplus of fresh water


The Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) has several water treatment plants across Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia: The Saline Water Conversion Corporation of Saudi Arabia provides 50% of the municipal water in the Kingdom, operates a number of desalination plants, and has contracted $1.892 billion[119] to a Japanese-South Korean consortium to build a new facility capable of producing a billion liters per day, opening at the end of 2013. They currently operate 32 plants in the Kingdom;[120] one example at Shoaiba cost $1.06 billion and produces 450 million liters per day

If oil can be piped from the north of Alaska to the south water can be pumped from the sea inland.

But the US is spending borrowed dollars on Ukraine (5 Billion) and Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan.

California has started to figure it out, which is a wonder in itself considering most of the people in that state can't remember last week. (I'm from California and believe me I know)

Jobs and clean water. A 2fer. Water and energy shortages are happening only because the US Gov is broken. Totally Broken. Spending $5 billion on Ukraine. What a joke. Except it's not funny.

[AnalystInParadise]

4. What is their definition of the SW????

Cali? Yeah I believe that.....Southern Arizona? not sure I can buy that one.

[HuckleB]

5. Huh?

Did you read the piece?

AZ and NM are definitely SW.

[Uncle Joe]

7. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, HuckleB.

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. This is apparently historic climatic "normal" for the region.

The Southwest has historically experienced regular periods of extended drought. The 20th century was unusually wet by longterm standards, enough so to represent a climatic anomaly...which is a problem when that coincides with the period of major development and everyone's baseline assumptions of "normal" rainfall.

See for instance here:

California is experiencing its worst drought since record-keeping began in the mid 19th century, and scientists say this may be just the beginning. B. Lynn Ingram, a paleoclimatologist at the University of California at Berkeley, thinks that California needs to brace itself for a megadrought—one that could last for 200 years or more.

As a paleoclimatologist, Ingram takes the long view, examining tree rings and microorganisms in ocean sediment to identify temperatures and dry periods of the past millennium. Her work suggests that droughts are nothing new to California.

"During the medieval period, there was over a century of drought in the Southwest and California. The past repeats itself," says Ingram, who is co-author of The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climate Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow. Indeed, Ingram believes the 20th century may have been a wet anomaly.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/02/140213-california-drought-record-agriculture-pdo-climate/

And here:

The California Department of Water Resources, which had funded some of the research, published the results as an illustrated poster. Beneath a series of stock southwestern postcard shots, the spiky trace of tree-ring data oscillates nervously across the page, from A.D. 762 on the left to 2005 on the right. One photo shows the Hoover Dam, water gushing from its outlets. When the dam was being planned in the 1920s to deliver river water to the farms of the Imperial Valley and the nascent sprawl of Los Angeles, the West, according to the tree rings, was in one of the wettest quarter centuries of the past millennium. Another photo shows the booming skyline of San Diego, which doubled its population between 1970 and 2000—again, an exceptionally wet period along the river. But toward the far left of the poster, there is a picture of Spruce Tree House, one of the spectacular cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado, a pueblo site abandoned by the Anasazi at the end of the 13th century. Underneath the photo, the graph reveals that the Anasazi disappeared in a time of exceptional drought and low flow in the river.

In fact, the tree rings testified that in the centuries before Europeans settled the Southwest, the Colorado basin repeatedly experienced droughts more severe and protracted than any since then. During one 13-year megadrought in the 12th century, the flow in the river averaged around 12 million acre-feet, 80 percent of the average flow during the 20th century and considerably less than is taken out of it for human use today. Such a flow today would mean serious shortages, and serious water wars. "The Colorado River at 12 million acre-feet would be real ugly," says one water manager.

Unfortunately, global warming could make things even uglier. Last April, a month before Meko and Woodhouse published their latest results, a comprehensive study of climate models reported in Science predicted the Southwest's gradual descent into persistent Dust Bowl conditions by mid-century. Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), meanwhile, have used some of the same models to project Colorado streamflow. In their simulations, which have been confirmed by others, the river never emerges from the current drought. Before mid-century, its flow falls to seven million acre-feet—around half the amount consumed today.

(snip)

Stine found drowned stumps in many other places in the Sierra Nevada. They all fell into two distinct generations, corresponding to two distinct droughts. The first had begun sometime before 900 and lasted over two centuries. There followed several extremely wet decades, not unlike those of the early 20th century. Then the next epic drought kicked in for 150 years, ending around 1350. Stine estimates that the runoff into Sierran lakes during the droughts must have been less than 60 percent of the modern average, and it may have been as low as 25 percent, for decades at a time. "What we have come to consider normal is profoundly wet," Stine said. "We're kidding ourselves if we think that's going to continue, with or without global warming."

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2008/02/drying-west/kunzig-text