Proposal To Goose Colorado River Flow - Cut Down Mountain Forests

[hatrack]

"Still struggling with drought on the Colorado River despite a winter of bountiful storms in the Southwest, water managers are dusting off provocative ideas for filling the river — among them, logging mountainsides to wring more runoff out of national forests and seeding clouds to pull more snow out of the sky. "A lot of things that are controversial will be looked at," said Central Arizona Project general manager Sid Wilson. "We can't do things the way we've always done them. We have to find ways that are creative to address tomorrow's problems."

Officials are also talking of reactivating a much criticized desalting plant near Yuma and building new storage basins along a Southern California canal that draws from the Colorado, one of the West's main water supplies. "You just run into a myriad of ideas," said Wilson, whose agency supplies Colorado River water to Phoenix and would suffer some of the first cuts if a shortage were declared in the lower basin. "There's been a lot of work done on weather modification, vegetation management … just pull together all the information and see what we've got."

EDIT

"Those are ludicrous," said Jennifer Pitt of Environmental Defense's Colorado office. "We're going to cut down our national forests so we can water our lawns on the front range? Give me a break. There's no way people are going to accept that." The idea of opening up the forest to generate more runoff in mountain watersheds is not a new one. Experiments date from the early 1900s, and many have been conducted in Colorado, the main source of snowmelt for the Colorado River.

"People have talked about it literally for over 100 years, and the reality is it becomes very hard to implement," said Lee H. MacDonald, a Colorado State University natural resources professor who co-wrote an extensive 2003 review of experiments to increase forest water yield. "Socially it's not particularly acceptable…. It's hard to cut enough trees to really make a substantial difference to the flow in the Colorado River." One of the photographs on the cover of his report shows an experimental forest in Wyoming that was logged to boost water production. Riddled with roads and more than 200 small clear cuts, it looks like a moth-eaten rag. Although many of the experiments documenting increased water yields involve some form of clear-cutting, Wilson shied away from suggesting that. "Reducing the density of trees and increasing the grasses can improve runoff, but I don't necessarily believe clear-cutting is the answer."

EDIT

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-drought17apr17,1,3230000.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage&ctrack=1&cset=true

[illflem]

1. This has already been tried and has failed

What happens is more sunlight hits the ground and causes the soil to dry more then soak up more water when it does come than if it had been shaded.
It's also proven that tree's evapotranspriration contributes to increased precipitation.

[phantom power]

2. I have a "controversial" proposal: population control.

Of course, that's much too controversial for most people. Far safer to consider less controlversial ideas, like simply mowing down every tree, and eroding the entire landscape away, in the name of keeping the southwest development binge going for a few more years.

[chicagiana]

4. Free contraception ...

Yeah, the loons on the right have a serious problem with ANY effort to stop the production of as many babies as possible.

Over-population is the elite's ticket to perpetual sustinence of their class system. They intentionally make the resources scare so us hoople-heads will fight each other instead of realizing the REAL sources of our problems.

Scarcity breeds conflict. And controlling a scarce resource is equivalent to power and wealth.

[Massacure]

7. On the right? Where did you learn to read a map. Colorado is on the left!

California is on the left coast, and New york is on the right coast!

Oh! You mean that right? :P

[blindpig]

8. perpetual sustenance

yup, the uber-monkeys need to have mucho unter-monkeys for needs physical and physiological. They need us to produce, they need us to consume, so that they might take their little tastes at every step, like the parasites they are. They need to be sitting on top of the social pyramid, because that's what our monkey nature tells us to do.

I know that many suspect the uber-monkeys of planning a mass genocide of the unter-monkeys as a "malthusian" response to the results of overpopulation. Possibly, but they're going about it funny. Why have they not supported and promoted serious family planning over the past 30 years if population was a serious concern? Are they dumb or are they monsters? Or both? And what of us unter-monkeys, can we not see the writing on the wall?

I suspect we're all stupid fucking monkeys

[chicagiana]

3. GRAY WATER ...

The western US needs to face a reality that irrigating one's lawn with POTABLE water is DUMB!!!!

The west is where wholesale sewage systems based on gray AND black water MUST come about to meet growth in those areas. You start at the neighborhood level having cisterns of gray water available for watering lawns and washing cars.


These proposals for clear cutting are INSANE!!!! You can't draw water from MUDSLIDES!!!!


Eventually, folks here in the Great Lakes Basin will get rich selling water to the west. The lesson here is ... don't settle in areas without water.

[Redneck Socialist]

5. Or they could take less water out of the river.

Crazy idea I know, it'll never fly. :eyes:

[phantom power]

9. They'd have to quit building endless subdivisions

across the desert. The author of "Long Emergency" got at least one thing dead right. Our economy here in the SW is built on endless construction. I suspect our fearless leaders know this, and so they are paralyzed. Even if they accept that water is running out, they can't face the political fallout of doing something about it, since that would make them the politicians who presided over the popping of the bubble.

[struggle4progress]

6. Water quality would suffer. And it's likely that ice in forest floor ...

... detritus melts over an extended period, perhaps well into the summer months, buffering the release of water to streams.