Drought within the west shouldn’t be climate, however local weather – and can’t be remedied by short-term options

July 1st map from the US Drought Monitor

When we think of the seemingly endless war in Syria, these thoughts tend to focus on the mendacity of Bashir Assad and the maneuvers of various powerful countries, including Russia, which has long treated Syria as a client state. However, the civil war that began in 2011 and produced over 11 million refugees and displaced persons was triggered to a significant extent by a prolonged drought that resulted in massive crop failures, economic disruption and widespread hunger.

As a 2014 article in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society found, “Challenges related to climate variability and change, and the availability and use of freshwater” were a key driver of the Syrian unrest. As in many regions, “water ownership” in Syria was subject to a number of legal agreements, traditions and regulations. The long-term water shortage in the region made the importance of water access immediately apparent and a central part of many regional agreements. Those agreements failed when Syria faced the worst drought in 500 years. Water scarcity is certainly not the only factor that led to the civil war in Syria, but it was certainly one of the main factors.

In the truest sense of the word, the more than 11 million displaced people in Syria are not war refugees: They are climate refugees. And these refugees were not displaced by climate change caused by a supervolcano eruption or the long-term fluctuations due to the planet’s ever-changing axial tilt. The drought in Syria is almost certainly the direct consequence of the man-made climate crisis.

When one thinks of climate refugees, one often worries about the millions in Miami or New Orleans or other coastal cities who could be displaced by rising seas. That is a legitimate concern that is moving closer to reality year after year.

But there is another group already facing massive threats – cities in the western United States that cannot exist without comprehensive water management and that cannot continue to exist with the current levels of rainfall. There’s no need to go to Chinatown to understand the importance of water management to cities from LA to Las Vegas. Mark Twain may never really have said “Whiskey is for drinking; Water is there to fight “, But the sentiment behind that statement shows that the people who built the cities, villages, farms, and factories in the western United States understood well the vital importance of water access.

There’s a reason domestic terrorist Ammon Bundy is currently threatening to open the floodgates Klamath Falls in Oregon. It’s not because Bundy cares about the farmers in the area or because he has a perverse hatred of the area’s endangered fish. That’s because Bundy understands that water rights always create high levels of fear, and in the midst of a record-breaking mega-drought, those fears can be exploited.

Bundy won’t be the last to put his finger on that hot button. Water in the western United States is not a hard-to-understand climate model or prediction that begins with the words “by the end of this century”. This is a disaster that is immediately visible in the form of dried up river beds and empty reservoirs. It is happening now.

It took nearly a decade for officials from Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and the federal government to reach an agreement on just part of the distribution of the dwindling water supply. Because of this and other agreements, some cities in the desert, such as Phoenix, are semi-safe for the immediate future. Others, like El Paso, Texas, which im The Chihuahua Desert and seeing less than nine centimeters of precipitation in a good year have future prospects that are much more uncertain.

The “bathtub ring” shows the massive drop in the water level at Lake Mead

The record heat that has ravaged the west this year has got the most attention in the news, and it’s hard to ignore temperatures that are killing dozens of people while also triggering an early start to a serious forest fire season. But the current heat dome is ultimately much less destructive than the severe drought that has lasted for two decades.

This length is the real concern. There are a number of cities in the United States that are so dependent on surface water and so lacking in storage that even a short-term drought can cause serious problems (see you, Atlanta). But what is happening in the West is not a slip-up. It’s a long-term trend that suggests that the warming planet created by the man-made climate crisis is one where there will be significantly less rainfall in this region. This is a situation that is likely to get worse in a way that will have a big impact before it gets better – no matter what steps we take to address the climate crisis.

These impacts are measured in much more than just shutting down fountains, avoiding irrigated lawns, and potential threats to fully irrigation-dependent agriculture. As KLAS announced in Las Vegas on Tuesday, the water levels at the Hoover Dam have now dropped so far that electricity generation is at risk. Half of the power from the site goes to California. So if there are power outages or bottlenecks in the coming weeks, it’s not just the ongoing heatwave, but also the reduced supply due to the drought. By August, Lake Mead could no longer produce any electricity at all, as it reaches levels that trigger automatic cuts in water consumption.

Former marina on Lake Folsom, CA

California may be worse affected than most, especially because it has both a large population and a heavily water-dependent industry in the form of agriculture. The state’s reduced snowpack has created only 20% of expected runoff, as high temperatures and dry creek beds have caused much-needed water to simply evaporate before it ever reaches local rivers.

Three-quarters of California have already reached the term extreme drought. The level of drought in 2021 will reach the level last seen when the state reached these conditions between 2012 and 2015. Those years were the four driest since the state began to keep records being dwarfed by the current drought cycle. The state is short of rain, short of snow and reservoirs are at record lows. There aren’t any good signs. Snow cover in the Sierra Nevada is now 5% of the average for this time of year, even though rainfall is less than half the average.

The word for it is: not sustainable.

California has always been hit by intermittent drought – water has always been there to fight – but since the 1980s the drought cycles have gotten harder and faster. What is still referred to as an “exceptional drought” is becoming less exceptional by the day. This degree of drought could easily be the new normal or even the basis for even more severe and prolonged droughts.

So what happens now? The USDA declared a drought disaster back in April. This enables farmers to obtain low-interest loans to help them weather the drought. But these are loans, not grants. They assume that next year the farmers will have the money – that is, the water – to repay these loans. There is absolutely no evidence that it will. Rainfall in 2021 is heavy, but this is only the second year of the current extreme drought cycle. The last such sequence ended in 2017 after a term of over five years.

The severe drought in the west does not look like a weather phenomenon, but rather like climate change. Treating it with patches that are in place for a short period of time is … exactly what they did in Syria and the Chaco and Sumer. Failure to plan events by treating them as a long-term national crisis that requires extreme urgency invites people like Bundy and GOP leader Mitch McConnell to turn the crisis into a political opportunity at the expense of mounting misery.