Real Climate Science

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/

Lake Powell, the 25 million acre-foot reservoir formed by Glen Canyon Dam in 1968, is now less than half full.

It’s not a philosophical question about the reservoir being half empty or half full. It didn’t fill up last year. Since the drought of 2002, it’s draining faster than it’s filling. While water experts admit there are lot of “ifs” in their calculations, they are beginning to get concerned. Eagle County’s Eagle River is a tributary of the Colorado River.

If the drought, now in its third year, continues at current rates -and forecasts vary – the huge lake could be drained by 2010, leaving Colorado to supply 7.5 million acre-feet it agreed to supply downstream states under the 1922 Colorado River Interstate Compact.

http://www.vaildaily.com/

May 24, 2007–Lake Powell is doomed, activist says (Grand Junction Daily Sentinel)

Rich Ingebretsen is trying to spread a message many Colorado River Basin water managers don’t like: “Lake Powell is going away.” His argument goes like this: Silt will clog Lake Powell, rendering it useless, and global warming is going to ravage the West with higher temperatures and inadequate precipitation so much that Lake Powell by even the Bureau of Reclamation’s estimation will be empty 15 percent of the time and only 40 percent full most of the time.

http://www.waterinfo.org/

However, incompetence is a requirement for a job in the Obama administration.

Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

http://investorshub.advfn.com/

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2008/0213/p25s05-usgn.html

http://www.arctic.io/observations/64/2011-06-15/9-N30-W82/United-States-Fargo

Can you find the fire in Arizona, which is a proxy for the entire west?

h/t to noiv11

http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/wrcc/YearTDeptWRCC.png

http://www.salon.com/

I’ve lived most of my life in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The world’s tallest Aspen groves are in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, where I worked as a wilderness ranger. Those groves formed from massive forest fires in the 19th century.

There was a huge forest fire in Los Alamos 11 years ago – which is now filling in with much more attractive Aspen trees. Fires go through cycles, and most of the west has been amazingly free of fires this year.

The monsoons will start in New Mexico in about a week, and that will shut the fire season down there. In a couple of weeks they will start in Arizona too.

Most of the west is dealing with flooding, not fire.

h/t to Marc Morano

Bill Clinton has also taken a direct role in pushing Weiner. The former president has reportedly been “livid” about Weiner’s behaviour, despite Clinton’s own history of sexual peccadilloes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

http://lakepowell.water-data.com/index2.php?as_of=1964-06-15

Water is flowing into the lake at a record rate, so it is quite likely that by July the water level will be back up near a historic maximum. This is in spite of the fact that they are also letting a lot of water out of the dam.