The New York Times, October 21st, 2007

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water
problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of
rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the
steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep
accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to
provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more
modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of
dangers. Last May, for instance, 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.”

In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A
catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly
consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a
kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from
the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people
depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in
seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and
California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with
farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing
states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by
treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international
law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser
Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of
economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries,
agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent
Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of
the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would
experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”

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