The water level in Lake Mead is reaching record lows and the popular narrative maintains that drought brought on by human-caused climate change is to blame.
But the government’s own data from the Bureau of Reclamation shows this is not true. [bold, links added[
Imagine that a large city has been built in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
Since no precipitation falls there, a large man-made reservoir is created with water piped in from a thousand miles away.
The desert city grows over time, but the water supply does not.
Over the years, the desert city must ration water as the reservoir is drained due to overuse.
In this hypothetical situation, would it be rational to blame the water shortage on drought and global warming? No.
Yet, this is the situation we have with Lake Mead.
As can be seen in the Bureau of Reclamation’s official estimate of the yearly natural water flows into Lake Mead, there has been no long-term trend in water flow into the reservoir.
Yearly natural water flows into Lake Mead at Lees Ferry, Nevada, since 1930. The measured flows have been corrected for upstream diversions created over time to provide the best estimate of whether ‘climate change’ has caused drought-induced reductions in the water supply to Lake Mead. Details of those corrections are described here. Data source here.
Most of the water supplying the Colorado River at this location comes from snowmelt in the upper Colorado River watershed. The April snowpack in that region shows a slight upward trend.
Upper Colorado River watershed snowpack as estimated each April from 1938 to 2022. Department of Agriculture data source here.
So, why is Lake Mead losing so much water?
The answer is overuse.
The Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study, published in 2012, showed that water demand from Lake Mead increased rapidly over the decades but remained less than water supply until around 2000, after which usage exceeded the available water supply in most years.
This is what can be expected when we build cities in the desert (e.g. Las Vegas) and grow crops on arid land where there is insufficient natural precipitation.
That virtually every news story we read blames the water crisis on ‘climate change’ or drought leads to widespread disinformation on the causes of falling water levels in Lake Mead.
This then leads to expensive and misguided solutions to the problem.
For example, on July 22, Forbes published an article titled “Why Is Lake Mead Shrinking? Climate Change Is a Major Reason.” Also in July, NASA published “Lake Mead Keeps Dropping,” in which the agency stated the reservoir “provides a stark illustration of climate change.”
In fact, ‘climate change’ does not even predict reductions in precipitation in the region that feeds water to Lake Mead.
CMIP6 climate model projections of yearly precipitation over the upper Colorado River watershed. Climate model data archived here.
Rational approaches to ‘climate change’, to the extent it exists, must be informed by accurate data.
This is why Dr. John Christy and I created and continue to maintain and update a satellite-based global temperature dataset at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
That global dataset shows less global warming than scattered surface-based thermometers, which are prone to increasing spurious heat sources over time.
But in the case of Lake Mead, the datasets (such as those in the three graphs above) are not even in question. The problem is that lazy and biased reporting — even in some scientific reports — has led to the widespread misperception that ‘climate change’ is responsible for Lake Mead losing water.
Lake Mead is being drained by overuse, not ‘climate change’.
Read rest at Spectator
I recently google searched the UAH satellite temperature records and found a lot of nobodies attacking the accuracy and application of them. The worst argument against them was that they don’t agree with surface temperatures, so they need to be corrected to match. Another false argument was that the satellites don’t read temperature! The satellites are in orbit for good reason. They don’t lie.
The internet is a dumpster for disinformation.
This same thing happened with Shasta Lake but they did,nt blame it on Global Warming/Climate Change and it was the 1970’s
This is very interesting and a similar situation exists with the massive city of Sydney in Australia. The city has one dam and outside of La Nina periods, Sydney is always short of water. That didn’t happened back in the 1970’s because the population at that time was much less than today.
Now, most sensible people might expect that another dam would be built given the huge increase in population that depends on a relaible water supply, but NO, for a multitude of “green” reasons and of course all the red and green tape invented by lazy bureaucrats, no new dam is planned.
More recently, the Astralian government has announced it will grant access to Australia for another 150,000 ( around that number) new migrants per year. Many of those people will end up living in Sydney which in time, will place higher demand on the only dam we have and tougher water use restrictions down the road. Remember, Australia tends to be a dry country.
It is only a matter of time for Sydney Australia to be in the same situation as cities currently depending on water from Lake Mead.