is it raining is it snowing is a hurricane a-blowing
USA Today (yes, the USA Today, via the mighty mighty ProRev):
The water supply for more than two-thirds of the West's population comes from melting of winter snow, stored high in the mountains like freezers full of shaved ice. In spring, that snowpack begins to thaw. The snowmelt flows into streams and reservoirs, which store and deliver water for drinking, crop irrigation, hydropower and other uses during typically drier summer, fall and winter months.
“Snow is the cornerstone of water in the West,” says Mote, a member of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, a research collaboration between universities and the federal government.
Mote says he was “frankly shocked” to find that for the West overall, 75% of snow courses, where measurements are taken, show a decline. In the Pacific Northwest, much of that drop is caused by warming. He adds, “The Cascades as a whole have lost 3% of their snowpack since 1950, and two-thirds of that is the result of warming.”
A new climate model developed by the Energy Department's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory projected this month that many of Earth's high mountain ranges could lose much of their seasonal snow cover by the end of the century. It forecasts the Sierra Nevada, Cascades and southern Rockies to lose 43% of winter snowpack.
You know, just as a side note, it still manages to amaze me that the proclamations of government scientists on climate change can be laughed at by some of the least qualified people in politics, but the most far-out, hateful gibberish stuck to bottom of a religion's shoe is taken seriously and made part of our public life.
I attended a short talk last fall by a CU Prof at Boulder library on the prospects for the Boulder Creek watershed in a post-climate change environment; said prof summed up his lecture by saying that it will either be wetter in Colorado, or, well, it won't.
And that's not the sort of thing policy makers - especially policy makers with an eye towards accomodating more residents, more development, and more water needs - would sit still for. Nevertheless, it may become apparent sooner than we would like - and I mean Americans, and I especially mean Coloradans - have deluded ourselves that we have achieved a mastery over nature, over the land and the environment.
See, nature is like The House at a card game - nature always wins. In fact, nature doesn't even have to play this game, really: we're the ones who have to stay at the tables all night, betting and feinting and betting some more. And our line of credit goes only so high.
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