Scientists have long warned of a Colorado River crisis

The Colorado River is approaching a breaking point, its reservoirs depleted and Western states under pressure to drastically cut water use.

It’s a crisis that scientists have long warned was coming. Years before the current shortage, scientists repeatedly alerted public officials who manage water supplies that the chronic overuse of the river combined with the effects of climate change would likely drain the Colorado’s reservoirs to dangerously low levels.

But these warnings by various researchers — though discussed and considered by water managers — went largely unheeded.

Now, many of the scientists’ dire predictions are coming to pass, with Lake Mead and Lake Powell nearly three-fourths empty and their water levels continuing to fall. Some researchers say the seven states that depend on the river would have been better prepared had they acted years ago.“If I’ve learned anything recently, it’s that humans are really reluctant to give things up to prevent a catastrophe,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. “They’re willing to hang on to the very end and risk a calamity.” He said it’s just like humanity’s lack of progress in addressing climate change despite decades of warnings by scientists.

If larger cuts in water use were made sooner, Udall said, the necessary reductions could have been phased in and would have been much easier.

Peter Gleick, a water and climate scientist and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, said the collective failure to heed scientists’ repeated warnings is “directly responsible for how bad conditions are today.”

“If we had cut water use in the Colorado River over the last two decades to what we now understand to be the actual levels of water availability, there would be more water in the reservoirs today,” Gleick said. “The crisis wouldn’t be nearly as bad.”In a 1993 study for the federal government, Gleick and coauthor Linda Nash examined the threat climate change posed for the river and warned that the water supply would be very sensitive to rising temperatures.“Under conditions of long-term flow reductions and current operating rules, these reservoirs are drawn almost completely dry,” they wrote. “Current approaches to water management in the basin will have to be modified.”In 2000, board members of the Metropolitan Water District who were concerned about climate change invited scientists including Gleick to speak at a workshop. The scientists advised them to start preparing for consequences including less Sierra snow and possible decades of drought.

Gleick said a common refrain from many water managers in the 1980s and ’90s, when told about risks based on climate projections, was to respond that once they had a more definitive picture of effects on water resources, they could deal with it.

Even later, as the projections got more definitive and “alarm bells got louder,” Gleick said, political barriers hindered changes in the entrenched system of how the river’s water is divided and managed, a system established starting with the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Action was stymied, he said, by those “who either didn’t want to believe the science or had something to lose if we changed our policies.”

Gleick said there is a parallel in how fossil fuel interests have long fought the sorts of changes necessary to address global warming.

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