Climate change shrinking water in western U.S.

Program #5460 of the Earth & Sky Radio Series
with hosts Deborah Byrd, Joel Block, Lindsay Patterson and Jorge Salazar.

A 2008 study shows that Earth’s changing climate has caused available water to shrink in the western U.S. during the last half century.

And even bigger changes lie ahead, according to lead author Tim Barnett of Scripps Oceanographic Institution in San Diego.

Tim Barnett: It’s a 20 percent decrease on average over the western U.S. in the snowpack as it exists on the first of April.

Barnett’s study compared 50 years of river and climate data with computer models. It showed that in the western U.S., about 60 percent of changes, such as shrinking snowpack, can only have a non-natural explanation: a human-induced rise in temperature caused by greenhouse gases. Barnett added that water supplies in the western U.S. might be disrupted within 20 years.

Earth & Sky asked Barnett how people will adapt.

Tim Barnett: Some of the adaptations will be conservation. Some will be taking it from farmers and giving it to a growing population. A decent adaptation would be to limit the population growth and development in the western United States. I don’t think that will ever happen. But those are the kinds of things that we’re going to have to do.

Barnett is concerned about the environmental future we’re leaving for the coming generations.

Tim Barnett: We’re altering the climate of planet in ways that we know, and in lots of ways that we don’t know. We’re making a world for today’s children and grandchildren that they’re going to have to live in, in the future. And if they don’t like it, there won’t be a thing they can do about it.

Barnett warns that dam capacity will be insufficient to hold the water coming rushing down.

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