Communities throughout Colorado’s Western Slope rely on water from the state’s snowpack, which is gradually dwindling as climate change worsens a 20-year drought, The Washington Post reports.
“In all my years of farming in the area, going back to about 1950, 2018 was the toughest, driest year I can remember,” said Norman Kehmeier, 94, who works a farm in Colorado with his son, Paul.
A small group of counties in the state’s Western Slope have warmed by 2 degrees Celsius on average, while the Colorado River’s average flow has fallen by almost 20 percent in the last century, partly because of rising temperatures.
Chris Milly, a senior resource scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, and a colleague found that about 1.5 billion tons of water has gone missing as a result of the Colorado River’s decline, and that much of that comes from the shrinking of the snowpack, which has begun melting earlier in the year.
“The seasons where you don’t want to see the warming are warming faster,” Jeff Lukas, researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Western Water Assessment, told the Post.
“What we’re seeing is changes in real time,” added Mark Harris, director of the Grand Valley Water Users Association. “As water managers, regardless of our personal beliefs, we can’t totally disregard these worst-case scenarios. The trends are leading in one direction.”
Kehmeier told the Post that the town of Sugar City, Colorado “used to be a sugar beet growing area,” where farmers would sell their water rights to the local municipalities, but now “that’s about the saddest, dust-blown little nothing town that you ever saw.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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