Another factor that has led to the river drying up that isn't mentioned here are golf courses. Golf courses in Nevada and Arizona use the river water Having a golf course in a green lush state is one thing, but having one in a desert state using the water of your state's lifeline...is something else
HOAs- A little taste of Fascism in America, before it was cool. *Cough* A lot like most Unions, which steal away your rights and what you can do both on the job and as a person, some even dictating how you can vote.
@@asitallfallsdown5914 They're supposed to be for people who want to live with a set of property rules to enforce their neatly ordered ideals. The problem is that HOA's have proliferated too much. They shouldn't be allowed to swamp the market, so that house buyers always have a choice whether they want to be in an HOA or not. Personally, I don't like them, but I have no problem with some people choosing them, as long as the choice is informed and voluntary.
As someone who lives in the Rocky Mountain West (Wyoming), I don’t think that most Americans really understand how dangerous water levels of rivers have been. While it is a major water source, the Colorado River isn’t the only river that has been negatively impacted by climate change. The North Platte is seeing an every decreasing water level year after year. This is having a direct impact on the crops that are produced in Nebraska as farmers are seeing less water coming down the Platte from Wyoming. This has over the years cause issues between the State because of contracts and agreements that were signed between Wyoming and Nebraska. The mountains, which just 10 years ago had full, deep, snow covered peaks year round, are now far too often lacking that snow. That lack of snow at high elevations means that, at the end of the day, there is less water in the rivers. This is a major problem that is a reflection of the negative impact of global warming.
We have enough water we just need to be more efficient with it. Take a page from Las Vegas which is insanely efficient for our cities and Isreal for our farming practices. Crazy that these new FABs and other huge manufacturing plants coming in places where water is scarce... They require a HUGE amount of fresh water to operate. Why are people building them in the drier areas is beyond me (I know why tax incentives and they have politicians who will bend over backwards because of money). Since people are so against nuclear we are going to see water bills go up sharply as we are going to have to start building more desaltion plants for some cities. Why we let so much water go into the oceon is beyond me too. Recycle it! What worries me too is the massive aquafers. Either they are drying up or being polluted. Anyway water shortages are going to be one of the biggest issues going forward. Still don't comprehend how we can see more rain on average but less water to hold. Also why does it matter if the water comes from a snow pack or from a deluge from up in the mountains? Either way it's flowing in the same direction is it not? Just a laymen do not mind me.
Larry, my heart aches over all of this. It scares me. I don’t know how to fix it. I wish I could. It’s so overwhelming. My heart aches for all of us. People chasing their ALMIGHTY DAM $. Makes me sick. Is this the “end times”? If I had the power to fix the h2o problem etc…I would.
Hey Joe, you might want to research the region of Mendoza, in Argentina, just for fun. It's in a iteral desert, but because of water management they were able to become the biggest wine producer in the country, while also thriving in agriculture*. The two main things they do are: 1. recovering water from melting ice and snow from the Andes and 2. treat every day as a water shortage day, even when there's rain. Which means, even if you don't have a water shortage, the city and the farms are only allowed a limited water suppy, and the surplus of rainy days is stored to be used in the dry seasons. It's super interesting, and it reay shows how proper management can make a huge difference on limited resources. *Edit: I originally claimed Mendoza was the biggest food producer in the country, but I was corrected on the replies below. Still impressive, though.
I don't know if you know about the energy producing towers that just use kinetic potential energy using gravity that Hoover dam could be used to simply lift a bunch of of those weights up into the air and then slowly let them down generating even more power if there was hundreds of towers around that damn it could supply power all the way as far as the West Coast itself and the Midwest large parts
I've spent some time in the Mendosa region. I was impressed by the matter of fact attitude towards water conservation. Here in the US capitalism is king, and the powers that be will destroy almost anything that stands in the way of profit. Including the earth itself.
One creative idea I saw recently was to cover the canals with solar panels. It generates electricity, reduces evaporation, and improves panel efficiency due to the water keeping them cool. Maybe then Phoenix can continue to build out lego housing communities out in the middle of no where to squeak out more profits.
@@Wasthere73 Lets just build a big ole cloud above the mountain that feeds the river. A big concrete cloud with a bunch of solar panels on it. Maybe air conditioning that can pump cold air out the bottom, and use the top like a heat sink.
I’ve worked on power plants, petroleum plants, flood control systems, water and wastewater treatment plants and it amazes me how little my fellow citizens understand the importance of these facilities. As my buddy, an electric company lineman says, “We are overpaid and invisible until they flip that switch and nothing happens.”
I’m a lineman too, its disgusting the amount of people that think electricity and utilities are just magic, and when they lose them during a power outage they get mean and nasty and just say “why can’t you just put our lights back on!” Even though its a very long and hard process to restore power! People are so pampered and clueless to how the world works nowadays, they are so entitled and lazy, they wont know what hit them until they lose it all, people need to wake up and appreciate how good they have it!
AZ boy here. I love AZ and glad you were highlighting this. It's been something that we're not ignorant of (but many people are unaware of these problems). Thanks again for talking about this! One note: Gila (river and Native American tribes) is pronounced "Hee-lah" not Gill-ah. :)
I've lived in the vegas metro area ever since i was an infant and I worked on the hoover dam for over a year and let me tell you, standing over the dam, looking into the lake, and seeing that bathline is always disheartening
The first summer that water service to the city is disrupted (some time in the next 20 years) the city will die. Waiting for the water truck ain't no way to live.
@@JOlivier2011 not only that, but a massive chunk of the power vegas receives is hydro electric from the dam, so no water and limited power. If this isn't fixed it'll result in chaos in vegas
I live in Arizona and have watched the water level at Mead change dramatically over my lifetime. Thank you for this video to spotlight the challenges the future holds for us.
@Miles Doyle That was pretty good ! How the heck did you beat the algorithm ? As a hated and despised Catholic , I challenge you to look into Eucharistic miracles . Your going to find half bread bound to human heart muscle that has only one strand of DNA and never decomposes . You like spiritual phenomena ? Try that.
Angkor Wat was one of the most amazing cities ever built. During a period of prolonged drought, drastic measures were taken to dismantle the complex series of canals and water management structures that were as much of a marvel as the city itself. And then the drought ended, the city flooded and it became impossible to live there.
Yep. Reading history is like wandering through a graveyard for civilizations, most of whom were at least partially destroyed by climate change. The civilizations along the Pacific coast of North and South America had it worst. I think it was the Moche that were hit by 35 years of severe drought followed by 35 years of severe flooding. But they were far from the only civilization there to end up being nature's bitch.
I live in Las Vegas. We have a $36 water bill. We changed all the plants to ones that are native to Australia such as Eucalyptus trees. we have zero water going to our plants.
I took away from this that maybe, just maybe farming in a desert and having to water it might have not been a great idea. Meanwhile a few miles from my home, prime cropland (that didn't need to be watered) is being covered with concrete and 14,000 homes. Yeah Buddy, we be smart!
And it isn't even modern farming methods. They could be using 10 times less easily and do much more recycling of water. The Netherlands produce almost as much agriculture foods as the US maybe more and we might fit inside new York as a country. We now how to do proper water management
I grew up in Vegas and I can confirm… not the best idea. But-the reason we do it is because of the nearly nonexistent pests and consistent climate. Root rot isn’t a concern in the desert, unlike where i live now in Florida. Crop disease is also less abundant in the desert. So i understand why they started…. But now it’s time to think of a different method for farming in the desert. Like, closed hydroponic systems inside a greenhouse, for instance.
@@MsPoliteRants The absence of bad things does not override the lack of good things. There are no pests on the moon either, but that doesn't make it a good place for commercial farmland.
As someone who has boated on lake Mead and the river for almost 50 years now and has seen the drastic changes with my own eyes, I feel most likely the lake and river may be doomed unfortunately.
@@monkeybarmonkeyman "environmentalists" are calling for that now. Some others are brainwashed by conservative media to thinking otherwise, but guess what, "environmentalists" don't have money, therefore little political power. If Lake Mead lives or dies, it's because big economic interests willed it so. Coal power plants still stand to benefit from the end of water power generation there. Not environmentalists.
Agreed. I grew up in Vegas. Lived there from 1968 to 2000. I remember when they opened the gates in 1999. That was an amazing sight. Since then I've just watched it through pictures being depleted every year. So sad.
The Murray-Darling River system in Australia is going through a very similar situation. We've had mass fish deaths, water licences up stream for cotton have reduced flow in crop producing regions down river causing crop failures, and we've got political corruption involved with money being paid for water that doesn't exist. A lot of the problems are due to climate change with droughts, changing rainfall patterns and so on. And for the love of God, why is a dry country like Australia farming irrigation intense cotton... Like the Colorado River, the Murray darling is Australia's food bowl. If it dies, our already arid country is gonna have a bad time.
And, the Carmichael Mine in Qld will ship "clean coal" because it can wash it clean with huge volumes of 10,000 year old aquifer water sucked out of the ground... Scotty-from-marketing loves coal, and the few votes his COALition parties gain from allowing foreign companies to "invest in Australia's future"... They'll take out of the ground in a few decades what nature took a few millennia to put there... What could go wrong??? All countries get the governments they deserve... For Oz, "what worked in the 20th century should still work in the 21st, right???" The easiest people to exploit are those who are not born yet...
For some reason, we have people growing RICE in Australia. One of the driest countries on the planet growing one of the most moisture reliant foodstuffs on the planet. DERP! Try living in South Australia. We get the dregs after the eastern states have taken most of the supply. The backwaters are turning into swamps. The mouth of the river completely closes occasionally. It's not "climate change", it's living in an arid country. It's always been an arid country. Government corruption and industry greed are the problem
@@funkymunky7935 Climate change is exacerbating the problem. That's not in question. But yes, corruption and greed is the major problem preventing Australia addressing climate change in even the most rudimentary way.
Here in Australia rice and cotton do require significant amounts of water. What’s important to realise though is that cotton and rice use less water in the Murray-darling basin compared to fruits and nuts, pastures/cereal crops and grapevines.
Water, water, everywhere. LCRA is screwed in the long run, too, because of population growth- that was a perfectly timed tangent cam. All I can say is that the variable in the equation is how we adapt to prevent water wars. Happy New Year! 😄💜
What I always find interesting is that water restrictions are invariably first placed on residential water use, notwithstanding the mention of reduced water allocations to farmers in this video, when, for instance, here in Florida residential water use accounts for only 8% of total consumption while business use is ~22% and agriculture uses by far the lion's share at 70%. Hence, even if the average person use water more efficiently and reduces by, say, 1/2 you're still only talking about 4% of the total. This is not to say we shouldn't use the resource responsibly, but c'mon people put the focus where it will get a bigger bang. That's like calling for cutting a billion or so $ from a federal child food security subsidy to reduce the budget but _increase_ the military budget by 5%. Oh wait, that's already been done a number of times too... So here's an update edit (1/7/21) to answer a few who asked where I got my figures. Seems I could only submit one comment- there are probably limits in placed to reduce spamming, etc. My numbers simply came from the usgs website, plus a dedicated issue on water in Nat'l Geo some years ago, and some pie graphs which summarize various analyses which can be found at researchgate dot net. Basically, reputable sources that are easily found if desired. On a lighter note, we may have a whole lot more fresh water in the next few years floating around in the ocean in the form of island size icebergs when the Thwaites ice shelf collapses. There you go - all the world's fresh water problems solved in one stroke...oc, at that point we may have an even bigger problem, but what's a few hundred million people having to migrate from the world's coastal areas when we'll have all that fresh water, right?
@@omstout The problem is not that we need to eat but what we are eating. Cutting down on meat consumption is the best way to reduce your water footprint. On average eating the same amount of calories in a vegetarian dish compared to a meat based dish is about 85% more efficient in regards of water required to produce it. Livestock drinks a lot and eats a lot (which also requires water to grow).
@Bob I'm not sure if I understand your argument. Do you say that introducing wolves increases the amount of cattle? Cattle usually eats grasses and small plants in the wild which causes deforestation when there are too many of them. To control the population you need predators like wolves. The important thing here is a balance between grazing animals and predatory animals. However what I'm pointing at is large scale farms with thousands of cows and so on, those require massive amounts of resources in order to produce meat. That resource usage is highly ineffcient, it's like producing calories with a detour.
I graduated from college in 1982 and considered going on to law school. I didn't, but while I was thinking about it, people in the know were whispering to me, "Water rights," in the same tone that the guy said "Plastics" to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. We've known this was coming for a long time.
I am an environmental science student in Utah. Over the past year or so I have written papers on the water crisis in the American Southwest and the Colorado River Basin. Thank you for highlighting the importance for the River and all those who rely on it. Sometimes topics like this one can be a downer but only because it's so important. Keep up the good work!
Explain Hippos in the Thames 130 thousand years ago during the Eemian interglacial period. And even during the interglacial we live in today we have seen trees grow much closer to the poles and much higher up the mountain than today is possible. Don't they teach you this stuff in universities anymore ?
Thanks so much for doing work in this area. It's definitely not a downer, it is so important. The rest of America and the world still wants to live blissfully. Environmental problems are a real and emerging threat and no one wants to address them. The problem with most people is when they hear things like this, they brush it off and ignore the problem and continue on with their old way of life. Until foods run out of the shelves in supermarkets, or water stops flowing from their taps, they'll start to realize that it's a much bigger problem.
@@ducthman4737 yes, they definitely do still teach about the Eemian in universities and all professional climate scientists will be familiar with it. That warming event is associated with orbital forcing (variation in the tilt and orbit of the Earth) and difference in how much sun that reaches the Earth. Orbital forcing cannot explain the current warming.
I was actually at Lake Mead last week (the Pearce Ferry/South Cove area in northwest AZ). I took some photos and realized that I was in a spot that was underwater just 20 years ago. Yet the water level was still at least 70 feet below me. Having grown up in the Colorado mountains as a kid and spending a chunk of my life in Arizona, seeing the changes over the decades is startling when you compare then and now photos. The cities in AZ are actually quite good at conserving, recycling and recapturing water. Non farmers will not be impacted nearly as soon as the farmer and industrial concerns. One possible solution is to actually decommission and dismantle Glen Canyon Dam in order to consolidate the water of Mead and Powell into a single reservoir. That would reduce evaporation and seepage. Also it would restore the Glen Canyon, which conservationists still regret seeing drowned...although it too is in the process of reappearing. Maybe this gets discussed in 2026 as an option. Having two reservoirs at 30% capacity is useless to the entire region. I honestly don't know if there's a good path forward for this region. Unless the drought does end (which I suppose is entirely possible), climate change and population demands on the river will continue depleting it. Those of us who live in the region will be confronting this head on whether we like it or not.
Get rid of nearly half the system's storage capacity because of evaporation and seepage you reckon? You want to fix a water supply problem by removing 50% of the system's storage capacity? I suppose that if the dam was removed, all the problems that would be caused could be blamed on climate change. Brilliant.
@@rb032682 Drastically increase water storage capacity. Expand on a water storage system that we've taken for granted and denied significant investment for over 50 years. Some new dams and man made lakes are not the environmental hazards the greenies well tell you they are.
Scientists have known for a long time that those involved in the water compacts on the Colorado were entirely wrong back in the 1920's. From 1905 to 1920 there had been unusually high moisture that fed the Colorado and they used that data in their assessment. No good decisions have been made since then. Studies have shown that the Colorado has gone through numerous decadal mega droughts over the last 1000 years. Add to that all of the diverted water to sustain cities, farms, etc. in desert regions and voila a self made disaster.
Good point - populating and irrigating a desert based on optimistic historical data is bound to go wrong. Probably it has little to do with global climate change and more to do with local cycles. Yes Joe - I'm tired of your climate change shtick. Everything isn't climate change. Here's an example of climate change - cyclic and not human made though: ua-cam.com/video/LTKxqfvM1bA/v-deo.html
your mention of "decadal mega droughts" sounds like climate change denial to me. I live in Boulder County, and we've never had drought leading to grassfires in DECEMBER. I think we'll soon find ourselves in situations that will overshadow the long-term Colorado River problem.
Droughts have happened in this area in the past - the entire Pueblo culture collapsed in the 12th century due to a Mega drought that left the Colorado with 1/3 of its peak flow. A fundamental issue here is that the water in the river was divided up in a time where its flow was at its peak - guaranteeing that a water crisis would happen once everyone is sucking their share out and the next drought happens. I guess we are here now. Its going to get ugly!
Thanks for the invitation to add to the video. To add to the good news, the Ogalala aquifer feeding Arizona, west Texas and New Mexico is near collapsing and, due to decreased rainfall and increased pressure through use, there is literally no way for it to refill except for population collapse and several hundreds of years of rainfall for it to fill up again. Happy New Year everyone.
We are absolutely experiencing this where I live. I have climbed and hike in the Cascades for years, and how that landscape has changed is easy to see. Glaciers are vanishing, water quality in lakes and rivers is deteriorating, and wild fires are growing more frequent and intense. In 2020 my wife and I had to pack up our house and evacuate, while friends lost their homes. And these fires were not way out in there. They were within a few miles of a metro area with more than 2 million people, leading to that region having the worst air quality of any urban area on the planet. Off the coast the water is also an issue. With vast dead zones where the oxygen content in the water so low that the fish that cannot swim out of it, simply suffocate. "Living with it" is going to be possible for many people. However nobody should assume that learning to live with climate change is the same as it not effecting them. Learning to live with climate change is like learning to live with heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Sure you can live with it, but that is not the same as living free from it.
climate change is natural. It happens over tens of thousands of years or even longer time frames. Global warming isnt. Itll take less than 200 years. This is global warming. Human catastrophe in the making. Pretty sure if govs dont grow a brain and act literally yesterday, full force, Itll get exponentially bad. Its funny now, some droughts, snow where it shouldnt typically snow. So funny and novel yay. Yeah were pretty much dying out by 2050 and entirely extinct by 2100 for sure. Wars famine. Descent into basic animal traits is all thatll well amount to. All because of some assholes constantly pumping fossils to burn. What a joke.
@@Andytlp human caused climate change isn't natural. They shifted to calling it climate change because it's not just warming, it's changing the climate.
@@Andytlp I really wish scientists had called this problem "Man accelerated climate change", it would defused the argument the climate changes over time by itself. I cringe every time I hear the phrase "Climate change" or "Global warming", both are equally terrible terms.
I drove over the Colorado River at Blythe, CA yesterday. Was so amazed at how low the water was we stopped and took a picture. We live off grid during the winter and use about 500 gallons of water per month (250 per person). It doesn’t matter how little a household uses, if you can’t get water it your in major trouble.
I also passed over the river at Blythe last week and it's almost pitiful how little water from the river makes it to that point. In Yuma, it's nearly impossible to detect the river from the highway bridge.
How do you use so little? I’m in the Philippines where we bucket bathe and we use around 5 cubic meters (1300 gallons a month) albeit more people using water here
@@redpillsatori3020 we live in our RV full time off grid, in the dessert and need to haul water. When you have.to spend 2 / 3 hours a week, you tend to watchit closer.
Same prob in Australia. We tried to bring in an allocation system for the Murray-Darling system but after billions of dollars it pretty much failed. Just like fossil fuels, all the existing dependents -farmers - are so politically powerful they and their politicians can undermine any attempt to rationally downsize them, even though they are in effect, catastrophically and irrationally downsizing themselves and everything else associated with our biggest river system.
@@adammerza5745 - It only sets up a new tropical agriculture zone for inland Queensland and northern SA. Supposedly. It doesn't solve anything for temperate farming in the Murray-Darling. Not to mention Bradfield had no access to accurate water flow data and ignored evaporation, which alone would negate most of the benefit.
No worries because as soon as we get some snow in the mountains Colorado river will resume its raging South right on down the mountain just wait for some more snow hopefully we'll get some this Winter
Just drove across the basin from AZ to CA and back. In AZ I still see a ton of farming using high water usage methods - flooding a field vs using micro irrigation technology. I also live in AZ and see wells drying up left and right and folks having to truck in water - hence using river basin water. So its only going to exponentially increase. Time to get desalinization investment up and continue to improve that, then we can build new canals to feed existing infrastructure and fill the resoivoirs up.
Yep. Farmers who don't adapt will go out of business. Unless we get miraculous rains (which we don't, at least not long-term), those farmers will eventually be impacted by water cuts. At that point, if they're still using inefficient systems, they're toast.
Struggling farms will likely get bought up by foreign interests with the cash to drill the deepest wells. Then they can pump groundwater 24/7 and export the bounty to their homelands. Almond growers did this in California.
@@addanametocontinue Or they can't afford more advanced farming techniques. They need subsidies to transition to sustainable practices. Almost like a new deal of sorts, but green...
In the UK we inherit a lot of problems from the US which don't necessarily apply here. One of which is "thou shall not waste water". Even though we have loads of the stuff over here. So much, that 25% of all potable water is lost through leakages because it's cheaper to waste it than fix the networks.
As a Scot I was under the impression that the South of Englands water supply was under constant strain in the summer months, no? Obviously not a problem north of the border though.
On a global scale, it's impossible to waste water (unless you're shooting it into outer space or breaking it down into hydrogen and oxygen). It's a closed system. The problem is distribution. Some places dry up, with all the water that evaporated or flowed out ending up somewhere else. In the States, drier West, wetter Midwest. We don't have the wherewithal to change that, at least not yet. But the Earth still has all those hundreds of quintillion gallons of water all around us. How sweet would it be if we could figure out how to desalinate and move it on a grand scale.
@@Paul-zk2tn we have a tiny reserve. Which 99% of the time is fine as it rains so often. If rain ceased worldwide overnight, SE England wouldn't have long (except London that abstract from ground water). So every now and again, you'll have a hosepipe ban after a month or so of dry weather, then it rains and everything is fine again.
Wow, this is all stuff I covered in class in the 70s, great. Been wondering how long before someone noticed. The good news is that they are worried about the Pecan crop in California, and stopped building new golf courses in Vegas. No word yet about the two million people that moved here. I'm thinking we’ll handle this about as well as we handled COVID.
idk what you mean - all his episodes inspire me more than any new year's resolution to do better. Idk why people find these episodes pessimistic. They're optimistic to me!
You should see the Great Salt Lake these days. It is de-press-ing! The snowpack in the Wasatch Mountains (the western edge of the greater Rockies) that feed the lake are so drought-ridden, it's just awful (not to mention causing piss-poor ski seasons). Last summer the state instituted water limitations and many people let their lawns die. I was quite surprised by how well it did, if I'm being honest. People really stepped up and drastically cut back on water use.
people also don't seem to understand how drought resistant commercial grass seed has become. You might be shocked how well lawns come back after they "die".
@@squirlmy yeah! As long as uts watered once or twice a month, youncant really kill the grass. As opposed to every other day to twice a week, Which is typically what is required for green healthy looking lawns in Utah
one year of some rain and the cal. gov calls drought over...sad. back up to 3 lawn watering days a week. like above, every day should be a water crises day. i do see drought tolerant lawns here and there. wealthy neighborhoods-- the greenest grass you could image...also sad. boycott almonds...1900 gal. of h20 per pound!
Solid video Joe. As someone that grew up in northern Colorado, one note, it is pronounced Poo-der (Named after Cache la Poudre River, which is spanish for a stash of gun powder). One other item, you make a big point of this being man made from climate change (which I understand) but a huge part of this is mismanagement of the resource. The idea of building so much in the desert, complete with dozens of golf courses in each town is so non-sensical it would be comical if it weren't so tragic. It is the ultimate thing we do as humans, focus on today, with no thought about the impacts on tomorrow. If the draining of the resource (water) is not addressed nothing will stop the absolute lack of water in this region soon. Being that no one is willing to make tough calls or concede they should make due with less I don't see a happy ending to the story. What needs to be done is building large desalination plants on the west coast to keep things functioning...
Hard to believe that it was just in 1983 when there was so much water flowing into Lake Powell, that the spillways at Glen Canyon Dam were running at full blast and there was a fear of it overflowing.
I once took a bath in the Colorado river as my hippie parents drove us accross the country in an old school bus. For some reason Joe chose to leave that fun fact out of the video
Build more enclosed hydroponic farms. They can reuse the same water many times by capturing evaporation moisture, and the water is not wasted do to targeted watering techniques. The sun in the dessert areas can run solar power for them for their lighting, pumping, and filtering needs.
Okay, so solution oriented aspiration here. I saw a documentary on Netflix called the Biggest Little Farm. In that doc, the farmers being documented had a really interesting thing happen where in one rainstorm, all of their neighbours' farms flooded and were brutally eroded. Theirs sequestered like several tons of water into the water table, thanks to their use of ground cover crops and stuff like that. I wonder how much of a difference we can make simply by changing our farming practices. Farming takes up more land than anything else humans do, so maybe this can be a focal point for our water management regulations.
A big difference. Those farming methods are more labour intensive on the human body, but recreate natural cycles that not only reduce the number of inputs required for food production over the long haul, but also foster carbon sequestration, ecological health, soil health, biodiversity, increased nutrition, less or no reliance on fossil fuels, and also require less water overall due to the soils ability to capture, and hold water more efficiently. Really what we should see is a return to traditional methods with modern innovation, local and seasonal growing and eating. The problem with indoor and vertical farming is the energy inputs it requires, still viable, just more challenges and walls to climb. There are many on UA-cam with great explanations on how such systems can be implemented. Start here: ua-cam.com/video/faT9pXt4MQw/v-deo.html
I remember touring Hoover Dam back in 1999, when the water level was near maximum allowable capacity. It's hard to wrap your head around just how massive a structure it is until you see it in person. I just happened to search for images of the dam online a few years later and noticed that the water level was a lot lower, but at the time, I thought it was just a temporary fluctuation. It's hard to believe the water level has now fallen 120 feet since I was there. It's a massive amount of water. At maximum capacity, Lake Mead held 9.3 trillion gallons of water. If the average person drinks 1/2 gallon of water a day, it would take the entire population of the United States 155 years to drink that much water. O_o
I spent a couple months in Henderson, NV, during the summer of 1999 and would drive out to the dam every so often just because it is one of the most amazing structures ever built. I took it for granted that the lake was basically full at that time. I'm still stunned at what it has turned into.
I lived in Vegas from 1968 to 2000. I went to the dam when they opened the gates for the first time in a LONG while. I remember watching that giant rush of water go through, quite a sight. Looking at pictures since I moved have done nothing but sadden me.
@@christophergruenwald5054 Not everyone needs to drink 1-2 gallons a day, sometimes 1/2 gallon is a enough. Most people drink less than 1/2 a gallon. Water intake depends on several factors like physical activity, weather, temperature, how much you sweat, etc.
As an Egyptian this story hits close to home, Egypt as a country has relied on the Nile River for a millennia, but now we find ourselves in an unenviable situation where we we're forced to choose between peace or possible destruction, Egypt has been locked in a fierce dispute with Neighbors Sudan and Ethiopia over Nile water rights, Long story short Ethiopia is building a massive Dam called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the blue Nile (one of the Niles two main tributaries) and precisely the tributary that Supplies a majority (roughly 80%) of all the water in the Nile's watercourse. This Dam once completed will have one of the largest reservoirs on Earth (around 74 Billion cubic meters of water), Egypt opposes the dam due to the hastened filling process that would drastically cut its water supply that contributes roughly 90% of Egypt's fresh water needs, the Egyptian government has reached out to both the governments of Sudan and Ethiopia to negotiate over Egypt's water rights during the filling of the dam but thus far Ethiopia has remained rather intransigent over the course of the whole crisis, they deem the dam as the centerpiece of their developmental plans that seeks to transform the daily life of the average Ethiopian citizen, but in my eyes i find their stubbornness to be out of character and strange, their tone and demeanor has been fairly hostile and aggressive and this position seems to be echoed by the general populace as well who have made it their mission to belittle and trivialize Egypt's grievances, many Ethiopians are subscribed to the notion that Egypt is an enemy "colonizer state" that must be stopped, this stems from a general distaste towards Arabs in general going all the way back to ancient times The UN and the international community have been silent over the issue and are taking a rather luckluster and unproductive approach towards a dispute that could potentially boil over into a regionwide armed altercation.
Wow. I’m sorry to hear about this. That sounds terrifying in all aspects. I wish peace for you and your fellow countrymen and woman, and hopefully someone will find an easy solution to this. As an American when I hear the word Nile I think of Egypt. They’re so synonymous with each other. Ethiopia has had many problems with droughts over the years, so I can understand why they’d want to find a solution to that problem, but not by shorting another countries life line. Thankfully we have water treaties here in the states, but I can see them getting thrown out if climate change keeps melting our rivers :/
You have every right to ensure your supply of water does not get cut off, or held for ransom. If the negotiation table fails, I'm sure your government has other means of keeping the water flowing.
I wouldn't count on the UN for nothing. Build a mega desalination plant at the Mediterranean Sea and start pumping the water upstream through the Nile, thus rendering the Ethiopian dam useless, optionally, flooding their whole country. That is, iF you are a proud nation of the Pharaohs.
@dražen g As long as the dam doesn't actually go up and get used to starve Egypt of water, I agree with you. But once it does, and once it cuts Egypt off, the situation demands quick, effective action. I imagine some conventional bunker busters would do the trick, but I'm no expert. I'm sure Egypt's military already knows exactly what would work.
In 1983 I flew a small plane from Boulder, Colorado to Los Angles. After crossing the divide I followed the Colorado (IFR- I follow rivers) all the way to Arizona. Since you can’t fly down the Grand Canyon I had to go cross country to Las Vegas to refuel. What a wonderful trip. Hundreds of miles of rocky cliffs, eagle, with a blue line to follow. Flying down lake Powell was like a science fiction movie ( the crash site from Planet of the Apes). That river and the area it flows though are a national treasure. The river has been there millions of years, it will come back someday, but maybe no in our life time. Thank you Joe, this brought back so many memories.
Cities are not the problem. Cities in the western United States use only about five percent of the available water -- if that. Agriculture -- irrigating millions of acres in the *desert* -- uses 80 percent of the available water, in this region. The rest goes to all other uses -- including conservation and recreation.
As an Arizona environmentalist, I’ve been watching this problem and solution debate evolve for decades. Arizona needs to grow different crops, but we’re growing lettuce! - basically exporting our water. Hemp would be an excellent alternative - a fast-growing fiber plant - providing an alternative also to cutting the forests.
Came here to complain that Arizona was #2 producer of lettuce (and top five for many other fresh greens) I'm the nation. I love this state but we encourage some dumb shit out here.
Hemp requires a ton of irrigation, more than many other plants, as producers in Colorado have found. Needs 300,000 gallons to grow 1000 plants (per 12 months of growing) for good yield. Will grow without irrigation in places where there's plenty of rain, but yields won't be the same if not irrigated.
@@chandlered but, are you sure you're not including marijuana grown in warehouses under artificial lighting? Because the way those plants are grown is very different than hemp, and of course "yields" are quite different when talking about buds. I'm living here in Colorado, and I haven't heard complaints from "producers" about water use, although the electricity use of marijuana growers is a big point of discussion.
@@floridaarmyvet3613 that statement reminds me of the claim made by some serial killers: "everyone dies eventually". It's a really dumb argument. It's an appeal to fatalism to justify persisting with continued destructive behaviour.
@@QT5656 If you think the government will solve this problem, you are insane! They will just make it worse. The countries doing the damage like China, India, Pakistan, most Asian, Africa, most South American countries won't stop. Those countries are destroying the planet and now the ocean is polluted with masks from covid! The world is overpopulated also.
@@floridaarmyvet3613 at least you now admit that there is a problem. And no the government won't solve it if we just sit on our arse and say dumb stuff like "change is inevitable". You undestimate the current generation as well as USAs capacity for leadership.
The implications of this happening was a big part of Pablo Bacagalupi’s dystopian sci-fi novel, “The Water Knife.”States go to war, Balkanized factions fighting over water rights. Las Vegas is a dustbowl hellscape. Pretty good read, not for everybody
Hey Joe! This video was very interesting to me. I grew up in southern Nevada and now live in Arizona. These conversations have been happening my entire life. And it’s always been considered dire. While I was raised with strict water conservation tactics, nothing will be done about this until we are dangerously low. That’s how it’s always been. I’m doubtful that many even know how much water they waste.
Can't wait for my local politicians and business leaders to dehydrate me and my loved ones to death. All so that people and golf courses can have lush Bermuda lawns and shitty non-native palm trees
The name "Grand River" actually applied only to the portion of what is now called the Colorado from its headwaters to its confluence with the Green River (in the state of Utah and now in Canyonlands National Park). Grand Lake and the city of Grand Junction (at the confluence of the Grand / Colorado River and the Gunnison River), as well as the Grand Counties in both Colorado and Utah were named for the Grand River. I think the Grand Canyon was named before the Grand River. Prior to 1921, only the portion below the confluence with the Green was called the Colorado River.
I have heard that once upon a time the middle east was a verdant location on the globe, but look at it now. Is this where we are heading? Will anything we do short of ceasing to exit make any difference? Thus restoring the natural rhythm of the Earth. Will stopping the endless pollution of man solve the problem?
Joe, you had impeccable timing with the video, considering that just a few days ago a large portion of the Boulder, Colorado area went up in flames. Partially due to the fact that area has been in an extreme drought which made the fire far worse than what might be expected. It went right through the city, near where I live. Over 500 buildings have been destroyed with thousands of residents losing their homes right before the new year. This may not be a direct cause of the low river, however the environment is all connected to a certain degree and it is, at least, loosely related. The point being, this had a large personal impact as my house had a very real possibly of being charred. I was lucky, however the same cannot be said for many of the people near me. To the people reading my comment, my advice is to don't take it for granted.
How can anyone that has lived anywhere near the western mountains of North America for the last several years, experiencing wild fires every summer, still deny that climate change is real? Our only hope is massive, solar powered desalinization plants and the immediate ban of carbon emmisions or we won't have any food to eat real soon.
@@surferdude4487 Oh, I can. This has been this way for millennia. If wild fires have gotten worse it is because people keep putting out the fires that would normally cleanse the area. Mismanagement is the real problem not climate change.
The fire was Big Box to Big Box caused by faulty electric in an outbuilding and propagated by inadequate setback between houses for the known high winds every year back to the Anastazi Indians. It has NOTHING to do with 'Human-Caused Climate Change' (sic). The mountains of Colorado are filled with artifacts of pre-historic civilizations lost to periodic drought.
It is so incredible to me how by all accounts, rampant climate change is showing to cost us TRILLIONS in economic and collateral damage in the near future, and yet switching to clean and renewable energy is still "too expensive."
that's because politicians are insanely short sighted since they really only care about the next election, meaning they never really think more then 4 years ahead. Sure spending $100 today may save use $1000 over the course of the next 10 years but that doesnt mean anything when you need to cut spending this year so you can reelected. The only time politicians plan ahead its when their corporate masters tell them too, like the recent infrastructure bill which has had 2 presidents and every senator, congress person, and governor fighting over which companies get the most money. It doesnt help that supporting things like nuclear, our best bet to ween ourselves off fossil fuels, is politically unpopular and killing nuclear plants will earn you the votes of the people living near the plant even if the nuclear plant is harmless, has 1000 people living around it, but supplies clean power to 100,000 people.
Farming in the desert is insanity. There is so much fertile land east of the Mississippi that could be farmed but they can’t compete with designer farms that have unlimited water whenever they want it.
Wow. I learned as much from the comments as I did your video. Which I loved. Anyway, says a lot about how great you are by how great your followers are. Rock on!
Wow, does the average house really use 300 gallons a day? I'm mentally adding up showers, toilets, dishes, laundry, lawn watering, car washing, drinking and cleaning/handwashing. Maybe we do! And most of that has to go through a sewage treatment plant as well. Great video. I really need to become a patreon.
The Colorado has reached its delta a couple of times in the last two decades. When we released enough to reach the delta the entire area became green. The Salton Sea area of California is a prime example of what our failures to properly manage resources looks like. "The Colorado River no longer reaches the Gulf, and instead peters out of existence miles short of the sea." Source- National Geographic Aug 2020
@@babyUFO. Maybe it doesn't go completely dry, but so much water is removed from the river before reaching the delta that almost all the wetlands in that region have now dried up.
I have visited the Salton Sea and I thought it was cool...not realizing what a disaster it was. Now I see stuff on UA-cam about the Salton Sea dried up and a bunch of dead fish and palm trees. Is that the fate of the whole American Southwest....with the addition of human bones that show the evidence of cannibalism someday in the future to some archeologist.. human or otherwise. 😕
@@babyUFO. Depends what your definition of dry is. Very little if any water that starts in Colorado actually makes it to the gulf of California. The trickle that does come out is mainly treated sewage water from the towns and villages at the end of the road.
For a delta to exist you need high energy river floods to bring the sediments. The moment you build dams you condemn a delta to die. And then we say it is because of climate change we lose our beaches.
YES!! You are the first UA-camr I have seen who has finally said the thing that needs to be said: we need to shift the conversation more toward how we will ADAPT to climate change!!! Fact is, humanity can’t “stop” climate change. We can minimize our impact, yes. And we should. Some say we can reverse our past/current impact, though I am highly skeptical of that line of thought. We are wasting so much energy, time, money, and other resources on trying to “stop” climate change, which we simply cannot do. Nomenclature is important. We have the power to minimize our impact on the climate, but not to stop the ebb and flow of planetary geological and meteorological systems. So yes please PLEASE let’s talk more about how to adapt, because as we *do* adapt, we will by default also be doing things that automatically lessen our impact on the environment.
Who knows what kind of unforseen consequences "stopping" climate change would have if we could do it. The planet has been on the cooling and warming cycle for billions of years, like breathing. The effects of stopping it might be worse in the long run for humanity.
JOE, Glad to see you talking about this. It would be great if you would do a few more episodes on water; for example how over the last 50 years the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world's largest aquifers the runs from Texas to Wyoming supplies about 30% of America's agricultural lands is being quickly depleted, leaving some farms, especially on its western edge with dry wells. One the glacier melt ice in the aquifer is gone, those farms will return to grassland if we are lucky, and dessert if not. Or do one on the how Mexico city, the central valley of California, and Jakarta are sinking because of the depletion of groundwater. Another nice episode would be about cities like Chennai, India (population about 10 million) that have run out of water. If we don't allocate and use our resources sustainably, it will end our civilization. This is as important (and linked to) climate change, but most people are not aware of how seriously we will soon be in trouble if we don't fix this now.
I’ve been keeping an eye on this for a few years. My family and I live I southern Utah for years and I could see that the region was slowly drying up so we ended up moving away. It’s too bad too because we love the southwest.
Not happening. Over 2/3rds of the planet surface is covered by water. If potable water gets scarce enough, desalinization will suddenly make a lot more sense. Yes, water will become more expensive in that case, but nothing like a truly scarce resource.
@@joesterling4299 I think we can cut M C and his dad a little slack here, and not be so literal. He was absolutely on point and if we do some serious asteroid mining, it may still come to pass.
@@squirlmy If we do some serious asteroid mining, precious metals will become less scarce, and therefore less valuable. But even so, the quantities mined would be a rock in an ocean filled with 326 quintillion gallons of water. We don't have a water shortage. We have a processing and distribution shortage, due to our current technical limitations. If we advance enough to solve asteroid mining, we can solve desalination and distribution too.
Joe, sitting here in Canada here wwe have more fresh water then any other country on the planet, perhaps I am out of touch for this topic but I think that xeriscaping is exactly the right solution. Using less water. Ripping out the lawns is the key. Only let unirrigated grass grow. In Phoenix everyone has a pool. The pools have got to go. Too much evaporation going on in that stagnant water. The people who have moved there from water rich places need to adapt themselves to their environment, not the other way around. The people need to grow different plants and animals and play different games. No more golf, unless you like sand traps... There are many places like this around the world. The solutions are thousands of years old. But the people will need to adapt to their environment
Cujo, golf courses, lawns (a crop we can’t eat), cutting it, fertilizing it, car washing, strong detergents requiring massive rinsing. What did they do in the days of old. We got caught in the times of overuse of what we do most. People used to bathe once a week. TV tells us we “smell bad”. It doesn’t require 1,2,3, Long hot showers. A small basin will do it. Drive less, don’t speed, & a T&A clean up will do. Recycle at home any plastic cups, bags, any & everything. Walk wher u can. Never waste anything. Ever. God Bless Us All. Our planet is in trouble & it scares the hell out of me
The Columbia river has 10 times the flow of the Colorado river. Just build a canal and divert a fraction of its flow into the deserts and arid regions of California, Nevada, and Arizona, and this is all fixed. We fixed similar problems in New York 200 years ago, and all we had then was drunks, shovels, and whiskey. It is a solvable problem.
You're not seeing the big picture. So much of our modern society depends on the infrastructure we built on the assumption that the environment is largely stoic. That's why climate change is such a problem. Something like what's happening to the Colorado can easily happen to the Columbia. Its a bandaid over something that needs surgery. And its a fairly poor solution at that.
Humans ignoring life threatening problems....?! I am shocked...not... Good video as always and you are 100% right! Sadly, let us face it they ain't going to do anything about it
I ignore the fact that tornadoes can spawn where I live, and I have a greater chance of stopping those than I do of fixing climate change. Some things are beyond our control, and its pointless to obsess about them. I hope enough brilliant minds come together worldwide to fix the slow disaster, but I doubt it; and I know I don't have the right stuff to be one of them.
@@joesterling4299 As inviduals I do think we want to fix it. The problem is the organizations and the people who controle the organizations that can make a real difference, an impact are the ones who don't want to cause no profit, no actions taken. We all do our part the best we can with the exceptions out there of course!
Blows my mind how much Lake Powell has shrunk since the 80s. It was either Powell or Bullfrog Bay that had to literally move the entire marina once. The A in Nevada should be pronouned like the A in Glad. Easiest way to remember is that it rhymes with "Ya mad, huh?"
The marinas at Lake Mead near the Hoover Dam have been moved a lot. I believe at Lake Powell, they are down to one boat ramp that's still semi functional. At what used to the be northern end of Lake Powell, Hite marina is entirely abandoned now as the lake is gone and the river's current channel is hundreds of feet away from the concrete boat ramps.
Happy new year! So glad you’re covering this! I saw this on 60 minutes in late 2021 and it made me feel true panic that I haven’t felt since 2020. So many officials in so many states are like “no, state x, YOU have to YOUR usage more”.😣So many consequences 😕
I live In Utah. Why we grow lawns in a desert bewilders me. Ive almost ranted about this on Facebook like 3 times over the last few months. The timing of this video is wild, because I've already been thinking about this a lot and much because I have been playing this beaver city builder game where you have to make dams to survive drouights. It's given me plenty to ponder about how our exploding population and recent droughts are being adapted to.
I have seen several environmental shows concerning how the beaver can greatly influence the areas they live in, creating ponds, lakes, and marshes were animals can thrive and water can be conserved.
I live in Utah as well. When we recently re-did our landscaping we removed well over half the square footage of lawn space and replaced it with rocks and drought-resistant bushes, trees, etc. Then we stopped watering the lawn and let it go brown, haha. Whenever I see someone watering their yard at high noon in the middle of July I damn-near blow a gasket.
They river is diminished because too many people are taking from the system . It not due to increased heat , it is greed . It doesn't even flow to the ocean anymore Colorado River will die if we don't do something. In my opinion California should be investing in desalination plants big time .
I mean it barely snowed in colorado on new years. Ive never seen that happen so im not surprised. I am surprised no one is scared about whats happening to our earth
Some people have been raising the alarm for decades now... but yeah, the majority just ignore those warnings. 😟 Here in Florida, we went from having a real winter with sub-freezing temperatures in December and January in the 1960's and 70's to having great beach weather in those same months in the 2010's and 20's... but no one ever gives that a thought because "it's Florida, it's hot there." *sigh* 😑 I used to be more optimistic -- I mean, we're the same civilization that banded together behind the science and stopped the ozone hole.... but at this point, I'm pretty sure no one is gonna do squat until places like New York and Miami are literally underwater. And it's waaaay too late at that point.
Maybe Las Vegas shouldn't be there? Maybe we shouldn't be flood irrigating alfalfa in the desert. Maybe golf courses in Arizona and Utah are a stupid idea. Everybody is so uncomfortable saying what needs to be said. We know where the water is going. It is being misused. Climate change is a completely different conversation that we should be having but acknowledging the poor land management and short sighted profit seeking schemes that have destroyed ecosystems and violently displaced native groups across the country should be the main focus.
I grew up in Tucson, and so I feel comfortable saying that Arizona should largely be abandoned. As should Nevada, Utah, and Eastern California. These places are unfit for large populations.
@@scottharding4336 lmao wut? Phoenix is THE VALLEY OF THE SUN. A valley is a place encompassed by mountains. So the only point you brought up is moot. You didn't talk about the obvious which would be standard of living which is 3.9% higher in Phoenix but is offset by the average 5% increase of salaries for the same job. Everywhere I've been in Tuscan is a shit hole. There are plenty of places like that in Phoenix (ie: South Phoenix) but if you're talking about the metropolitan area you have to account for Scottsdale which is maintained much better than either of the two. I'm not advocating for Scottsdale but if you wanted to go somewhere nice in Tuscan it would be surrounded by poverty stricken areas. Whereas most of the PHX metro area gets a lot nicer the further north you go.
@@CTRL_X_X You can't really call the pathetic little foothills around Phoenix mountains. Snottsdale's existence is further proof that Phoenix is a miserable armpit. Whichever city is worse is kind of beside the point. Both cities use an unsustainable amount of water, and should be abandoned. Give all the land and water back to the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Pima Peoples.
Subscribing to you has been such a good decision for me! I’ve enjoyed this video very much - Huge like for all your efforts and energy spent into making this one! What a fine job ❤️
When I used to go the Las Vegas, I laughed at the concept of golf courses in the desert. They're still there, unfortunately. And they're still getting national coverage during the big golf championship tournaments. We will all know people are getting serious about water in that part of the world when those golf courses revert to desert.
Sounds very similar to the Murray-Darling Basin and associated river systems in Australia, which prior to 2021 reached record low levels due in large part to an extreme drought and higher than average evaporation from climate change (alongside a poorly implemented market based system of water entitlements). No doubt there are stacks of other similarly impacted river systems around the world.
@Bob The small temperature increase so far 1.5C, is not evenly distributed all over the globe. Areas that tend to be hotter and drier are more impacted than areas that are colder and wetter. Also a hot day may not be much hotter because of 1.5C but if the hotness continues as in a drought then the average temperature over time becomes a lot great than just that.
@@blakedblake6143, happy to share some research and sources. Greg has already summarised it to some extent, but I should provide some stuff from actual experts and government sources (I've broken the links with spaces next to "www" and "com" or "gov" so they can be posted to UA-cam - fix when pasting). My summary of the below research, (and I'm not a climatologist by any stretch) is that marginal increases in land surface temperature lead to a small increase in the existing evaporation (from water surfaces and soil) and transpiration (from vegetation). When applied over a long enough period, such as a drought of several years, this small effect compounds to increase the severity and length of said drought, as well as demands on water from agriculture and communities. Australia's land surface temperature is already 1.4 degrees C above pre-industrial levels on average according to the latest IPCC report (summary here: news com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/landmark-report-confirms-australia-is-14c-warmer-and-is-being-impacted-by-climate-change/news-story/4e0cd1b1e4bea194ebcf8a61aed67acd). Research papers: https ://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley com/doi/full/10.1029/2010WR010333 This one is from 2011, prior to the worst effects of the most recent drought experienced in this part of Australia. In the model used, evaporation and transpiration account for 5% of reduction in annual runoff, with the rest explained by changing rainfall levels and seasonality. (See Abstract and Discussion). www nature com/articles/s41598-021-95531-4#ref-CR25 This paper notes "total evaporation has increased by up to 2.5mm per decade since the 1970s" (jump to Conclusion, or see a good summary here www.uts.edu.au/news/health-science/mounting-impact-climate-change-murray-darling). Pages from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (federal government agency in charge of water management, criticised by some for their approach to water entitlements. Research was undertaken by other federal agencies like CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology): www mdba gov.au/basin-plan-roll-out/climate-change www mdba gov.au/water-management/mdba-river-operations/why-water-losses-happen Particularly check out the section titled "What causes water losses" By no means an exhaustive list, so feel free to do a quick google of your own! Happy reading :)
for all those people that think lack of water isn't important i invite you to not drink for 24 hours then tell me its not important great vid keep it up and a happy new year (well 10 seconds at least :)
I live in Colorado and our droughts are getting worse each year and wild fires getting worse and no one seems to care even though our mountains provide fresh water for the whole SW of this country.
Manage your resources properly. Forest service will charge you for tree theft if you remove fuel. Forest service service then in turn charges you taxes for fire surpression. Exactly what outcome do people expect?!
Because all that the rest of us see out of Colorado is marxist commie b.s. , and fair or not, it makes it where we don't give a shit about the place. Same with where you send your water, CA. that place has become so anti-American that if the water were cut off on purpose tomorrow, we would find it amusing. Colorado slowly but surely got woke. Let it go broke.
Living in a place that used to have 170+ days of rain per year, where summer mostly boiled down to 2-3 weeks of +25°C without any major rain in July & August and the entire rest of the year was a kind of grayish 5-15°C autumnwinterspring with some occasional sunshine, the thought of saving water has always been kinda odd here. 2018 and 2019, and to some degree 2020, however saw some weather that I personally would classify as the greatest summers of my entire life, but most people would call the worst drought Germany has seen in a really, really long time. For the first time that I can remember, it was illegal to water your lawn in some areas. And the forests died. Vast areas of them. Though... my job took me all across the country for the last few years, and the trees that died where almost exclusively those that had no business growing there in the first place: European Spruce. Which had been planted everywhere for wood because they grew quickly, much quicker than beech, oak or maple. Those however, especially the older ones, can apparently cope a lot better with drought, with heat, and with storms. But hey, when did humans ever ruin an ecosystem by introducing a species that did not belong there? Current aside, I could have waded through the biggest river in our country for some weeks. The major water resservoires are still not back to the level where they were before. In a country where water shortage was basically unheard of, where we usually use about 1/6 of the water available in any way or form.
Argal it's just going to get worse & worse as long as Europe keeps following the lies we have blindly followed. Want to see what is coming to Germany go look at Romania & the southern European states as their arable lands are desertifying. I don't know how old you are but we have about 50 years of arable crops left before all our fields of soil turn to dust. I left this answer for Ben Sullins above perhaps it will help you understand that their is a route out of this for the EU but it will mean we Greens may have to recognise that we have tricked & that a return to a more traditional German diet is needed The most effective way of increasing water supply is to work with nature rather than against it as we have for the last 10,000 years. There are lots of great videos about how to return desert lands to rich verdant fields, but it does mean changing what we grow & thus what we eat. Go look at Regenerative Agriculture & at Mob Grazing via the Savory Institute. TLDR stop growing almost all Seeds, Beans, Pulses, & stop Stockade farming ruminants on the resulting food waste. Switch to Mob grazing ruminants using Robot based headers. Switch to a primary grass fed meat & animal product diet supplemented with seashore derived vegetables grown with no-till cover crops. Ideally transit to heavily instrumented food forests using Musk style Android Robots where food is sensor tracked & harvested when ripe & to order/availability i.e. cap off the agricultural solutions which we have been using to create deserts such as the Sahara for 10,000 years & move to a post agricultural revolution using electrically driven robots instead of humans.
@@squirlmy well you can try & sell it to the public: a. The Deep Green Echo-Fascist strategy. Billions of humans will starve to death. But feel good about yourself as a million or so ruminants are never born, never get a chance at a few years of life and global warming very slowly gets better as you re-wild everything with trees b. The Don't Look (it) Up strategy (see film). Carry on as today. Don't starve, feel good about yourself as you live in your drug fueled Sugar rich high as carry on as now, stop a million ruminants being born and watch as your fields across Europe turn to deserts with death of billions of life in the soil and the increasing speed of global warming & as you ignore the millions of animals & birds die. c. Eat as we did 150 years ago Strategy. More millions of Ruminants will die after living an increasing longer life in a symbiotic relationship with grass, billions of more life in the soil, rapid stop & reversal of climate change as carbon & water rapidly accumulates in the soil. We need millions of animals to feed us but also we need to rapidly increase stocking levels to eat all the grass available, hence giving ruminants longer life span, before we predate on them, just as they would be in the wild. Multi-millions of animals get to be born & live that would not have because we stop poisoning the soils. Large Christian Food & Biotech Companies like Coke, Bayer etc might go out of business. Rapid drop in diabetes, autoimmune disorders, cancer & heart disease etc. I want option C but your reaction suggests you want either option A also known as the Children of Man strategy. I want to starve & watch billions of others stave to death as society breaks down in constant war & dictatorships. Or option B aka The Soylent Green strategy. I commit sucide in my old age as my children starve or live on the sort of gruel we can manufacturer inside buildings because all the land has turned to desert Whist the super rich live on what increasing little the land can produce.
The allocation of water to farms for crops that require massive irrigation allocations are the major cause not CC. Nothing residential consumers can do will have any impact what so ever. A single Pistachio plantation uses more water in a month than all the houses in NV in a year.
No No No..... the obvious problem is the amount of people using the water. With birth rates at their current levels in the U.S., as long as 40 million people don't just force their way into the areas in question, the water would be fine.
The big agrabusiness wants you to think its YOUR FAULT for not conserving water. Just like they want us to sort out garbage instead of creating less of it (single use plastic) they sell to us that makes more profits for them.
They are trying yet again to get the 'middle' class to take a dive for a completely imagined problem - meanwhile almost all major american companies are reporting "Record profit growth" during these years that average income, employment, and basic cost of living have all gone to crap. Ask yourself, where are the resources going people!?
I know it would be a huge investment, but it seems like it could be possible to build solar power plants (even molten salt energy storage types), tidal power off L.A. and/or San Francisco, even (if we have to) nuclear plants. Then use the electrical power to desalinate seawater. Plus, if there's surplus power (and there ought to be), retire fossil fuel power plants and help reduce global warming. Maybe it's impractical, but it's not impossible, to get water from places that aren't the Colorado River.
Impractical = not worth trying Also California will not have too much a problem with the Colorado river drying up because it has its own aqueduct system and other water sources. However, for Utah, Arizona, Colorado, its pretty much a death sentence.
There’s a proposal to pump floodwaters from the northern Mississippi watershed over to reservoirs in the Colorado watershed. That ought to be much more energy-efficient per gallon of water than desal.
One interesting result of desalinating sea water is an excess of salt and where to dump it. ALTHOUGH scientists are designing better batteries that use salt to increase efficiency and durability of EVs. (There are problems to solve with this tech.)
You should do one on the Great Salt Lake and how it is disappearing. That could completely devastate huge areas of the west and spread cancer to millions.
I have a solution: get rid of the aquaduct stealing water for Los Angeles, which is actually nowhere near the Colorado River, and allows them to steal more than 1.2 million acre-feet of water each year.
It's not "theft" if they pay for it, according to legal agreements. Moreover, the cities are *not* the problem. The hundreds of millions of acres of irrigated farmland in the deserts, are the problem
@@thomashiggins9320 Oh, you mean the farmland next to the Colorado River with NO OTHER ACCESS TO WATER? Did California tap into the Salton Sea, Diamond Valley Lake, Lake Eisnore, Lake Matthews? They have the Santa Clara river, and the Santa Ana river. No, they go to the complete other side of the state to take water from a river that borders other states who have no other access to water. Face it, that city has had shit planning for the last 30-40 years. Not just water. it's beyond the scope of this discussion to debate the rolling blackouts, the shit and needles all over the sidewalks, or the rampant homelessness.
Good program, Joe, I wish more people would take climate change seriously. I will recommend your program to others--not that they'll watch it mind you, in my experience I find that most people are tired of it (as you said) ALWAYS being about climate change. Too bad, it's gonna get worse. We have a very small yard so we could only put in two water tanks to collect the rain, 500 and 300 gallon poly tanks. We can collect almost all the rain that falls on our roof with a tank on each side of the house. We took out all our grass and I built raised beds separated by narrow walkways all over the yard. We use the collected rain to water our gardens where we raise vegetables and medicinal herbs (my spouse is an herbalist) and 3 tiny fruit trees. Another thing that many people don't know to do is grow plants that support the local bird and insect populations, especially we need early and late season plants that will feed pollinators like bees and bumble bees. Bumble bees are functionally extinct in Oregon, Idaho, portions of Montana, and are disappearing in many more places. It's good to leave out bowls of water for all the critters too, especially in the winter it is hard for birds to find water if it's cold, so heated dishes are recommended. Another irritating subject is the painful truth that the meat-based diet is an environmental disaster. Meat production is the most water intensive and wasteful industry in the country. Going vegan is the most useful action that any of us can take on an individual basis.
You're straight up lying about it being the most water intensive and wasteful industry. Have you seen how leather and denim are produced? How metals are mined? How a lot of power is generated? How paint is made? Alkali and chlorine production? Paperboard mills? Wineries? Pesticide manufacturing? Synthetic dyes and pigment manufacturing? Adhesives manufacturing? Industrial gas manufacturing? Distilleries? I'd rather eat meat and give up leather and denim, convert to liquid salt power generation and mine metals in a more ecologically friendly way. Steak, bacon and mincemeat are some of the only things I look forward to in my deeply depressing life. www.statista.com/statistics/1175813/water-intensive-industrial-sectors-united-states/ How about you do some basic research and cite some sources next time, because it didn't take me more than 15 seconds to find a source from people who are a genuinely qualified authority on the data, copy that link and paste it here. It's the bare minimum standard.
@@jamielonsdale3018 I tried to access the website that you listed in your post but they wanted a $39 fee which I don't have. I won't call you a liar because that's not polite. On the other hand, I have had a career in agribusiness in the US and I actually know a little about it since I have worked with cattle, hogs, chickens, and even a few sheep and horses. While I cannot speak to your website I will note that most of the sites that address this issue are quite constrained in what they count against the meat industry for water usage. First and foremost, the greatest amount of water which is usually not even counted are the billions of gallons used to raise all the feed for livestock. You need to realize that a vast percentage of the corn, soybeans, and other grains that are actually human edible are fed to livestock in a process that is a protein production system in reverse in that it takes around 100 pounds of grains to produce 1 pound of a finished meat product. Those grains could feed a huge number of people if they actually ate the grain themselves instead of filtering it through livestock. Another use of water that is rarely added in is the amount that is consumed by the cattle themselves, but even if you add that in it is still fairly modest when compared to the water polluted by the billions of tons of untreated manure that the meat industry dumps into the water ways of the US. The pollution of our water by manure, chemicals fed to livestock (sub-clinical doses of antibiotics used to increase growth in confinement operations), and fertilizer run-off causing eutrophication in rivers, lakes, bays, and in the oceans should also be counted against the meat industry. So too should all the water that is used to clean all the processing facilities where the animals are killed, butchered, processed, hung for cooling, chopped and packaged. All the water used to produce the electricity to run all the refrigeration in all those plants and facilities should also be added to the account. Then of course we have all the refrigerated warehouses, distribution centers, grocery stores, and home refrigerators and freezers too. Before we move on we need to add in all the water used to raise pasture for the somewhat-more free roaming cattle and we also need to address all the water polluted by damage to riparian zones all across the western US, the streams that no longer support the local fish populations due to cows having eaten the stream side vegetation thus rendering the water too warm for the native fish. Free range cattle are a disaster to the water resources on the land where they are grazed. I know about this from a personal perspective because a piece of land I owned was practically destroyed by my neighbors cattle since the whole are was zoned "open range" which meant that cows had the right-of-way and one had to fence them OUT while the owner had no responsibility for any damage they did. The spring and the creek I had were so polluted with manure and the riparian zones so denuded of vegetation that once I got it fenced it took about a decade for me to restore it. I am willing to bet your source did not include many of the things that I have added, that is the difference between living with it instead of using 15 seconds to look up something on the internet which is neither complete nor accurate. I think that the real "meat" of your position is stated most clearly in your second paragraph. You are terrified that you will be deprived of something you love to eat, something that is the only thing you can look forward to in your depressing life. Your response to me had more vitriol than was called for so I could see right away that I had hit a nerve. Sorry about that, it wasn't my intent to hit you where it hurts. Rather, I am concerned about the water shortages that are appearing all over the world due to the changing climate, the pollution of our aquifers, rivers, and the oceans. We have to begin to rein in our activities (like fracking) that are putting our water supplies in danger. Look at the Southwest of the US, millions of acres of farm land is being fallowed and more will be in the coming years due to the changing climate which is shifting rainfall patterns all over the planet. I often try to give sources when I write even though I know that most people won't look at them. Carol Adams wrote an interesting book called THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF MEAT in which she looked at how meat is perceived in American culture traditionally and currently. She looks at the long history of eating meat being synonymous or at least associated with masculinity. "Real men eat meat" as the saying goes. A look at what cattle have done in the Western US is presented in SACRED COWS At the Public Trough by Denzel and Nancy Ferguson. In his book DIET FOR A NEW AMERICA John Robbins talks at length about the environmental damage that the meat-based diet does.
It's always so crazy to me how different local climates can be, I'm in Pennsylvania and we have too much water. The last decade has had so much flooding. And since we have our water collect in aquafers we don't count on snow during winter. Basically every creek and stream just starts randomly out of a hill no snow melt needed (nor are our mountains tall enough to keep it frozen long term)
We have been having somewhat similar problems in Australia with the Murray Darling river-system. It is an incredibly important system going through the countries best arable land and most populated regions. Up until recently it was suffering from severe long term drought and mismanagement. A La Nina phase has pulled it back from the brink a tad though, but all that has done is to kick the can down the road a bit and put the issues on the back burner. It is worth knowing that the management of the river system has been bought out one way or another by cotton growing interests in what is mostly the head of the system. Cotton, in the driest continent on Earth. We aren't known for being overly smart in Australia....
@@johnestes31 1.9% of Australia's water entitlements is owned by China. 1.9% is owned by the US. 1.1% is owned by the UK. And 5.5% is owned by a number of other countries. 89.6% is owned by Australia. I find it interesting that Skynews and other right-leaning news corporations only focus on China's ownership of these water entitlements. It is almost as if they are pushing an agenda... nah, couldn't be. The corporate news would never be dishonest.
@@thechloromancer3310 I don't watch the news & I don't make assumptions. My point was why sell any water (China's whatever % in the specific location mentioned) when every drop counts? I'm not judging - which is why I said it's either financial advice or a call for an uprising. And you're right about the news - on the same team as the left & right. Edit: Just to be clear I'm saying all 3 are on the same team & the propaganda machine media is why people think choosing a side matters.
@@johnestes31 I agree with you that selling water to foreign entities makes no sense when water shortages are a real concern. My issue was with singling out China, especially in the context of a geopolitical cold war being whipped up by the US. I feel that Australia's leadership has erred greatly by allowing itself to become a pawn for the US in this ideological/geopolitical battle. Australia has enough resources and leverage to stand up for its own interests and vision, rather than allow itself to be subservient to either China or the US. Hopefully the next Australian administration will recognize this and return to a policy of doing what is best for Australia - and that may include better management of Australian resources to serve the people of Australia first and foremost.
Switching away from an implied-scarcity economic model based on endless debt, would be a great start. Maybe go watch the Zeitgeist Movement films and realize how old the solution has been out there and buried by slander. Humanity without Money. It was the answer then, still is now.
In the words of Sam Kinison, “Of course there is no water… You live in the EFFING DESERT, AGGGGHHHHH. I got an idea why don’t you move where the water is!”
One of my best friends rated the grand canyon and cataract canyon this summer. There is rapids in both coming back thar haven't been seen since the dams were built. On the one hand, it's kinda neat. On the other it is absolutely devastating, we have faced the worst fire season colorado has ever had. The Boulder fire just more than doubled the record for most homes burnt in a single fire. Our local reservoir is the lowest it's been since it was filled, out of the last 5 years 4 of them have also hit that mark....
Hey Joe can you talk about the shipping containers shortage, it's really interesting imo and i just think I'd make an interesting video. also! love your videos, honestly. I've binged watched all of them and re-watch some multiple times lol. it really shows how much effort is out into the videos thankyou
@@BREEDIN420 she just thought it would be an interesting video idea, who knows, maybe he would take your point of view. Don’t yell at someone just because they brought up a very interesting idea for a potential video he could make.
@@BREEDIN420 It’s not that hearing the truth is the issue, it’s that you’re griping for no reason other than to gripe. If you have a problem, shut up and go fix it!
Massive increase in hydroponic farming and filling up the salton sea area to the brim would help, altough the latter would demand some sacrifices because some cities would be have to be removed completely and so would some of the farming area, then again, if it would be sort of extension of the sea, many other opportunities would rise for the people.
@@cherrydragon3120 There's plenty of water, as long as the efficiency of it's usage is maximized, like with hydroponics, there's also other techniques to save water. If The Salton sea area would be flooded, it would also raise the air moisture, which then again would make the climate of the wider area less dry and thus less needy of water.
They took all the trees, and put em in a tree museum And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them No, no, no Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot Oh, bop, bop, bop Oh, bop, bop, bop
Yes, I saw this drop when it was already well on it’s way in 2013, just in May - so almost nine years ago! Why didn’t they do something then? This is like closing the barn door two months after the horse ran off.
I did a report on this in 1998 and it's amazing how nothing gets better.
Great to know that people don't learn! Ok, they do learn. Just very, very slowly.
Yup
I was a little disappointed to not hear one of the worst unnecessary catalysts...golf courses.
@@NimbleBard48 they learn the wrong things. Everybody has a Facebook and UA-cam PHD
Human societies only ever respond to crisis when they are at hand or imminent.
Unfortunately it's just how we're wired.
Another factor that has led to the river drying up that isn't mentioned here are golf courses. Golf courses in Nevada and Arizona use the river water
Having a golf course in a green lush state is one thing, but having one in a desert state using the water of your state's lifeline...is something else
Humans are extremely stupid.
Utah is also an enormous culprit with this. Like, stupidly so.
@@boiseguyjoe Amurricans*
Sure-- do that- but also stop giving the water away at far below market prices to large corporations.
@@boiseguyjoe Americans in particular. Climate change. blah blah blah
Make it illegal for HOA's to mandate lawns. Actually, just make HOA's illegal, won't solve the water problem but it will make us all happier.
Yes!
HOAs- A little taste of Fascism in America, before it was cool.
*Cough* A lot like most Unions, which steal away your rights and what you can do both on the job and as a person, some even dictating how you can vote.
How else will HOAs make money? Sorry spend money.
HOAs = Paying your neighbors to limit what you can do with your own property. Because F R E E D O M !
@@asitallfallsdown5914 They're supposed to be for people who want to live with a set of property rules to enforce their neatly ordered ideals. The problem is that HOA's have proliferated too much. They shouldn't be allowed to swamp the market, so that house buyers always have a choice whether they want to be in an HOA or not. Personally, I don't like them, but I have no problem with some people choosing them, as long as the choice is informed and voluntary.
As someone who lives in the Rocky Mountain West (Wyoming), I don’t think that most Americans really understand how dangerous water levels of rivers have been. While it is a major water source, the Colorado River isn’t the only river that has been negatively impacted by climate change. The North Platte is seeing an every decreasing water level year after year. This is having a direct impact on the crops that are produced in Nebraska as farmers are seeing less water coming down the Platte from Wyoming. This has over the years cause issues between the State because of contracts and agreements that were signed between Wyoming and Nebraska. The mountains, which just 10 years ago had full, deep, snow covered peaks year round, are now far too often lacking that snow. That lack of snow at high elevations means that, at the end of the day, there is less water in the rivers. This is a major problem that is a reflection of the negative impact of global warming.
We have enough water we just need to be more efficient with it. Take a page from Las Vegas which is insanely efficient for our cities and Isreal for our farming practices.
Crazy that these new FABs and other huge manufacturing plants coming in places where water is scarce... They require a HUGE amount of fresh water to operate. Why are people building them in the drier areas is beyond me (I know why tax incentives and they have politicians who will bend over backwards because of money).
Since people are so against nuclear we are going to see water bills go up sharply as we are going to have to start building more desaltion plants for some cities.
Why we let so much water go into the oceon is beyond me too. Recycle it!
What worries me too is the massive aquafers. Either they are drying up or being polluted. Anyway water shortages are going to be one of the biggest issues going forward.
Still don't comprehend how we can see more rain on average but less water to hold. Also why does it matter if the water comes from a snow pack or from a deluge from up in the mountains? Either way it's flowing in the same direction is it not?
Just a laymen do not mind me.
Larry, my heart aches over all of this. It scares me. I don’t know how to fix it. I wish I could. It’s so overwhelming. My heart aches for all of us.
People chasing their ALMIGHTY DAM $. Makes me sick. Is this the “end times”? If I had the power to fix the h2o problem etc…I would.
Diana, they build them without concern for water dependent humans. They only want $$$. $$$$ will do NO GOOD without water to keep us alive.
Hey Joe, you might want to research the region of Mendoza, in Argentina, just for fun. It's in a iteral desert, but because of water management they were able to become the biggest wine producer in the country, while also thriving in agriculture*. The two main things they do are: 1. recovering water from melting ice and snow from the Andes and 2. treat every day as a water shortage day, even when there's rain. Which means, even if you don't have a water shortage, the city and the farms are only allowed a limited water suppy, and the surplus of rainy days is stored to be used in the dry seasons. It's super interesting, and it reay shows how proper management can make a huge difference on limited resources.
*Edit: I originally claimed Mendoza was the biggest food producer in the country, but I was corrected on the replies below. Still impressive, though.
Biggest FOOD producer?
I don't know if you know about the energy producing towers that just use kinetic potential energy using gravity that Hoover dam could be used to simply lift a bunch of of those weights up into the air and then slowly let them down generating even more power if there was hundreds of towers around that damn it could supply power all the way as far as the West Coast itself and the Midwest large parts
@@adb012 they said “biggest in their COUNTRY”
I've spent some time in the Mendosa region. I was impressed by the matter of fact attitude towards water conservation. Here in the US capitalism is king, and the powers that be will destroy almost anything that stands in the way of profit. Including the earth itself.
@@adb012 according to what the locals told me when I was there. To be honest, I didn't double check. :)
One creative idea I saw recently was to cover the canals with solar panels. It generates electricity, reduces evaporation, and improves panel efficiency due to the water keeping them cool. Maybe then Phoenix can continue to build out lego housing communities out in the middle of no where to squeak out more profits.
Lack of source water is probably a bigger issue. The lack of snow is gonna be killer.
Another important thing is how to improve urbanization in cities. Less dependent on the private car and use more public transport and bicycles.
Solar fricken roadways!!
That's SUPER EXPENSIVE 😕
@@Wasthere73 Lets just build a big ole cloud above the mountain that feeds the river. A big concrete cloud with a bunch of solar panels on it. Maybe air conditioning that can pump cold air out the bottom, and use the top like a heat sink.
I’ve worked on power plants, petroleum plants, flood control systems, water and wastewater treatment plants and it amazes me how little my fellow citizens understand the importance of these facilities. As my buddy, an electric company lineman says, “We are overpaid and invisible until they flip that switch and nothing happens.”
I'm just curious, If the total amount of water on earth does not decrease then where does all the water go?
The ocean will become less salty is one way.
@@fpvphilosophy2576 , precipitation in areas that don't feed the river, ultimately leading to sea-level increase ?
I’m a lineman too, its disgusting the amount of people that think electricity and utilities are just magic, and when they lose them during a power outage they get mean and nasty and just say “why can’t you just put our lights back on!” Even though its a very long and hard process to restore power! People are so pampered and clueless to how the world works nowadays, they are so entitled and lazy, they wont know what hit them until they lose it all, people need to wake up and appreciate how good they have it!
@@jaredchampagne2752 same with IT workers.. computers and network infrastructure is just SUPPOSED to work
AZ boy here. I love AZ and glad you were highlighting this. It's been something that we're not ignorant of (but many people are unaware of these problems). Thanks again for talking about this! One note: Gila (river and Native American tribes) is pronounced "Hee-lah" not Gill-ah. :)
haha yeah, I cringed when he said Geela River, instead of Heela River. I've hiked and camped along the river and found petroglyphs above the river.
I've lived in the vegas metro area ever since i was an infant and I worked on the hoover dam for over a year and let me tell you, standing over the dam, looking into the lake, and seeing that bathline is always disheartening
Nothing like staring into the spillways that have been perpetually empty for decades
The first summer that water service to the city is disrupted (some time in the next 20 years) the city will die. Waiting for the water truck ain't no way to live.
@@JOlivier2011 not only that, but a massive chunk of the power vegas receives is hydro electric from the dam, so no water and limited power. If this isn't fixed it'll result in chaos in vegas
who wouldve thunk, sin city getting judged
I live in Arizona and have watched the water level at Mead change dramatically over my lifetime. Thank you for this video to spotlight the challenges the future holds for us.
Got a minute to chat about Science? Cause i really wanna.
@Miles Doyle Dafuq?
@Miles Doyle "Shake and Bake" Ricky Bobby
@Miles Doyle That was pretty good ! How the heck did you beat the algorithm ?
As a hated and despised Catholic , I challenge you to look into Eucharistic miracles . Your going to find half bread bound to human heart muscle that has only one strand of DNA and never decomposes . You like spiritual phenomena ? Try that.
Angkor Wat was one of the most amazing cities ever built. During a period of prolonged drought, drastic measures were taken to dismantle the complex series of canals and water management structures that were as much of a marvel as the city itself. And then the drought ended, the city flooded and it became impossible to live there.
well that sucks
@@jackxiao9702 yeah I was waiting for the good ending
Yep. Reading history is like wandering through a graveyard for civilizations, most of whom were at least partially destroyed by climate change. The civilizations along the Pacific coast of North and South America had it worst. I think it was the Moche that were hit by 35 years of severe drought followed by 35 years of severe flooding. But they were far from the only civilization there to end up being nature's bitch.
I love siem reap!
@@thechloromancer3310 that damn capita... Wait!
I live in Las Vegas. We have a $36 water bill. We changed all the plants to ones that are native to Australia such as Eucalyptus trees. we have zero water going to our plants.
I took away from this that maybe, just maybe farming in a desert and having to water it might have not been a great idea. Meanwhile a few miles from my home, prime cropland (that didn't need to be watered) is being covered with concrete and 14,000 homes. Yeah Buddy, we be smart!
Lmao facts
And it isn't even modern farming methods. They could be using 10 times less easily and do much more recycling of water. The Netherlands produce almost as much agriculture foods as the US maybe more and we might fit inside new York as a country. We now how to do proper water management
I grew up in Vegas and I can confirm… not the best idea. But-the reason we do it is because of the nearly nonexistent pests and consistent climate. Root rot isn’t a concern in the desert, unlike where i live now in Florida. Crop disease is also less abundant in the desert. So i understand why they started…. But now it’s time to think of a different method for farming in the desert. Like, closed hydroponic systems inside a greenhouse, for instance.
@MINI DIVA not a single thing in this comment makes any sense. It’s as if you vomited in a plastic bag and told someone to type out what they saw
@@MsPoliteRants The absence of bad things does not override the lack of good things. There are no pests on the moon either, but that doesn't make it a good place for commercial farmland.
As someone who has boated on lake Mead and the river for almost 50 years now and has seen the drastic changes with my own eyes, I feel most likely the lake and river may be doomed unfortunately.
Same here :/
Not 50 years but .. about 25 years
You watch... when it gets extremely low, environmentalists will start calling for restoring the natural river flows...
@@monkeybarmonkeyman "environmentalists" are calling for that now. Some others are brainwashed by conservative media to thinking otherwise, but guess what, "environmentalists" don't have money, therefore little political power. If Lake Mead lives or dies, it's because big economic interests willed it so. Coal power plants still stand to benefit from the end of water power generation there. Not environmentalists.
If unlucky, you'll still be alive when the lake is gone.
Agreed. I grew up in Vegas. Lived there from 1968 to 2000. I remember when they opened the gates in 1999. That was an amazing sight. Since then I've just watched it through pictures being depleted every year. So sad.
The Murray-Darling River system in Australia is going through a very similar situation. We've had mass fish deaths, water licences up stream for cotton have reduced flow in crop producing regions down river causing crop failures, and we've got political corruption involved with money being paid for water that doesn't exist. A lot of the problems are due to climate change with droughts, changing rainfall patterns and so on.
And for the love of God, why is a dry country like Australia farming irrigation intense cotton...
Like the Colorado River, the Murray darling is Australia's food bowl. If it dies, our already arid country is gonna have a bad time.
And, the Carmichael Mine in Qld will ship "clean coal" because it can wash it clean with huge volumes of 10,000 year old aquifer water sucked out of the ground... Scotty-from-marketing loves coal, and the few votes his COALition parties gain from allowing foreign companies to "invest in Australia's future"... They'll take out of the ground in a few decades what nature took a few millennia to put there... What could go wrong???
All countries get the governments they deserve... For Oz, "what worked in the 20th century should still work in the 21st, right???"
The easiest people to exploit are those who are not born yet...
@@rustycherkas8229 Well said. We need net zero Morrison by mid-2022.
For some reason, we have people growing RICE in Australia. One of the driest countries on the planet growing one of the most moisture reliant foodstuffs on the planet. DERP!
Try living in South Australia. We get the dregs after the eastern states have taken most of the supply. The backwaters are turning into swamps. The mouth of the river completely closes occasionally.
It's not "climate change", it's living in an arid country. It's always been an arid country. Government corruption and industry greed are the problem
@@funkymunky7935 Climate change is exacerbating the problem. That's not in question. But yes, corruption and greed is the major problem preventing Australia addressing climate change in even the most rudimentary way.
Here in Australia rice and cotton do require significant amounts of water. What’s important to realise though is that cotton and rice use less water in the Murray-darling basin compared to fruits and nuts, pastures/cereal crops and grapevines.
Water, water, everywhere.
LCRA is screwed in the long run, too, because of population growth- that was a perfectly timed tangent cam. All I can say is that the variable in the equation is how we adapt to prevent water wars. Happy New Year! 😄💜
What I always find interesting is that water restrictions are invariably first placed on residential water use, notwithstanding the mention of reduced water allocations to farmers in this video, when, for instance, here in Florida residential water use accounts for only 8% of total consumption while business use is ~22% and agriculture uses by far the lion's share at 70%. Hence, even if the average person use water more efficiently and reduces by, say, 1/2 you're still only talking about 4% of the total. This is not to say we shouldn't use the resource responsibly, but c'mon people put the focus where it will get a bigger bang. That's like calling for cutting a billion or so $ from a federal child food security subsidy to reduce the budget but _increase_ the military budget by 5%. Oh wait, that's already been done a number of times too...
So here's an update edit (1/7/21) to answer a few who asked where I got my figures. Seems I could only submit one comment- there are probably limits in placed to reduce spamming, etc.
My numbers simply came from the usgs website, plus a dedicated issue on water in Nat'l Geo some years ago, and some pie graphs which summarize various analyses which can be found at researchgate dot net. Basically, reputable sources that are easily found if desired.
On a lighter note, we may have a whole lot more fresh water in the next few years floating around in the ocean in the form of island size icebergs when the Thwaites ice shelf collapses. There you go - all the world's fresh water problems solved in one stroke...oc, at that point we may have an even bigger problem, but what's a few hundred million people having to migrate from the world's coastal areas when we'll have all that fresh water, right?
YES!!! Because people don't need to eat! We can turn all the farm land into residential housing instead of putting people on non-arable land.
References on the %s please.
@@omstout The problem is not that we need to eat but what we are eating. Cutting down on meat consumption is the best way to reduce your water footprint. On average eating the same amount of calories in a vegetarian dish compared to a meat based dish is about 85% more efficient in regards of water required to produce it.
Livestock drinks a lot and eats a lot (which also requires water to grow).
@@abcdef.fedcba next you will be asking to get rid of our wasteful pets.
@Bob I'm not sure if I understand your argument. Do you say that introducing wolves increases the amount of cattle?
Cattle usually eats grasses and small plants in the wild which causes deforestation when there are too many of them. To control the population you need predators like wolves. The important thing here is a balance between grazing animals and predatory animals. However what I'm pointing at is large scale farms with thousands of cows and so on, those require massive amounts of resources in order to produce meat. That resource usage is highly ineffcient, it's like producing calories with a detour.
I graduated from college in 1982 and considered going on to law school. I didn't, but while I was thinking about it, people in the know were whispering to me, "Water rights," in the same tone that the guy said "Plastics" to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. We've known this was coming for a long time.
I am an environmental science student in Utah. Over the past year or so I have written papers on the water crisis in the American Southwest and the Colorado River Basin. Thank you for highlighting the importance for the River and all those who rely on it. Sometimes topics like this one can be a downer but only because it's so important. Keep up the good work!
Explain Hippos in the Thames 130 thousand years ago during the Eemian interglacial period. And even during the interglacial we live in today we have seen trees grow much closer to the poles and much higher up the mountain than today is possible. Don't they teach you this stuff in universities anymore ?
@@ducthman4737 I'm sorry, is this relevant to the comment you commented on?
Thanks so much for doing work in this area. It's definitely not a downer, it is so important. The rest of America and the world still wants to live blissfully. Environmental problems are a real and emerging threat and no one wants to address them. The problem with most people is when they hear things like this, they brush it off and ignore the problem and continue on with their old way of life. Until foods run out of the shelves in supermarkets, or water stops flowing from their taps, they'll start to realize that it's a much bigger problem.
@@ducthman4737 yes, they definitely do still teach about the Eemian in universities and all professional climate scientists will be familiar with it. That warming event is associated with orbital forcing (variation in the tilt and orbit of the Earth) and difference in how much sun that reaches the Earth. Orbital forcing cannot explain the current warming.
Thanks!
I was actually at Lake Mead last week (the Pearce Ferry/South Cove area in northwest AZ). I took some photos and realized that I was in a spot that was underwater just 20 years ago. Yet the water level was still at least 70 feet below me. Having grown up in the Colorado mountains as a kid and spending a chunk of my life in Arizona, seeing the changes over the decades is startling when you compare then and now photos. The cities in AZ are actually quite good at conserving, recycling and recapturing water. Non farmers will not be impacted nearly as soon as the farmer and industrial concerns.
One possible solution is to actually decommission and dismantle Glen Canyon Dam in order to consolidate the water of Mead and Powell into a single reservoir. That would reduce evaporation and seepage. Also it would restore the Glen Canyon, which conservationists still regret seeing drowned...although it too is in the process of reappearing. Maybe this gets discussed in 2026 as an option. Having two reservoirs at 30% capacity is useless to the entire region.
I honestly don't know if there's a good path forward for this region. Unless the drought does end (which I suppose is entirely possible), climate change and population demands on the river will continue depleting it. Those of us who live in the region will be confronting this head on whether we like it or not.
@Chedsey - Well said.
Get rid of nearly half the system's storage capacity because of evaporation and seepage you reckon? You want to fix a water supply problem by removing 50% of the system's storage capacity? I suppose that if the dam was removed, all the problems that would be caused could be blamed on climate change. Brilliant.
@@TheJazsa80 - Please tell us your solution.
@@rb032682 Drastically increase water storage capacity. Expand on a water storage system that we've taken for granted and denied significant investment for over 50 years. Some new dams and man made lakes are not the environmental hazards the greenies well tell you they are.
@@TheJazsa80 Why does the engineer who designed the dam disagree with you?
Scientists have known for a long time that those involved in the water compacts on the Colorado were entirely wrong back in the 1920's. From 1905 to 1920 there had been unusually high moisture that fed the Colorado and they used that data in their assessment.
No good decisions have been made since then.
Studies have shown that the Colorado has gone through numerous decadal mega droughts over the last 1000 years. Add to that all of the diverted water to sustain cities, farms, etc. in desert regions and voila a self made disaster.
Good point - populating and irrigating a desert based on optimistic historical data is bound to go wrong.
Probably it has little to do with global climate change and more to do with local cycles.
Yes Joe - I'm tired of your climate change shtick. Everything isn't climate change.
Here's an example of climate change - cyclic and not human made though:
ua-cam.com/video/LTKxqfvM1bA/v-deo.html
shhh don't contradict the soros climate hoax
@@cbboegh Gotta keep that head on the sand, huh?
your mention of "decadal mega droughts" sounds like climate change denial to me. I live in Boulder County, and we've never had drought leading to grassfires in DECEMBER. I think we'll soon find ourselves in situations that will overshadow the long-term Colorado River problem.
@@MySerpentine no kidding.
Droughts have happened in this area in the past - the entire Pueblo culture collapsed in the 12th century due to a Mega drought that left the Colorado with 1/3 of its peak flow. A fundamental issue here is that the water in the river was divided up in a time where its flow was at its peak - guaranteeing that a water crisis would happen once everyone is sucking their share out and the next drought happens. I guess we are here now. Its going to get ugly!
No, this is unlike anything you’ve ever seen and it’ll get worse.
Thanks for the invitation to add to the video. To add to the good news, the Ogalala aquifer feeding Arizona, west Texas and New Mexico is near collapsing and, due to decreased rainfall and increased pressure through use, there is literally no way for it to refill except for population collapse and several hundreds of years of rainfall for it to fill up again. Happy New Year everyone.
We are absolutely experiencing this where I live. I have climbed and hike in the Cascades for years, and how that landscape has changed is easy to see. Glaciers are vanishing, water quality in lakes and rivers is deteriorating, and wild fires are growing more frequent and intense. In 2020 my wife and I had to pack up our house and evacuate, while friends lost their homes. And these fires were not way out in there. They were within a few miles of a metro area with more than 2 million people, leading to that region having the worst air quality of any urban area on the planet. Off the coast the water is also an issue. With vast dead zones where the oxygen content in the water so low that the fish that cannot swim out of it, simply suffocate. "Living with it" is going to be possible for many people. However nobody should assume that learning to live with climate change is the same as it not effecting them. Learning to live with climate change is like learning to live with heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Sure you can live with it, but that is not the same as living free from it.
climate change is natural. It happens over tens of thousands of years or even longer time frames. Global warming isnt. Itll take less than 200 years. This is global warming. Human catastrophe in the making. Pretty sure if govs dont grow a brain and act literally yesterday, full force, Itll get exponentially bad. Its funny now, some droughts, snow where it shouldnt typically snow. So funny and novel yay. Yeah were pretty much dying out by 2050 and entirely extinct by 2100 for sure. Wars famine. Descent into basic animal traits is all thatll well amount to. All because of some assholes constantly pumping fossils to burn. What a joke.
Anyone that saw Rainier this year and isn't extremely concerned, needs their head examined.
@@Andytlp human caused climate change isn't natural. They shifted to calling it climate change because it's not just warming, it's changing the climate.
@@Andytlp I really wish scientists had called this problem "Man accelerated climate change", it would defused the argument the climate changes over time by itself. I cringe every time I hear the phrase "Climate change" or "Global warming", both are equally terrible terms.
Can't ya just wish a well? There is so much water running underneath all of us at all times. You just have to have the will to find it
I drove over the Colorado River at Blythe, CA yesterday. Was so amazed at how low the water was we stopped and took a picture. We live off grid during the winter and use about 500 gallons of water per month (250 per person). It doesn’t matter how little a household uses, if you can’t get water it your in major trouble.
I also passed over the river at Blythe last week and it's almost pitiful how little water from the river makes it to that point. In Yuma, it's nearly impossible to detect the river from the highway bridge.
How do you use so little? I’m in the Philippines where we bucket bathe and we use around 5 cubic meters (1300 gallons a month) albeit more people using water here
@@redpillsatori3020 we live in our RV full time off grid, in the dessert and need to haul water. When you have.to spend 2 / 3 hours a week, you tend to watchit closer.
Same prob in Australia. We tried to bring in an allocation system for the Murray-Darling system but after billions of dollars it pretty much failed. Just like fossil fuels, all the existing dependents -farmers - are so politically powerful they and their politicians can undermine any attempt to rationally downsize them, even though they are in effect, catastrophically and irrationally downsizing themselves and everything else associated with our biggest river system.
Chinese-owned cotton operations don't give a rat's ass about the Murray-Darling, and they own Barnaby and all his mates. We're rooted.
Bradfield Scheme needs to be built finally, make use of all that North Queensland rain
@@adammerza5745 - It only sets up a new tropical agriculture zone for inland Queensland and northern SA. Supposedly. It doesn't solve anything for temperate farming in the Murray-Darling.
Not to mention Bradfield had no access to accurate water flow data and ignored evaporation, which alone would negate most of the benefit.
The Murray Darling is boned. Unless vested interests are crushed. Which won't happen.
@@adammerza5745 and that water will all flow south to where it's needed ... because it's downhill, right? Lol.
No worries because as soon as we get some snow in the mountains Colorado river will resume its raging South right on down the mountain just wait for some more snow hopefully we'll get some this Winter
Just drove across the basin from AZ to CA and back. In AZ I still see a ton of farming using high water usage methods - flooding a field vs using micro irrigation technology. I also live in AZ and see wells drying up left and right and folks having to truck in water - hence using river basin water. So its only going to exponentially increase. Time to get desalinization investment up and continue to improve that, then we can build new canals to feed existing infrastructure and fill the resoivoirs up.
Yep. Farmers who don't adapt will go out of business. Unless we get miraculous rains (which we don't, at least not long-term), those farmers will eventually be impacted by water cuts. At that point, if they're still using inefficient systems, they're toast.
Struggling farms will likely get bought up by foreign interests with the cash to drill the deepest wells. Then they can pump groundwater 24/7 and export the bounty to their homelands. Almond growers did this in California.
@@addanametocontinue Or they can't afford more advanced farming techniques. They need subsidies to transition to sustainable practices. Almost like a new deal of sorts, but green...
When joe talks, I listen.
It's truely a simple equation.
When I'm listening, it's because Joe is talking.
@@christianfoley5846
L = JS Squared
I listen for Joe
Why?
In the UK we inherit a lot of problems from the US which don't necessarily apply here.
One of which is "thou shall not waste water".
Even though we have loads of the stuff over here.
So much, that 25% of all potable water is lost through leakages because it's cheaper to waste it than fix the networks.
Yeah but the water never escapes the atmosphere so its still somewhere on earth - Just maybe not where it's needed.... 🤣
As a Scot I was under the impression that the South of Englands water supply was under constant strain in the summer months, no? Obviously not a problem north of the border though.
On a global scale, it's impossible to waste water (unless you're shooting it into outer space or breaking it down into hydrogen and oxygen). It's a closed system. The problem is distribution. Some places dry up, with all the water that evaporated or flowed out ending up somewhere else. In the States, drier West, wetter Midwest. We don't have the wherewithal to change that, at least not yet. But the Earth still has all those hundreds of quintillion gallons of water all around us. How sweet would it be if we could figure out how to desalinate and move it on a grand scale.
@@Paul-zk2tn we have a tiny reserve.
Which 99% of the time is fine as it rains so often.
If rain ceased worldwide overnight, SE England wouldn't have long (except London that abstract from ground water).
So every now and again, you'll have a hosepipe ban after a month or so of dry weather, then it rains and everything is fine again.
Ah UK privatisation for the win 🤦♂️
Most of my veggies are local--except my potatoes (yay! farmer's markets!) But I've made the decision to grow them myself this year.
Wow, this is all stuff I covered in class in the 70s, great. Been wondering how long before someone noticed. The good news is that they are worried about the Pecan crop in California, and stopped building new golf courses in Vegas. No word yet about the two million people that moved here. I'm thinking we’ll handle this about as well as we handled COVID.
That's a good point. If you were curious how western governments are going to approach climate change. Look no further than Covid. We're doomed.
Politicians watering their vegas golf courses and then pointing at family-run farms and saying "these people are the PROBLEM!!!"
I just watched the original Rodan movie and there is a direct reference to global warming in the first several minutes of the movie. 1957.
all vegas should be covered in a one gigantic golf course. Then use all the water in the country to make it green. Win win
Thanks, Joe -- I was almost feeling optimistic about the new year, but you brought my expectations back down to where they should be ;-)
Back to purgatory 😢
idk what you mean - all his episodes inspire me more than any new year's resolution to do better. Idk why people find these episodes pessimistic. They're optimistic to me!
You should see the Great Salt Lake these days. It is de-press-ing! The snowpack in the Wasatch Mountains (the western edge of the greater Rockies) that feed the lake are so drought-ridden, it's just awful (not to mention causing piss-poor ski seasons). Last summer the state instituted water limitations and many people let their lawns die. I was quite surprised by how well it did, if I'm being honest. People really stepped up and drastically cut back on water use.
people also don't seem to understand how drought resistant commercial grass seed has become. You might be shocked how well lawns come back after they "die".
Indeed, I am ashamed of my local government for being unresponsive on this.
@@squirlmy yeah! As long as uts watered once or twice a month, youncant really kill the grass. As opposed to every other day to twice a week, Which is typically what is required for green healthy looking lawns in Utah
one year of some rain and the cal. gov calls drought over...sad. back up to 3 lawn watering days a week. like above, every day should be a water crises day. i do see drought tolerant lawns here and there. wealthy neighborhoods-- the greenest grass you could image...also sad. boycott almonds...1900 gal. of h20 per pound!
@@kirtg1 AAAAAMEN!
I did my bachelors on the Colorado river problematic. It is Terrifiing how Disasterous this is.
Solid video Joe. As someone that grew up in northern Colorado, one note, it is pronounced Poo-der (Named after Cache la Poudre River, which is spanish for a stash of gun powder).
One other item, you make a big point of this being man made from climate change (which I understand) but a huge part of this is mismanagement of the resource. The idea of building so much in the desert, complete with dozens of golf courses in each town is so non-sensical it would be comical if it weren't so tragic. It is the ultimate thing we do as humans, focus on today, with no thought about the impacts on tomorrow. If the draining of the resource (water) is not addressed nothing will stop the absolute lack of water in this region soon. Being that no one is willing to make tough calls or concede they should make due with less I don't see a happy ending to the story.
What needs to be done is building large desalination plants on the west coast to keep things functioning...
Hard to believe that it was just in 1983 when there was so much water flowing into Lake Powell, that the spillways at Glen Canyon Dam were running at full blast and there was a fear of it overflowing.
I once took a bath in the Colorado river as my hippie parents drove us accross the country in an old school bus. For some reason Joe chose to leave that fun fact out of the video
Is that like chaos theory where a butterfly flaps it's wings and everything goes to hell? So a hippie family caused this problem. Just asking.
You are public enemy number One!
How did your hippie parents manage to fit the river in their old school bus so you could take a bath in at as they were driving?
@@michaelsmith4904 he never left the water, but its drying up dangerously fast in his parents hippie hottub in the camper bus
Joe doesn't want to be blamed for all of the tourists going there & using all of that precious water.
Build more enclosed hydroponic farms. They can reuse the same water many times by capturing evaporation moisture, and the water is not wasted do to targeted watering techniques. The sun in the dessert areas can run solar power for them for their lighting, pumping, and filtering needs.
Okay, so solution oriented aspiration here. I saw a documentary on Netflix called the Biggest Little Farm. In that doc, the farmers being documented had a really interesting thing happen where in one rainstorm, all of their neighbours' farms flooded and were brutally eroded. Theirs sequestered like several tons of water into the water table, thanks to their use of ground cover crops and stuff like that.
I wonder how much of a difference we can make simply by changing our farming practices. Farming takes up more land than anything else humans do, so maybe this can be a focal point for our water management regulations.
A big difference.
Those farming methods are more labour intensive on the human body, but recreate natural cycles that not only reduce the number of inputs required for food production over the long haul, but also foster carbon sequestration, ecological health, soil health, biodiversity, increased nutrition, less or no reliance on fossil fuels, and also require less water overall due to the soils ability to capture, and hold water more efficiently.
Really what we should see is a return to traditional methods with modern innovation, local and seasonal growing and eating. The problem with indoor and vertical farming is the energy inputs it requires, still viable, just more challenges and walls to climb.
There are many on UA-cam with great explanations on how such systems can be implemented. Start here: ua-cam.com/video/faT9pXt4MQw/v-deo.html
I remember touring Hoover Dam back in 1999, when the water level was near maximum allowable capacity. It's hard to wrap your head around just how massive a structure it is until you see it in person. I just happened to search for images of the dam online a few years later and noticed that the water level was a lot lower, but at the time, I thought it was just a temporary fluctuation. It's hard to believe the water level has now fallen 120 feet since I was there. It's a massive amount of water. At maximum capacity, Lake Mead held 9.3 trillion gallons of water. If the average person drinks 1/2 gallon of water a day, it would take the entire population of the United States 155 years to drink that much water. O_o
I spent a couple months in Henderson, NV, during the summer of 1999 and would drive out to the dam every so often just because it is one of the most amazing structures ever built. I took it for granted that the lake was basically full at that time. I'm still stunned at what it has turned into.
You are dehydrated if you are only drinking 1/2 gallon a day. I’m drinking between 1-2 gallons most days.
I lived in Vegas from 1968 to 2000. I went to the dam when they opened the gates for the first time in a LONG while. I remember watching that giant rush of water go through, quite a sight. Looking at pictures since I moved have done nothing but sadden me.
@@christophergruenwald5054 Not everyone needs to drink 1-2 gallons a day, sometimes 1/2 gallon is a enough. Most people drink less than 1/2 a gallon. Water intake depends on several factors like physical activity, weather, temperature, how much you sweat, etc.
As an Egyptian this story hits close to home, Egypt as a country has relied on the Nile River for a millennia, but now we find ourselves in an unenviable situation where we we're forced to choose between peace or possible destruction, Egypt has been locked in a fierce dispute with Neighbors Sudan and Ethiopia over Nile water rights, Long story short Ethiopia is building a massive Dam called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the blue Nile (one of the Niles two main tributaries) and precisely the tributary that Supplies a majority (roughly 80%) of all the water in the Nile's watercourse.
This Dam once completed will have one of the largest reservoirs on Earth (around 74 Billion cubic meters of water), Egypt opposes the dam due to the hastened filling process that would drastically cut its water supply that contributes roughly 90% of Egypt's fresh water needs, the Egyptian government has reached out to both the governments of Sudan and Ethiopia to negotiate over Egypt's water rights during the filling of the dam but thus far Ethiopia has remained rather intransigent over the course of the whole crisis, they deem the dam as the centerpiece of their developmental plans that seeks to transform the daily life of the average Ethiopian citizen, but in my eyes i find their stubbornness to be out of character and strange, their tone and demeanor has been fairly hostile and aggressive and this position seems to be echoed by the general populace as well who have made it their mission to belittle and trivialize Egypt's grievances, many Ethiopians are subscribed to the notion that Egypt is an enemy "colonizer state" that must be stopped, this stems from a general distaste towards Arabs in general going all the way back to ancient times
The UN and the international community have been silent over the issue and are taking a rather luckluster and unproductive approach towards a dispute that could potentially boil over into a regionwide armed altercation.
Is there any way someone like myself could help
Wow. I’m sorry to hear about this. That sounds terrifying in all aspects. I wish peace for you and your fellow countrymen and woman, and hopefully someone will find an easy solution to this. As an American when I hear the word Nile I think of Egypt. They’re so synonymous with each other. Ethiopia has had many problems with droughts over the years, so I can understand why they’d want to find a solution to that problem, but not by shorting another countries life line.
Thankfully we have water treaties here in the states, but I can see them getting thrown out if climate change keeps melting our rivers :/
You have every right to ensure your supply of water does not get cut off, or held for ransom. If the negotiation table fails, I'm sure your government has other means of keeping the water flowing.
I wouldn't count on the UN for nothing. Build a mega desalination plant at the Mediterranean Sea and start pumping the water upstream through the Nile, thus rendering the Ethiopian dam useless, optionally, flooding their whole country. That is, iF you are a proud nation of the Pharaohs.
@dražen g As long as the dam doesn't actually go up and get used to starve Egypt of water, I agree with you. But once it does, and once it cuts Egypt off, the situation demands quick, effective action. I imagine some conventional bunker busters would do the trick, but I'm no expert. I'm sure Egypt's military already knows exactly what would work.
In 1983 I flew a small plane from Boulder, Colorado to Los Angles. After crossing the divide I followed the Colorado (IFR- I follow rivers) all the way to Arizona. Since you can’t fly down the Grand Canyon I had to go cross country to Las Vegas to refuel. What a wonderful trip. Hundreds of miles of rocky cliffs, eagle, with a blue line to follow. Flying down lake Powell was like a science fiction movie ( the crash site from Planet of the Apes). That river and the area it flows though are a national treasure. The river has been there millions of years, it will come back someday, but maybe no in our life time. Thank you Joe, this brought back so many memories.
The Colorado is not "dying". It's being strangled to death by municipalities draining it dry.
Southern CA should be cut off from it entirely.
*good luck with that one*
Cities are not the problem. Cities in the western United States use only about five percent of the available water -- if that.
Agriculture -- irrigating millions of acres in the *desert* -- uses 80 percent of the available water, in this region.
The rest goes to all other uses -- including conservation and recreation.
As an Arizona environmentalist, I’ve been watching this problem and solution debate evolve for decades. Arizona needs to grow different crops, but we’re growing lettuce! - basically exporting our water. Hemp would be an excellent alternative - a fast-growing fiber plant - providing an alternative also to cutting the forests.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Came here to complain that Arizona was #2 producer of lettuce (and top five for many other fresh greens) I'm the nation. I love this state but we encourage some dumb shit out here.
@@tjh4022 yeah we do :/
Hemp requires a ton of irrigation, more than many other plants, as producers in Colorado have found.
Needs 300,000 gallons to grow 1000 plants (per 12 months of growing) for good yield.
Will grow without irrigation in places where there's plenty of rain, but yields won't be the same if not irrigated.
@@chandlered but, are you sure you're not including marijuana grown in warehouses under artificial lighting? Because the way those plants are grown is very different than hemp, and of course "yields" are quite different when talking about buds. I'm living here in Colorado, and I haven't heard complaints from "producers" about water use, although the electricity use of marijuana growers is a big point of discussion.
This is why I laughed my ass off when my climate-change denying cousin bought a 80ft yacht on lake mead in 2020.
The two happiest days of a boat owners life: the day he buys it and the day he sells it. ⛵️
The Sahara was once a lush rain area. Everything changes.
@@floridaarmyvet3613 that statement reminds me of the claim made by some serial killers: "everyone dies eventually". It's a really dumb argument. It's an appeal to fatalism to justify persisting with continued destructive behaviour.
@@QT5656 If you think the government will solve this problem, you are insane! They will just make it worse. The countries doing the damage like China, India, Pakistan, most Asian, Africa, most South American countries won't stop. Those countries are destroying the planet and now the ocean is polluted with masks from covid! The world is overpopulated also.
@@floridaarmyvet3613 at least you now admit that there is a problem. And no the government won't solve it if we just sit on our arse and say dumb stuff like "change is inevitable". You undestimate the current generation as well as USAs capacity for leadership.
Why are you so good at this, Joe? I don't understand why your channel is the go-to for people who want to understand all the most intriguing topics?!
The implications of this happening was a big part of Pablo Bacagalupi’s dystopian sci-fi novel, “The Water Knife.”States go to war, Balkanized factions fighting over water rights. Las Vegas is a dustbowl hellscape. Pretty good read, not for everybody
Excellent book - just recommended it in a comment as well.
Can confirm: I live in vegas and it's already a dustbowl hellscape.
@@KyrosX27 cheers. Made me laugh.
Hey Joe!
This video was very interesting to me. I grew up in southern Nevada and now live in Arizona. These conversations have been happening my entire life. And it’s always been considered dire. While I was raised with strict water conservation tactics, nothing will be done about this until we are dangerously low. That’s how it’s always been. I’m doubtful that many even know how much water they waste.
I think 2021 saw it finally hit that "dangerously low" threshold that finally forced some actual steps to be taken.
Can't wait for my local politicians and business leaders to dehydrate me and my loved ones to death. All so that people and golf courses can have lush Bermuda lawns and shitty non-native palm trees
Las Vegas is really good now about recycling their water and using grey water. I don't know why more cities don't follow their example.
The name "Grand River" actually applied only to the portion of what is now called the Colorado from its headwaters to its confluence with the Green River (in the state of Utah and now in Canyonlands National Park). Grand Lake and the city of Grand Junction (at the confluence of the Grand / Colorado River and the Gunnison River), as well as the Grand Counties in both Colorado and Utah were named for the Grand River. I think the Grand Canyon was named before the Grand River. Prior to 1921, only the portion below the confluence with the Green was called the Colorado River.
@Miles Doyle 🤘word🤘
I have heard that once upon a time the middle east was a verdant location on the globe, but look at it now. Is this where we are heading? Will anything we do short of ceasing to exit make any difference? Thus restoring the natural rhythm of the Earth. Will stopping the endless pollution of man solve the problem?
Joe, you had impeccable timing with the video, considering that just a few days ago a large portion of the Boulder, Colorado area went up in flames. Partially due to the fact that area has been in an extreme drought which made the fire far worse than what might be expected. It went right through the city, near where I live. Over 500 buildings have been destroyed with thousands of residents losing their homes right before the new year.
This may not be a direct cause of the low river, however the environment is all connected to a certain degree and it is, at least, loosely related.
The point being, this had a large personal impact as my house had a very real possibly of being charred. I was lucky, however the same cannot be said for many of the people near me. To the people reading my comment, my advice is to don't take it for granted.
How can anyone that has lived anywhere near the western mountains of North America for the last several years, experiencing wild fires every summer, still deny that climate change is real? Our only hope is massive, solar powered desalinization plants and the immediate ban of carbon emmisions or we won't have any food to eat real soon.
@@surferdude4487 Oh, I can. This has been this way for millennia. If wild fires have gotten worse it is because people keep putting out the fires that would normally cleanse the area. Mismanagement is the real problem not climate change.
@@greglinse3863 It just so happens that my son is getting his Masters degree in Forestry. I'l ask him about it.
The fire was Big Box to Big Box caused by faulty electric in an outbuilding and propagated by inadequate setback between houses for the known high winds every year back to the Anastazi Indians. It has NOTHING to do with 'Human-Caused Climate Change' (sic). The mountains of Colorado are filled with artifacts of pre-historic civilizations lost to periodic drought.
Didn’t that area just recently receive a lot of snowfall? I figured it wouldn’t be at risk of fire…
It is so incredible to me how by all accounts, rampant climate change is showing to cost us TRILLIONS in economic and collateral damage in the near future, and yet switching to clean and renewable energy is still "too expensive."
that's because politicians are insanely short sighted since they really only care about the next election, meaning they never really think more then 4 years ahead. Sure spending $100 today may save use $1000 over the course of the next 10 years but that doesnt mean anything when you need to cut spending this year so you can reelected. The only time politicians plan ahead its when their corporate masters tell them too, like the recent infrastructure bill which has had 2 presidents and every senator, congress person, and governor fighting over which companies get the most money. It doesnt help that supporting things like nuclear, our best bet to ween ourselves off fossil fuels, is politically unpopular and killing nuclear plants will earn you the votes of the people living near the plant even if the nuclear plant is harmless, has 1000 people living around it, but supplies clean power to 100,000 people.
Farming in the desert is insanity. There is so much fertile land east of the Mississippi that could be farmed but they can’t compete with designer farms that have unlimited water whenever they want it.
Wow. I learned as much from the comments as I did your video. Which I loved. Anyway, says a lot about how great you are by how great your followers are. Rock on!
Wow, does the average house really use 300 gallons a day?
I'm mentally adding up showers, toilets, dishes, laundry, lawn watering, car washing, drinking and cleaning/handwashing.
Maybe we do! And most of that has to go through a sewage treatment plant as well.
Great video. I really need to become a patreon.
The Colorado has reached its delta a couple of times in the last two decades. When we released enough to reach the delta the entire area became green.
The Salton Sea area of California is a prime example of what our failures to properly manage resources looks like.
"The Colorado River no longer reaches the Gulf, and instead peters out of existence miles short of the sea."
Source- National Geographic Aug 2020
Complete Bullspit. The Delta has NEVER ran dry... ever.
@@babyUFO. Maybe it doesn't go completely dry, but so much water is removed from the river before reaching the delta that almost all the wetlands in that region have now dried up.
I have visited the Salton Sea and I thought it was cool...not realizing what a disaster it was. Now I see stuff on UA-cam about the Salton Sea dried up and a bunch of dead fish and palm trees. Is that the fate of the whole American Southwest....with the addition of human bones that show the evidence of cannibalism someday in the future to some archeologist.. human or otherwise. 😕
@@babyUFO. Depends what your definition of dry is. Very little if any water that starts in Colorado actually makes it to the gulf of California. The trickle that does come out is mainly treated sewage water from the towns and villages at the end of the road.
For a delta to exist you need high energy river floods to bring the sediments. The moment you build dams you condemn a delta to die. And then we say it is because of climate change we lose our beaches.
YES!! You are the first UA-camr I have seen who has finally said the thing that needs to be said: we need to shift the conversation more toward how we will ADAPT to climate change!!! Fact is, humanity can’t “stop” climate change. We can minimize our impact, yes. And we should. Some say we can reverse our past/current impact, though I am highly skeptical of that line of thought. We are wasting so much energy, time, money, and other resources on trying to “stop” climate change, which we simply cannot do. Nomenclature is important. We have the power to minimize our impact on the climate, but not to stop the ebb and flow of planetary geological and meteorological systems. So yes please PLEASE let’s talk more about how to adapt, because as we *do* adapt, we will by default also be doing things that automatically lessen our impact on the environment.
Who knows what kind of unforseen consequences "stopping" climate change would have if we could do it. The planet has been on the cooling and warming cycle for billions of years, like breathing. The effects of stopping it might be worse in the long run for humanity.
Im just curious, If the total amount of water on earth does not decrease then where does all the water go?
JOE, Glad to see you talking about this. It would be great if you would do a few more episodes on water; for example how over the last 50 years the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world's largest aquifers the runs from Texas to Wyoming supplies about 30% of America's agricultural lands is being quickly depleted, leaving some farms, especially on its western edge with dry wells. One the glacier melt ice in the aquifer is gone, those farms will return to grassland if we are lucky, and dessert if not. Or do one on the how Mexico city, the central valley of California, and Jakarta are sinking because of the depletion of groundwater. Another nice episode would be about cities like Chennai, India (population about 10 million) that have run out of water. If we don't allocate and use our resources sustainably, it will end our civilization. This is as important (and linked to) climate change, but most people are not aware of how seriously we will soon be in trouble if we don't fix this now.
I’ve been keeping an eye on this for a few years. My family and I live I southern Utah for years and I could see that the region was slowly drying up so we ended up moving away. It’s too bad too because we love the southwest.
My Dad told me back in the 1950s water would someday be more valuable than gold. Sad 😞
Not happening. Over 2/3rds of the planet surface is covered by water. If potable water gets scarce enough, desalinization will suddenly make a lot more sense. Yes, water will become more expensive in that case, but nothing like a truly scarce resource.
@@joesterling4299 I think we can cut M C and his dad a little slack here, and not be so literal. He was absolutely on point and if we do some serious asteroid mining, it may still come to pass.
@@squirlmy If we do some serious asteroid mining, precious metals will become less scarce, and therefore less valuable. But even so, the quantities mined would be a rock in an ocean filled with 326 quintillion gallons of water. We don't have a water shortage. We have a processing and distribution shortage, due to our current technical limitations. If we advance enough to solve asteroid mining, we can solve desalination and distribution too.
Joe, sitting here in Canada here wwe have more fresh water then any other country on the planet, perhaps I am out of touch for this topic but I think that xeriscaping is exactly the right solution. Using less water. Ripping out the lawns is the key. Only let unirrigated grass grow. In Phoenix everyone has a pool. The pools have got to go. Too much evaporation going on in that stagnant water. The people who have moved there from water rich places need to adapt themselves to their environment, not the other way around. The people need to grow different plants and animals and play different games. No more golf, unless you like sand traps...
There are many places like this around the world. The solutions are thousands of years old. But the people will need to adapt to their environment
yep.. if you want to live in a desert.. live in a desert..
I have lawns too, but they aren't watered and cut as little as possible so the wild flowers inside it can bloom first
Cujo, golf courses, lawns (a crop we can’t eat), cutting it, fertilizing it, car washing, strong detergents requiring massive rinsing. What did they do in the days of old. We got caught in the times of overuse of what we do most.
People used to bathe once a week. TV tells us we “smell bad”. It doesn’t require 1,2,3, Long hot showers. A small basin will do it. Drive less, don’t speed, & a T&A clean up will do. Recycle at home any plastic cups, bags, any & everything. Walk wher u can. Never waste anything. Ever.
God Bless Us All. Our planet is in trouble & it scares the hell out of me
The Columbia river has 10 times the flow of the Colorado river. Just build a canal and divert a fraction of its flow into the deserts and arid regions of California, Nevada, and Arizona, and this is all fixed. We fixed similar problems in New York 200 years ago, and all we had then was drunks, shovels, and whiskey. It is a solvable problem.
A thousand mile canal? I’ll believe it when I see it.
No fricken thanks...In all this the one problem is..........California
You're not seeing the big picture. So much of our modern society depends on the infrastructure we built on the assumption that the environment is largely stoic. That's why climate change is such a problem. Something like what's happening to the Colorado can easily happen to the Columbia. Its a bandaid over something that needs surgery. And its a fairly poor solution at that.
Humans ignoring life threatening problems....?! I am shocked...not... Good video as always and you are 100% right! Sadly, let us face it they ain't going to do anything about it
I ignore the fact that tornadoes can spawn where I live, and I have a greater chance of stopping those than I do of fixing climate change. Some things are beyond our control, and its pointless to obsess about them. I hope enough brilliant minds come together worldwide to fix the slow disaster, but I doubt it; and I know I don't have the right stuff to be one of them.
/*it's
@@joesterling4299 As inviduals I do think we want to fix it. The problem is the organizations and the people who controle the organizations that can make a real difference, an impact are the ones who don't want to cause no profit, no actions taken. We all do our part the best we can with the exceptions out there of course!
Who cares anymore what "they" do or think. It's what YOU do that matters.
@@joesterling4299 It's not about waiting for "brilliant minds"!
It's about the collective result of each of us.
Blows my mind how much Lake Powell has shrunk since the 80s. It was either Powell or Bullfrog Bay that had to literally move the entire marina once.
The A in Nevada should be pronouned like the A in Glad. Easiest way to remember is that it rhymes with "Ya mad, huh?"
The marinas at Lake Mead near the Hoover Dam have been moved a lot. I believe at Lake Powell, they are down to one boat ramp that's still semi functional. At what used to the be northern end of Lake Powell, Hite marina is entirely abandoned now as the lake is gone and the river's current channel is hundreds of feet away from the concrete boat ramps.
Such a great video- your quality is unreal Joe!
Happy new year! So glad you’re covering this! I saw this on 60 minutes in late 2021 and it made me feel true panic that I haven’t felt since 2020. So many officials in so many states are like “no, state x, YOU have to YOUR usage more”.😣So many consequences 😕
Who are you
I live In Utah. Why we grow lawns in a desert bewilders me. Ive almost ranted about this on Facebook like 3 times over the last few months.
The timing of this video is wild, because I've already been thinking about this a lot and much because I have been playing this beaver city builder game where you have to make dams to survive drouights.
It's given me plenty to ponder about how our exploding population and recent droughts are being adapted to.
I have seen several environmental shows concerning how the beaver can greatly influence the areas they live in, creating ponds, lakes, and marshes were animals can thrive and water can be conserved.
I live in Utah as well. When we recently re-did our landscaping we removed well over half the square footage of lawn space and replaced it with rocks and drought-resistant bushes, trees, etc. Then we stopped watering the lawn and let it go brown, haha. Whenever I see someone watering their yard at high noon in the middle of July I damn-near blow a gasket.
Happy new year to you to Joe. I'm always so happy for your videos 🤩
They river is diminished because too many people are taking from the system . It not due to increased heat , it is greed . It doesn't even flow to the ocean anymore Colorado River will die if we don't do something. In my opinion California should be investing in desalination plants big time .
I mean it barely snowed in colorado on new years. Ive never seen that happen so im not surprised. I am surprised no one is scared about whats happening to our earth
Some people have been raising the alarm for decades now... but yeah, the majority just ignore those warnings. 😟 Here in Florida, we went from having a real winter with sub-freezing temperatures in December and January in the 1960's and 70's to having great beach weather in those same months in the 2010's and 20's... but no one ever gives that a thought because "it's Florida, it's hot there." *sigh* 😑
I used to be more optimistic -- I mean, we're the same civilization that banded together behind the science and stopped the ozone hole.... but at this point, I'm pretty sure no one is gonna do squat until places like New York and Miami are literally underwater. And it's waaaay too late at that point.
Maybe Las Vegas shouldn't be there? Maybe we shouldn't be flood irrigating alfalfa in the desert. Maybe golf courses in Arizona and Utah are a stupid idea. Everybody is so uncomfortable saying what needs to be said. We know where the water is going. It is being misused. Climate change is a completely different conversation that we should be having but acknowledging the poor land management and short sighted profit seeking schemes that have destroyed ecosystems and violently displaced native groups across the country should be the main focus.
I grew up in Tucson, and so I feel comfortable saying that Arizona should largely be abandoned. As should Nevada, Utah, and Eastern California. These places are unfit for large populations.
Living in Tuscon will do that to you buddy. It's the worst city in all of Az.
@@CTRL_X_X No, come on, Phoenix is obviously much worse. At least Tucson is surrounded by mountains, Phoenix is an armpit.
@@scottharding4336 lmao wut? Phoenix is THE VALLEY OF THE SUN. A valley is a place encompassed by mountains. So the only point you brought up is moot. You didn't talk about the obvious which would be standard of living which is 3.9% higher in Phoenix but is offset by the average 5% increase of salaries for the same job. Everywhere I've been in Tuscan is a shit hole. There are plenty of places like that in Phoenix (ie: South Phoenix) but if you're talking about the metropolitan area you have to account for Scottsdale which is maintained much better than either of the two. I'm not advocating for Scottsdale but if you wanted to go somewhere nice in Tuscan it would be surrounded by poverty stricken areas. Whereas most of the PHX metro area gets a lot nicer the further north you go.
@@CTRL_X_X You can't really call the pathetic little foothills around Phoenix mountains. Snottsdale's existence is further proof that Phoenix is a miserable armpit. Whichever city is worse is kind of beside the point. Both cities use an unsustainable amount of water, and should be abandoned. Give all the land and water back to the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Pima Peoples.
Subscribing to you has been such a good decision for me! I’ve enjoyed this video very much - Huge like for all your efforts and energy spent into making this one! What a fine job ❤️
When I used to go the Las Vegas, I laughed at the concept of golf courses in the desert. They're still there, unfortunately. And they're still getting national coverage during the big golf championship tournaments. We will all know people are getting serious about water in that part of the world when those golf courses revert to desert.
Most likely those golf courses will be green long after every other water use has been eliminated.
Sounds very similar to the Murray-Darling Basin and associated river systems in Australia, which prior to 2021 reached record low levels due in large part to an extreme drought and higher than average evaporation from climate change (alongside a poorly implemented market based system of water entitlements).
No doubt there are stacks of other similarly impacted river systems around the world.
LMAO. Ok. Site your research paper that says this please. I would love to read it.
@Bob The small temperature increase so far 1.5C, is not evenly distributed all over the globe. Areas that tend to be hotter and drier are more impacted than areas that are colder and wetter. Also a hot day may not be much hotter because of 1.5C but if the hotness continues as in a drought then the average temperature over time becomes a lot great than just that.
Dr. Bill Gates found the solution tough through his philanthropic foundation.
@@blakedblake6143, happy to share some research and sources. Greg has already summarised it to some extent, but I should provide some stuff from actual experts and government sources (I've broken the links with spaces next to "www" and "com" or "gov" so they can be posted to UA-cam - fix when pasting).
My summary of the below research, (and I'm not a climatologist by any stretch) is that marginal increases in land surface temperature lead to a small increase in the existing evaporation (from water surfaces and soil) and transpiration (from vegetation). When applied over a long enough period, such as a drought of several years, this small effect compounds to increase the severity and length of said drought, as well as demands on water from agriculture and communities. Australia's land surface temperature is already 1.4 degrees C above pre-industrial levels on average according to the latest IPCC report (summary here: news com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/landmark-report-confirms-australia-is-14c-warmer-and-is-being-impacted-by-climate-change/news-story/4e0cd1b1e4bea194ebcf8a61aed67acd).
Research papers:
https ://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley com/doi/full/10.1029/2010WR010333 This one is from 2011, prior to the worst effects of the most recent drought experienced in this part of Australia. In the model used, evaporation and transpiration account for 5% of reduction in annual runoff, with the rest explained by changing rainfall levels and seasonality. (See Abstract and Discussion).
www nature com/articles/s41598-021-95531-4#ref-CR25 This paper notes "total evaporation has increased by up to 2.5mm per decade since the 1970s" (jump to Conclusion, or see a good summary here www.uts.edu.au/news/health-science/mounting-impact-climate-change-murray-darling).
Pages from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (federal government agency in charge of water management, criticised by some for their approach to water entitlements. Research was undertaken by other federal agencies like CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology):
www mdba gov.au/basin-plan-roll-out/climate-change
www mdba gov.au/water-management/mdba-river-operations/why-water-losses-happen Particularly check out the section titled "What causes water losses"
By no means an exhaustive list, so feel free to do a quick google of your own! Happy reading :)
@@idunnoay Looks like you called somebody's bluff real good there.
for all those people that think lack of water isn't important i invite you to not drink for 24 hours then tell me its not important great vid keep it up and a happy new year (well 10 seconds at least :)
Who’s saying that?
Jokes on you. I ate a whole snowman. I wish it was more carrot than stick but atleast I've got enough fiber for a lifetime.
Literally no one said that
What a meth'd up assumption.
Do you need to buy some punctuation?
Can you do a video on desalination plants? why they would be beneficial and what the drawbacks would be?
The problem is that you can't pump 60,000,000 gallons over the Sierra Nevada, and that wouldn't even cover all of the shortage.
First vid of the year kicking it off with some existential dread!
Classic Joe lol
@@chappell251005 Indeed
How could pumping scarce fresh water into deserts to feed water-inefficient crops possibly be a problem? Aren't (scarce) resources infinite?
I live in Colorado and our droughts are getting worse each year and wild fires getting worse and no one seems to care even though our mountains provide fresh water for the whole SW of this country.
Manage your resources properly.
Forest service will charge you for tree theft if you remove fuel.
Forest service service then in turn charges you taxes for fire surpression.
Exactly what outcome do people expect?!
Because all that the rest of us see out of Colorado is marxist commie b.s. , and fair or not, it makes it where we don't give a shit about the place. Same with where you send your water, CA. that place has become so anti-American that if the water were cut off on purpose tomorrow, we would find it amusing. Colorado slowly but surely got woke. Let it go broke.
Unfortunately, if the Colorado River dries up, the only water flowing will be the bitter sting of tears.
Living in a place that used to have 170+ days of rain per year, where summer mostly boiled down to 2-3 weeks of +25°C without any major rain in July & August and the entire rest of the year was a kind of grayish 5-15°C autumnwinterspring with some occasional sunshine, the thought of saving water has always been kinda odd here. 2018 and 2019, and to some degree 2020, however saw some weather that I personally would classify as the greatest summers of my entire life, but most people would call the worst drought Germany has seen in a really, really long time. For the first time that I can remember, it was illegal to water your lawn in some areas. And the forests died. Vast areas of them. Though... my job took me all across the country for the last few years, and the trees that died where almost exclusively those that had no business growing there in the first place: European Spruce. Which had been planted everywhere for wood because they grew quickly, much quicker than beech, oak or maple. Those however, especially the older ones, can apparently cope a lot better with drought, with heat, and with storms. But hey, when did humans ever ruin an ecosystem by introducing a species that did not belong there? Current aside, I could have waded through the biggest river in our country for some weeks. The major water resservoires are still not back to the level where they were before. In a country where water shortage was basically unheard of, where we usually use about 1/6 of the water available in any way or form.
Argal it's just going to get worse & worse as long as Europe keeps following the lies we have blindly followed. Want to see what is coming to Germany go look at Romania & the southern European states as their arable lands are desertifying. I don't know how old you are but we have about 50 years of arable crops left before all our fields of soil turn to dust.
I left this answer for Ben Sullins above perhaps it will help you understand that their is a route out of this for the EU but it will mean we Greens may have to recognise that we have tricked & that a return to a more traditional German diet is needed
The most effective way of increasing water supply is to work with nature rather than against it as we have for the last 10,000 years.
There are lots of great videos about how to return desert lands to rich verdant fields, but it does mean changing what we grow & thus what we eat.
Go look at Regenerative Agriculture & at Mob Grazing via the Savory Institute.
TLDR stop growing almost all Seeds, Beans, Pulses, & stop Stockade farming ruminants on the resulting food waste.
Switch to Mob grazing ruminants using Robot based headers. Switch to a primary grass fed meat & animal product diet supplemented with seashore derived vegetables grown with no-till cover crops.
Ideally transit to heavily instrumented food forests using Musk style Android Robots where food is sensor tracked & harvested when ripe & to order/availability
i.e. cap off the agricultural solutions which we have been using to create deserts such as the Sahara for 10,000 years & move to a post agricultural revolution using electrically driven robots instead of humans.
@@annakissed3226 that sounds like a very German plan. How about no meat production at all?
@@squirlmy well you can try & sell it to the public:
a. The Deep Green Echo-Fascist strategy. Billions of humans will starve to death. But feel good about yourself as a million or so ruminants are never born, never get a chance at a few years of life and global warming very slowly gets better as you re-wild everything with trees
b. The Don't Look (it) Up strategy (see film). Carry on as today. Don't starve, feel good about yourself as you live in your drug fueled Sugar rich high as carry on as now, stop a million ruminants being born and watch as your fields across Europe turn to deserts with death of billions of life in the soil and the increasing speed of global warming & as you ignore the millions of animals & birds die.
c. Eat as we did 150 years ago Strategy.
More millions of Ruminants will die after living an increasing longer life in a symbiotic relationship with grass, billions of more life in the soil, rapid stop & reversal of climate change as carbon & water rapidly accumulates in the soil. We need millions of animals to feed us but also we need to rapidly increase stocking levels to eat all the grass available, hence giving ruminants longer life span, before we predate on them, just as they would be in the wild. Multi-millions of animals get to be born & live that would not have because we stop poisoning the soils. Large Christian Food & Biotech Companies like Coke, Bayer etc might go out of business. Rapid drop in diabetes, autoimmune disorders, cancer & heart disease etc.
I want option C but your reaction suggests you want either
option A also known as the Children of Man strategy. I want to starve & watch billions of others stave to death as society breaks down in constant war & dictatorships.
Or option B aka The Soylent Green strategy. I commit sucide in my old age as my children starve or live on the sort of gruel we can manufacturer inside buildings because all the land has turned to desert
Whist the super rich live on what increasing little the land can produce.
The allocation of water to farms for crops that require massive irrigation allocations are the major cause not CC. Nothing residential consumers can do will have any impact what so ever. A single Pistachio plantation uses more water in a month than all the houses in NV in a year.
Heard almonds and avocados also.
Grapes on the other hand area very arid-adapted plant.
No No No..... the obvious problem is the amount of people using the water. With birth rates at their current levels in the U.S., as long as 40 million people don't just force their way into the areas in question, the water would be fine.
The big agrabusiness wants you to think its YOUR FAULT for not conserving water. Just like they want us to sort out garbage instead of creating less of it (single use plastic) they sell to us that makes more profits for them.
@@murraymadness4674 I agree with that Murray
They are trying yet again to get the 'middle' class to take a dive for a completely imagined problem - meanwhile almost all major american companies are reporting "Record profit growth" during these years that average income, employment, and basic cost of living have all gone to crap.
Ask yourself, where are the resources going people!?
I know it would be a huge investment, but it seems like it could be possible to build solar power plants (even molten salt energy storage types), tidal power off L.A. and/or San Francisco, even (if we have to) nuclear plants. Then use the electrical power to desalinate seawater. Plus, if there's surplus power (and there ought to be), retire fossil fuel power plants and help reduce global warming.
Maybe it's impractical, but it's not impossible, to get water from places that aren't the Colorado River.
Impractical = not worth trying
Also California will not have too much a problem with the Colorado river drying up because it has its own aqueduct system and other water sources. However, for Utah, Arizona, Colorado, its pretty much a death sentence.
There’s a proposal to pump floodwaters from the northern Mississippi watershed over to reservoirs in the Colorado watershed. That ought to be much more energy-efficient per gallon of water than desal.
One interesting result of desalinating sea water is an excess of salt and where to dump it. ALTHOUGH scientists are designing better batteries that use salt to increase efficiency and durability of EVs. (There are problems to solve with this tech.)
@@Enoo-Wynn I mean if anything California has the Salton sea so might as well pump the waste water there.
You should do one on the Great Salt Lake and how it is disappearing. That could completely devastate huge areas of the west and spread cancer to millions.
I have a solution: get rid of the aquaduct stealing water for Los Angeles, which is actually nowhere near the Colorado River, and allows them to steal more than 1.2 million acre-feet of water each year.
It's not "theft" if they pay for it, according to legal agreements.
Moreover, the cities are *not* the problem. The hundreds of millions of acres of irrigated farmland in the deserts, are the problem
@@thomashiggins9320 Oh, you mean the farmland next to the Colorado River with NO OTHER ACCESS TO WATER? Did California tap into the Salton Sea, Diamond Valley Lake, Lake Eisnore, Lake Matthews? They have the Santa Clara river, and the Santa Ana river. No, they go to the complete other side of the state to take water from a river that borders other states who have no other access to water.
Face it, that city has had shit planning for the last 30-40 years. Not just water. it's beyond the scope of this discussion to debate the rolling blackouts, the shit and needles all over the sidewalks, or the rampant homelessness.
Good program, Joe, I wish more people would take climate change seriously. I will recommend your program to others--not that they'll watch it mind you, in my experience I find that most people are tired of it (as you said) ALWAYS being about climate change. Too bad, it's gonna get worse. We have a very small yard so we could only put in two water tanks to collect the rain, 500 and 300 gallon poly tanks. We can collect almost all the rain that falls on our roof with a tank on each side of the house. We took out all our grass and I built raised beds separated by narrow walkways all over the yard. We use the collected rain to water our gardens where we raise vegetables and medicinal herbs (my spouse is an herbalist) and 3 tiny fruit trees. Another thing that many people don't know to do is grow plants that support the local bird and insect populations, especially we need early and late season plants that will feed pollinators like bees and bumble bees. Bumble bees are functionally extinct in Oregon, Idaho, portions of Montana, and are disappearing in many more places. It's good to leave out bowls of water for all the critters too, especially in the winter it is hard for birds to find water if it's cold, so heated dishes are recommended.
Another irritating subject is the painful truth that the meat-based diet is an environmental disaster. Meat production is the most water intensive and wasteful industry in the country. Going vegan is the most useful action that any of us can take on an individual basis.
You're straight up lying about it being the most water intensive and wasteful industry. Have you seen how leather and denim are produced? How metals are mined? How a lot of power is generated? How paint is made? Alkali and chlorine production? Paperboard mills? Wineries? Pesticide manufacturing? Synthetic dyes and pigment manufacturing? Adhesives manufacturing? Industrial gas manufacturing? Distilleries?
I'd rather eat meat and give up leather and denim, convert to liquid salt power generation and mine metals in a more ecologically friendly way. Steak, bacon and mincemeat are some of the only things I look forward to in my deeply depressing life.
www.statista.com/statistics/1175813/water-intensive-industrial-sectors-united-states/
How about you do some basic research and cite some sources next time, because it didn't take me more than 15 seconds to find a source from people who are a genuinely qualified authority on the data, copy that link and paste it here. It's the bare minimum standard.
@@jamielonsdale3018
I tried to access the website that you listed in your post but they wanted a $39 fee which I don't have. I won't call you a liar because that's not polite. On the other hand, I have had a career in agribusiness in the US and I actually know a little about it since I have worked with cattle, hogs, chickens, and even a few sheep and horses.
While I cannot speak to your website I will note that most of the sites that address this issue are quite constrained in what they count against the meat industry for water usage. First and foremost, the greatest amount of water which is usually not even counted are the billions of gallons used to raise all the feed for livestock. You need to realize that a vast percentage of the corn, soybeans, and other grains that are actually human edible are fed to livestock in a process that is a protein production system in reverse in that it takes around 100 pounds of grains to produce 1 pound of a finished meat product. Those grains could feed a huge number of people if they actually ate the grain themselves instead of filtering it through livestock. Another use of water that is rarely added in is the amount that is consumed by the cattle themselves, but even if you add that in it is still fairly modest when compared to the water polluted by the billions of tons of untreated manure that the meat industry dumps into the water ways of the US. The pollution of our water by manure, chemicals fed to livestock (sub-clinical doses of antibiotics used to increase growth in confinement operations), and fertilizer run-off causing eutrophication in rivers, lakes, bays, and in the oceans should also be counted against the meat industry. So too should all the water that is used to clean all the processing facilities where the animals are killed, butchered, processed, hung for cooling, chopped and packaged. All the water used to produce the electricity to run all the refrigeration in all those plants and facilities should also be added to the account. Then of course we have all the refrigerated warehouses, distribution centers, grocery stores, and home refrigerators and freezers too. Before we move on we need to add in all the water used to raise pasture for the somewhat-more free roaming cattle and we also need to address all the water polluted by damage to riparian zones all across the western US, the streams that no longer support the local fish populations due to cows having eaten the stream side vegetation thus rendering the water too warm for the native fish. Free range cattle are a disaster to the water resources on the land where they are grazed. I know about this from a personal perspective because a piece of land I owned was practically destroyed by my neighbors cattle since the whole are was zoned "open range" which meant that cows had the right-of-way and one had to fence them OUT while the owner had no responsibility for any damage they did. The spring and the creek I had were so polluted with manure and the riparian zones so denuded of vegetation that once I got it fenced it took about a decade for me to restore it. I am willing to bet your source did not include many of the things that I have added, that is the difference between living with it instead of using 15 seconds to look up something on the internet which is neither complete nor accurate.
I think that the real "meat" of your position is stated most clearly in your second paragraph. You are terrified that you will be deprived of something you love to eat, something that is the only thing you can look forward to in your depressing life. Your response to me had more vitriol than was called for so I could see right away that I had hit a nerve. Sorry about that, it wasn't my intent to hit you where it hurts. Rather, I am concerned about the water shortages that are appearing all over the world due to the changing climate, the pollution of our aquifers, rivers, and the oceans. We have to begin to rein in our activities (like fracking) that are putting our water supplies in danger. Look at the Southwest of the US, millions of acres of farm land is being fallowed and more will be in the coming years due to the changing climate which is shifting rainfall patterns all over the planet.
I often try to give sources when I write even though I know that most people won't look at them. Carol Adams wrote an interesting book called THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF MEAT in which she looked at how meat is perceived in American culture traditionally and currently. She looks at the long history of eating meat being synonymous or at least associated with masculinity. "Real men eat meat" as the saying goes. A look at what cattle have done in the Western US is presented in SACRED COWS At the Public Trough by Denzel and Nancy Ferguson. In his book DIET FOR A NEW AMERICA John Robbins talks at length about the environmental damage that the meat-based diet does.
Way to spread the holiday cheer Joe! Existential angst at its finest 👌🏻
@MINI DIVA nah, I think it’s serious. I just live in the southeast so eh… ya know?
It's always so crazy to me how different local climates can be, I'm in Pennsylvania and we have too much water. The last decade has had so much flooding. And since we have our water collect in aquafers we don't count on snow during winter. Basically every creek and stream just starts randomly out of a hill no snow melt needed (nor are our mountains tall enough to keep it frozen long term)
We have been having somewhat similar problems in Australia with the Murray Darling river-system. It is an incredibly important system going through the countries best arable land and most populated regions.
Up until recently it was suffering from severe long term drought and mismanagement. A La Nina phase has pulled it back from the brink a tad though, but all that has done is to kick the can down the road a bit and put the issues on the back burner.
It is worth knowing that the management of the river system has been bought out one way or another by cotton growing interests in what is mostly the head of the system.
Cotton, in the driest continent on Earth. We aren't known for being overly smart in Australia....
But, but, freedom 'nd capitalism 'nd stuff!!!
re: "mismanagement" - gov''t selling water to China doesn't help. supply
@@johnestes31 1.9% of Australia's water entitlements is owned by China. 1.9% is owned by the US. 1.1% is owned by the UK. And 5.5% is owned by a number of other countries.
89.6% is owned by Australia.
I find it interesting that Skynews and other right-leaning news corporations only focus on China's ownership of these water entitlements. It is almost as if they are pushing an agenda... nah, couldn't be. The corporate news would never be dishonest.
@@thechloromancer3310 I don't watch the news & I don't make assumptions. My point was why sell any water (China's whatever % in the specific location mentioned) when every drop counts? I'm not judging - which is why I said it's either financial advice or a call for an uprising. And you're right about the news - on the same team as the left & right.
Edit: Just to be clear I'm saying all 3 are on the same team & the propaganda machine media is why people think choosing a side matters.
@@johnestes31 I agree with you that selling water to foreign entities makes no sense when water shortages are a real concern. My issue was with singling out China, especially in the context of a geopolitical cold war being whipped up by the US.
I feel that Australia's leadership has erred greatly by allowing itself to become a pawn for the US in this ideological/geopolitical battle. Australia has enough resources and leverage to stand up for its own interests and vision, rather than allow itself to be subservient to either China or the US. Hopefully the next Australian administration will recognize this and return to a policy of doing what is best for Australia - and that may include better management of Australian resources to serve the people of Australia first and foremost.
Switching away from an implied-scarcity economic model based on endless debt, would be a great start. Maybe go watch the Zeitgeist Movement films and realize how old the solution has been out there and buried by slander. Humanity without Money. It was the answer then, still is now.
In the words of Sam Kinison, “Of course there is no water… You live in the EFFING DESERT, AGGGGHHHHH. I got an idea why don’t you move where the water is!”
One of my best friends rated the grand canyon and cataract canyon this summer. There is rapids in both coming back thar haven't been seen since the dams were built. On the one hand, it's kinda neat. On the other it is absolutely devastating, we have faced the worst fire season colorado has ever had. The Boulder fire just more than doubled the record for most homes burnt in a single fire. Our local reservoir is the lowest it's been since it was filled, out of the last 5 years 4 of them have also hit that mark....
Hey Joe can you talk about the shipping containers shortage, it's really interesting imo and i just think I'd make an interesting video.
also! love your videos, honestly. I've binged watched all of them and re-watch some multiple times lol.
it really shows how much effort is out into the videos
thankyou
@@BREEDIN420 Give it a rest already.
The shipping container shortage was last year and is over.
@@BREEDIN420 she just thought it would be an interesting video idea, who knows, maybe he would take your point of view. Don’t yell at someone just because they brought up a very interesting idea for a potential video he could make.
@@BREEDIN420 Sadly you are woefully misinformed and almost blind.
@@BREEDIN420 It’s not that hearing the truth is the issue, it’s that you’re griping for no reason other than to gripe. If you have a problem, shut up and go fix it!
Massive increase in hydroponic farming and filling up the salton sea area to the brim would help, altough the latter would demand some sacrifices because some cities would be have to be removed completely and so would some of the farming area, then again, if it would be sort of extension of the sea, many other opportunities would rise for the people.
Where are they gonna get the water from for the hydroponics if those lakes and rivers are gone? :) just a thought
@@cherrydragon3120 There's plenty of water, as long as the efficiency of it's usage is maximized, like with hydroponics, there's also other techniques to save water.
If The Salton sea area would be flooded, it would also raise the air moisture, which then again would make the climate of the wider area less dry and thus less needy of water.
They took all the trees, and put em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them
No, no, no
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot
Oh, bop, bop, bop
Oh, bop, bop, bop
Call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye.......
Well, that song is stuck in my brain now. I guess I don’t mind.
@@Reach41 Yes, if a song must be stuck in your brain it might as well be a good one.
Yes, I saw this drop when it was already well on it’s way in 2013, just in May - so almost nine years ago! Why didn’t they do something then? This is like closing the barn door two months after the horse ran off.