"Absolutely Unprecedented" Drought, Infestation In Western Forests - CBS

FLAGSTAFF, AZ - "Just outside this mountain town, where the acres of ponderosa pine turn into a Christmas green blur, Tom Whitham eyes the weary, struggling forest. Death is everywhere. Their limbs bare and bark brittle, the trees quickly turn this forest into an aching reminder of the devastation of drought and a massive bark beetle infestation. Whitham pulls his pickup truck over and gestures to the dead trees - 75 percent in this area alone.

Forget talk of global warming and speculation of what it might do in 50 years, or 100. Here and across the West, climate change already is happening. Temperatures are warmer, ocean levels are rising, the snowpack is dwindling and melting earlier, flowers bloom earlier, mountain glaciers are disappearing and a six-year drought is killing trees by the millions.

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The West is unique in that it depends so heavily on snowpack - melting snow provides three-fourths of the water in streams. Over the past 35 years, temperatures across the region have inched up 1 to 3 degrees, causing the snow to melt as much as three weeks earlier, said Kelly Redmond, regional climatologist for the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, Nev. Lilac and honeysuckle bloom up to 10 days earlier. Warmer temperatures lead to a huge surge in woody plants that thrive in warm, wet conditions. Glaciers are retreating, roads are buckling in Alaska and shifting some supports on the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Already-low reservoirs are called upon to water fields and quench thirst for longer and longer periods after the seasonal snowpack is gone.

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Mike Wagner saw it coming. He predicted a beetle outbreak years ago in northern Arizona when he saw how abundant older trees were in overcrowded forests. When the drought began, the beetles were ready. By 2002, trees weakened by drought were unable to fend off the beetles, and they were soon overcome. Tens of millions of trees across the West have been killed at a rate never seen before. "Absolutely unprecedented," said Wagner, a regents' professor of forest entomology at Northern Arizona. "We've never had these conditions before, never had that combination." Scientists expect another devastating beetle outbreak this year."

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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/03/national/main615288.shtml

The forest fires that happen because of our outrageously dry conditions will kill off most of the beetles.

Let Bush's buddies in the foresty industry cut down all the trees....end of problem!

LA and Phoenix would become ghost-towns. But the nightmare wouldn't end there. If there's a mass-exodus, all those people have to go somewhere else. But where? Who would take them in? And how much of our nation's food is grown in the southwest? What would the impact be of losing that food production capacity?

for about 30% of the value of US agricultural produce, but much of this produce was high value crops. California produces things like fruit, strawberries, artichokes, almonds, dates, figs, etc. (Incredibly they grow rice in California.) Much of the produce was associated with the Imperial Valley, "the salad bowl of the nation," which is wholly dependent on Colorado River Water.

The Colorado will not dry up, though. Its flow may be greatly reduced, but there will still be some water in it. The question is, who will get what's left? I suspect that when push comes to shove, the agricultural interests will lose the water (but maybe not the money) simply because there are, at the end of the day, more votes in LA.

The ultimate solution, of course, would be desalination, which has it's own set of severe environmental problems, not to mention that it is a huge energy consumer. Much will depend on whether the United States is completely bankrupt or whether it has enough money to make the necessary investments and consumables associated with desalination, investments that will, like it or not, have a pretty profound environmental impact. It happens that some of the energy required for desalination is available from co-generation systems, but co-generation systems do have operational difficulties. The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant had a flash distillation unit that operated for some time, but they have replaced it with with a reverse osmosis system that the operate off of surplus electricity on off peak hours. The flash distiller as I understand it, didn't fail, but the RO proved to be cheaper to run. (That plant gets all of its fresh water from desalination systems.)

Irrespective of possible solutions, it ain't pretty folks. It ain't pretty. The water crisis that's coming is going to make the alleged "oil crisis" seem like small potatoes.