Sunday, Feb. 20, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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New scientific research puts the severity of the Western drought into stark perspective and serves as a red-alert warning about the needs to address climate change and water insecurity.
Recently, a research team led by UCLA environmental scientist Park Williams concluded that the West’s current 22-year drought is the worst the region has experienced in at least 1,200 years, and quite possibly longer.
More troubling yet, this current drought is being driven significantly by a factor that wasn’t involved in the other dry periods — human-caused climate change. That means the current conditions stand to only get worse, perpetually, unless we change.
The new study, published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, was based on modern soil-moisture measurements as well as tree-ring estimates that give a reliable picture of aridity dating to the year 800. The data yielded the conclusion that today’s megadrought topped the previously worst one, which occurred in the 1500s.
Williams and his team said megadroughts typically last about 20 years, but the current one has dragged on for 22. Although 2019 was a relatively wet year that seemed to signal that the dry spell might finally break, both 2020 and 2021 were unusually dry. That alarmed climate researchers, because it was an indication that the climate was no longer following its natural and long-established patterns.
Based on that concern, the research team used more than two dozen models to examine how the drought would have played out without the sharp rise in greenhouse gas emissions that has driven global warming. They concluded that climate change was responsible for 42% of the conditions. Minus the tens of billions of tons of CO2 being released into the atmosphere every year, they said, the current drought most likely wouldn’t have reached megadrought status, but rather would have been broken up by occasionally wet years.
If this isn’t a reason to take urgent action on global warming, nothing is. To put the 1,200-year span in perspective, there hasn’t been a drought this bad in the West since at least the time of Charlemagne, the Byzantine Empire and the rise of the Vikings. And the stretch may be even longer, given that tree-ring data is only reliable back to that era.
Now, in a supposedly more enlightened time, we’ve badly damaged the planet and created an existential threat for ourselves in the West and across the globe through our overuse of fossil fuels.
Westerners have seen the effects of this play out before our eyes for years — in wildfires that have grown exponentially in scope and severity, in dwindling water supplies, in ever-increasing heat and ever-lengthening heat spells, etc.
Meanwhile, a combination of population growth and dwindling inflow of water into the Colorado River is putting the water supply for tens of millions of residents in the Southwest at increasing risk.
The situation is not sustainable on our current path. Western states must ratchet up their water conservation efforts and work together to more equitably share the decreasing water supply. We need far more innovative partnerships like the one between the Southern Nevada Water Authority and its counterpart in Los Angeles, where the SNWA is contributing funding for a treatment system that will allow L.A. to recycle its wastewater like we do here. The new system will help protect Las Vegas’ water supply by allowing Los Angeles to reduce its draw on the Colorado.
On a broader scale, the West needs the Biden administration to establish a presidential commission on water issues, which would examine the situation from all angles. Creating this federal-level panel would allow for a comprehensive review of distribution policies, various covenants and water use projections toward boosting conservation, reducing the draw on water supplies and aiding communities in recapturing, purifying and reusing water.
Equally critical are policies to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions that are fueling climate change. More progress must be made in developing renewable energy sources, facilitating greater use of electric vehicles, improving energy efficiency of homes and buildings, and so forth.
Nevada has made significant strides in climate and water policy in recent years — including by establishing statewide targets for increased generation of renewable energy and increased use of electric vehicles, adopting a first-in-the-nation ban on strictly ornamental turf on non-residential properties to reduce our water usage, and much more.
In Southern Nevada, we’ve also elected national leaders who recognize the need for action on a federal and international level on climate change.
But so much climate damage has been done already, we have much more work to do to repair it. As the drought study showed, we’ve dug ourselves a hole of historic depth.
