Western Drought Enters Its Sixth Year - CSM

[hatrack]

DILLON, MONT. – With a cloud of dust behind his pickup truck, Larry Martin drives through miles of barren ranch land. In a "normal spring," he'd be surrounded by green fields of alfalfa and barley stems half a foot high. But in passing his empty irrigation canal, then striding in cowboy boots along a barbed-wire fence buried in parched tumbleweed and windblown topsoil, Mr. Martin admits he's given up hope for a crop this year.

Today, he's praying that he can get by with a reduced cattle herd and hold on to the family ranch. Last week he watched a neighbor lose his property to foreclosure, and rumors are that scores of other ranching families may follow. "We were always told that tough times will make you bend, but a drought will break you," says Martin.

What hasn't broken here is the sixth consecutive year of drought, with portions of the usually verdant Rockies looking more like the Mojave Desert. In what scientists call a combination of drought cycles and global warming, nine Western states are seeing extreme dryness:

• In California, the high Sierra snowpack is melting faster and earlier than during any spring in 80 years.

• In Colorado, sinking reservoirs have brought restrictions for 1.2 million Denver water users, who now can irrigate their lawns only twice a week. Without spring rains, water use could be radically curbed and made more costly.

• In Arizona, where forests and soils are the driest in a century, fire danger is extremely high.

• And in New Mexico and Nevada, low rivers may spur fights between farmers and cities over scarce water sources."

EDIT

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0427/p03s01-usec.html

[denverbill]

1. Don't know if you are a Westerner or not.

I thought you'd be interested to know that Republicans, god love them, have a solution to Colorado's water shortage.

More logging. You see, if there are fewer trees in Colorado's forests, more water will run off the slopes.

Remarkably, that's the same solution they had to the problem of forest fires.

[hatrack]

2. Why does that not surprise me?

Why does that not surprise me one infintessimal fucking bit?

Two-dollar timber and gas whores.