https://tinyurl.com/ybe67mfa
The Drought in the West Is Bad and It's Gonna Get Worse
The signs (like dry rivers) and symptoms (the wave of early-season fires)
are cascading on top of each other .. Now the future is here - hotter,
drier, sooner than predicted, and scarier than imagined. We can't call
these climatic conditions a drought anymore, because that implies it will
end ..
By June 1, snowpack in the Sierra Nevada was at zero percent of its
average .. After a record-breaking fire year in 2020, wildfire risks were
already high, and the state's agriculture industry .. was facing shortages
and cutting crops to compensate. In Oregon, fragile, threatened salmon
are dying because streams and lakes are drying up. Wide swaths of northern
New England and the upper Midwest are abnormally dry. Even Hawaii is at
elevated risk for wildfires.
In the Colorado River Basin .. the two big reservoirs in the system, Lake
Powell and Lake Mead, are crashing toward their lowest levels ever and
approaching elevations that will trigger the first-ever federally mandated
usage cutbacks .. And we're ignoring scientific limits and increasing
demand while climate change is shrinking our supply even further .. You
can already sense the drought from the rivers this spring, and as this
year's snowpack flows downstream, I'm sure we're going to feel the impacts
of heat and drought and fire in so many other ways. At this point, we can
only assume it's going to get worse ..