Western Water, or lack thereof

Warmer wetter winters, warmer drier summers. The future for stream dwelling salmonids ain't lookin' so rosey.
 
Someone recommended the book The West without Water on another thread - after reading it based on that plug, I’d recommend it to anyone. We are not ready for what’s likely coming.
 
Scientists say you can’t attribute a weather event to climate change, and that is technically right. A whole lot of weather over time is the data used to assess a climate, and so they ARE related. If the climate is changing it is natural that our expectations of what weather we will see should also change. I’ve been around the sun in the PNW 68 times now, and this winter is the first one I’ve seen like this. I like to ski so I get a close look at the snowpack each year.
Personally, I believe that watching weather anomalies happen and then talking about how you can’t attribute it to climate change is a dodge that political entities would love the conversation to be, rather than talk about what we could be doing to address the problem that is quite likely mostly human caused. I understand that climate is described by cumulative data over time and that many things can happen within a period that would be long enough to define a regional climate but just look at the records that are set practically every year, and it is pretty easy to see that it’s time to change what we are doing.
Humans have proved to me that the global climate system, the biological systems, hydrologic systems, atmospheric chemistry, etc. are far too complicated for our little pea brains to understand. Anyway most humans think that what they want right now is more important than all of that stuff, so they justify it however they can. All of us who enjoy fishing, or having fish in rivers and lakes even if we don’t fish for them, should not be so short sighted. The problem with the food web in the ocean is likely highly influenced by the changes in climate that have already happened. There are other factors, also mostly with humans being the root cause.
I am highly suspicious of the idea of tapping into a giant aquifer to solve the water problems that our short sightedness have gotten us into, because the same short sightedness and lack of understanding of this world we live in has gotten us and every other living thing that depends on working environmental systems in trouble over and over again.
 
I heard frogs this afternoon, and quite a few too.
 
Mossback said:
I heard frogs this afternoon, and quite a few too.
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Yep, been hearing them as well.
All the underbrush buds in the park across the street is already popping. That seems about 2-3 weeks early to me.
SF
 
bobduck said:
but will it be done intelligently? And.....don't tell the Californians.
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The coming water wars between New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Socal is going to get real when taps run dry. And all those AI data centers being built at the cost of trillions? One large AI data center can run through as much water as a town of 50,000.
It should be mandatory that a massive desalination water supply infrastructure fund is tied to AI data center development to compensate for their impact.
 
Didn't know that data centers have huge water requirements in addition to energy. Figures, I guess.
 
Here at the base of Hood we are actually positive on the water year. However, is has been warm rain up top as well as down low so there is almost 0 snow pack. We are going to need a huge spring snowfall to get anywhere near even. Scary times indeed.
 
Salmo_g said:
Didn't know that data centers have huge water requirements in addition to energy. Figures, I guess.
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"AI data centers consume massive amounts of water for cooling, often millions of gallons daily per facility, with total industry consumption estimated in the hundreds of billions of gallons annually. This high usage, driven by the intense heat generated during AI training and operations, often strains local water resources in water-scarce regions, raising concerns about sustainability and environmental impact"

In 2001 I was a project manager on the build-out of the largest data center at that time in Silicon Valley. We had to jump through hoops to get permits for the water consumption it would consume at full run status, requiring us to pay an offset infrastructure mitigation penalty. That data center of 30,00 sq' racked 3,000 servers.
The Stargate complex in Texas under construction will rack over 100,000 servers within 4M sq' when completed.
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Flymph said:

Consider above snow packs along with long range weather forecasts and you are probably destroying your winter snow tires.
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Terms of snow taaarrhhs i always head in to A LES SCHWAB. Drive around the Intermountain West highway roads, hittin LES SCHWAB locations. Talkin taarrhs while waiting to take a shit
 
Utah is at about 50% of average snowpack this year based off a local newsweather diagram I saw today. Good news is the groud is fairly saturated from December rain. Bad news is there isn't much snowpack to fill any reservoirs. Other bad news is that there are more thirsty, giant data centers being constructed to pile on the water usage (about 70% of the state consumption) for alfalfa production in the desert. Something has to give. Running the B-section of the Green through Red Creek at sub 800-CFS is getting old in a hard boat. I need to learn how to row better or just find a lake.
 
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