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by tony_cannistra
663 days ago
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Indeed. Worse, it's likely that "one of these years" will turn into "most of these years" before long. It sounds like you know this already, but the core issue here is that the 1922 agreement which divided the river's flow to various stakeholders overestimated the amount of water in the river even before the impacts of our modern warmer, drier climate. We're left with the consequences of this overestimate mostly in the form of gridlocked renegotiation conversations as the agreement is reworked for the modern resource scenario. Probably the biggest tl;dr here is: it's not going to be 60 million people fighting over water. It's going to be far fewer, and they're all alfalfa farmers. |
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Nit: on average, the world will get wetter as it warms. Warmer air carries more water, so the volume of precipitation each year is likely to increase averaged over the planet.
The issue for many of these areas is that that increased precipitation is not going to be evenly distributed. The trend has been wetter areas getting wetter, drier areas getting drier, and increased warmth causing increased evaporation and less snowpack persistence into summer.