Daniel Salzler No. 1197 EnviroInsight.org Four Items April 14, 2023
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1.Did This Winter Solve The Colorado River Crisis? No – But It Took Some Pressure Off, For Now.
Phoenix CNN — Across the Southwest, the signs of a phenomenal winter are everywhere. Snow blankets the tops of the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles. And in downtown Phoenix, the Salt and Verde rivers are full.
After three years of record-breaking drought and plummeting water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, water officials and experts across the West are now looking at more snow and water than they can handle.
While many are not ready to declare the crisis on the Colorado River solved, they feel the blockbuster winter means basin states should no longer have to cut up to 25% of the basin’s water usage that was called for last year by Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton, the river’s top federal official.
“We can probably create the protection levels with cuts not as big as what she described,” Arizona’s top water official Tom Buschatzke told CNN. “I think that might help us get to the place we need to be.”
After more than a year of contentious negotiations between Arizona, California and other Western states on how exactly to distribute those cuts, Buschatzke and other officials say the wet winter has taken some of the pressure off.
On Tuesday, the Interior Department and Bureau of Reclamation are expected to release the first installment of an environmental analysis examining what different volumes of Colorado River cuts will look like for the cities, farmers and tribes who all depend on the water.
The wet winter likely won’t be reflected in Reclamation’s analysis, according to Bill Hasencamp, the manager of Colorado River Resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides water to Los Angeles.
“People in the upper basin are dealing with feet and feet and feet of snow. The snowpack is still increasing,” Hasencamp told CNN. “It’s a completely different trend than we’ve seen the last three years. This is definitely going to make a huge difference in the short run. But people don’t want to go too far because they don’t want to go back to complacency.”
Still, others are cautioning that one historic winter will only delay the inevitable pain of water cuts, as years of overuse collide with climate change-fueled droughts.
As welcome as the reprieve this winter is, if water usage isn’t cut by up to 25%, “we will crash that system,” said Cynthia Campbell, water resources management adviser for the city of Phoenix, told CNN. “I think we’re going to come right back to that conclusion in a year – in a very short amount of time.”
Biden administration takes water-saving action. Even with the possible short-term reprieve from this winter’s snowpack, the Biden administration is readying a flurry of Colorado River announcements as it scrambles to deal with a fast-growing crisis in the Western US.
On Tuesday, the federal government’s highly anticipated analysis will compare several scenarios on the Colorado River – comparing taking no action with other water-cutting scenarios of various degrees. The Biden administration is expected to select a preferred scenario this summer.
But the administration is also hoping to incentivize water cuts by paying cities, tribes and farmers to reduce water use for the next few years. Source: By Ella Nilsen, CNN; Photographs by Will Lanzoni, CNN Published 12:17 PM EDT, Mon April 11, 2023
2. Even If You Don’t Live In Tucson, PLEDGE TO SAVE WATER – The 2023 Wyland National Foundation Mayors’ Challenge for Water Conservation is underway. Join Tucson Mayor Regina Romero and all Tucsonans in pledging to save water. It takes less than a minute to submit the survey about what you can do to save this precious resource. Pledge online by April 30 to make Tucson a winner for a fifth time. Source: April 10NewsNet Digest April 10, 2023
Pledge to save water
Watch a message from Mayor Romero
“A Guide to Responsible Desert Dwelling” water-saving tips
Tucson Water
3. As Earth Day Approaches (April 22) We Need To Recognize There Are Ten Things That Could Cause The End Of Civilization As We Know It. Civilizations don’t last forever.Just ask the Aztecs. Or the Maya. Or fans of the original Roman Empire. From the ancient Myceneans in the Mediterranean to the Anasazi in Arizona, societies throughout history have often gone the way of the dinosaurs and the dodo. Wars, or disease, or altered weather patterns, or natural disasters, or famine have repeatedly tipped complex regional societies past the point of stability, initiating chaos, ruin and ultimately total demise.
In his original unabridged dictionary, published in 1828, Noah Webster defined civilization as “the state of being refined in manners, from the grossness of savage life, and improved in arts and learning.”
Today civilization is a lot more complicated. Now civilization connotes global complexity and technological sophistication beyond anything Webster would have recognized. Civilization has become a state “marked by urbanization, advanced techniques (as of agriculture and industry), expanded population, and complex social organization,” as the most recent unabridged Webster’s dictionary describes it.
Civilization’s current stability depends on a vast global interdependence of countless connected components. Food and fuel, materials for manufacturing, clothing and housing — all require the cooperation of individuals, corporations and nations. Transportation, communication, economic activity anywhere affect everything everywhere (sometimes, all at once).
So far, the economic and social structures, governmental agencies and relevant public policies have managed to maintain something resembling Webster’s recent definition. But all that is under threat. Civilization is on the brink of breakdown. There’s no guarantee that 21st century civilization will last till the 22nd.
In fact, humankind now faces a multitude of credible existential threats of which everybody ought to be aware. Lack of space, though, requires that immediate warnings herein be restricted to the Top 10 Threats to the Survival of Civilization, with relevant movies noted. (Note to The Last of Us fans — fungal zombie apocalypse would have been No. 11.)
10. Alien invasion
Relevant movie: The War of the Worlds
An assault on Earth by extraterrestrials isn’t exactly likely anytime soon. Nevertheless, if spacefaring aliens did attack, they could easily destroy all earthly civilization. Even if they appeared to be friendly at first, don’t be fooled by a gift book from them titled To Serve Man. And don’t think Earth’s microbes will save us like they did in The War of the Worlds. If aliens possessed the technological capability for interstellar travel, they would also be smart enough to wear a damn mask.
9. Asteroid impact
Relevant movie: Armageddon
Not an immediate concern, yet more likely than an alien invasion. After all, an asteroid has already wiped out civilization on Earth once before. True, dinosaur civilization didn’t have the same kind of technology human civilization does. But a sufficiently big asteroid would certainly take down a lot of modern technology, and subsequent fires followed by global cooling would make a mess of the rest.
8. Bees all die.
Relevant movie: Bee Movie
According to Twitter, if bees all die, humans will soon all be dead as well. That prediction appears to derive from an Albert Einstein quote found widely on the internet: “If the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live.” Such a quote does not appear in the standard compilation of Einstein quotations, though, and nobody seems to have any evidence that he ever said it.
Still, the demise of the bees would be disastrous. Their pollination of important crops (coffee beans, for instance) keeps the world going. Bees are not the only important pollinators of course, but if some combination of pesticide poisoning and other calamities wiped out bees and other pollinating insects and animals, the consequences for humankind’s food supplies would be dire. Animal pollination is of at least some importance for the majority of the world’s food crops, a 2007 study concluded. Still, it’s unlikely that the human race would die out completely without pollinators. But civilization would probably collapse as the food chain (or web) unraveled, and there was no coffee.
7. Artificial intelligence takeover
Relevant movie: The Terminator (or Colossus: The Forbin Project)
A vast literature already exists describing the threats that artificial intelligence poses to civilization. Most such threats are minimal now, but as AI systems become more widespread, and both software and hardware become more sophisticated, AI’s destructive potential will pose an accelerating threat. For example, in a future in which civilization relies extensively on robots, a computer virus with AI capability could become a weapon for a malevolent cyberattack. “If the attack is on a very large scale, affecting billions of sophisticated robots with a large degree of autonomy, it may result in human extinction,” wrote Alexey Turchin and David Denkenberger.
And of course, putting AI in charge of things like nuclear weapons might easily become just as dangerous in real life as it is in the movies. Already the military makes use of AI technologies and, in the future, will no doubt employ AI-powered drones and other robotic weapons with increasing frequency.
6. Quantum computing
Ordinary AI has the potential to be risky enough, so it shouldn’t be surprising to discover that quantum computing, in principle a much more powerful technology still in its infancy, poses even more serious dangers. Overhyped as it frequently is, quantum computing nevertheless might someday be able to perform specific tasks dramatically more rapidly than today’s supercomputers.“Quantum simulation … offers an exponential quantum speedup in understanding reaction mechanism in molecules and probing the properties of new materials,” quantum scientist Benjamin Schiffer wrote in a paper last year.
In malevolent hands, such power would also enable design of more effective poisons. Using quantum computers, a novel pandemic agent could be engineered without the need for time-consuming ordinary chemical trial and error.
5. Complexity’s instability
Relevant movie: The Butterfly Effect (title only — actual movie is irrelevant)
Any sufficiently complex system is at risk of reaching a tipping point where the slightest disturbance can initiate a collapse. So a seemingly insignificant event can trigger an apocalypse. It’s like the way at some point adding a single grain of sand to a large sandpile can cause it all to come tumbling down. Or the snap of a twig initiating an avalanche.
In 2000, geophysicists Didier Sornette and Anders Johansen warned that such analyses forecast a collapse of human population growth along with the mother of all economic crashes in the 2050s. Obviously, the economy and human population growth are key aspects of civilization as a whole. So these forecasts “point to the existence of an end to the present era, which will be irreversible and cannot be overcome by any novel innovation,” Sornette and Johansen wrote.
4. Social media
Relevant movie: Don’t Look Up
It’s already evident that social media platforms have amplified ideological idiocy propagated to deter efforts to prevent or diminish many of the threats to civilization. Anti-vaccination propaganda is a prominent example, as is the effort to dispel the dangers of climate change and block efforts to address it. Social media enables disseminators of falsehoods to manipulate the masses and intimidate governments (as well as many organizations within the supposedly legitimate mainstream media).
On its own, social media might not destroy civilization totally, just eliminate civilized discourse. But combined with other options for vast destruction, social media could accelerate civilization’s devastation while impeding efforts to prevent it.
3. Pandemic(s)
Relevant movie: I Am Legend
You would think that a pandemic that has killed more than a million Americans and many millions more people worldwide would launch a serious effort to guard against future pandemics. Instead, the pandemic has led not to strengthening of public health measures, but an official response telling everybody they’re on their own.
2. Nuclear war
Relevant movie: Dr. Strangelove
After World War II, nuclear war was the most likely end-of-civilization scenario, and it certainly became a popular theme for fictional accounts of civilization’s demise. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, though, many people who had been holding their breath since 1945 permitted themselves to exhale. But as long as nuclear arsenals remained undismantled, the threat continued, and now it may be greater than ever.
In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists pushed its famous doomsday clock to 90 seconds before midnight, the closest to global catastrophe in the clock’s history. The publication’s science and security board released a statement saying the new time was motivated largely, but not exclusively, by Russia’s war on Ukraine. “Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict — by accident, intention, or miscalculation — is a terrible risk.
1. Climate change
Relevant movie: Princess Mononoke
Scientists have been warning for more than a century that carbon dioxide emissions could alter the planet. Higher average temperatures, hotter summers, melting sea ice, severe droughts, more wildfires, more powerful hurricanes and yes, even stronger winter storms are already signaling that climate change is not a myth. International efforts to agree on steps to limit rising carbon dioxide levels have stumbled. Study after study has detailed the numerous negative consequences for agriculture, human health and social well-being. Catastrophic climate change could instigate wars, famine, revolution.
Of course, most of the risks to the civilization are not isolated threats. Climate change could trigger wars (see No. 2) or contribute to the spread of infectious diseases (No. 3), Kemp and colleagues note. And a United Nations report last year found that analyses of numerous related systemic risks “show a dangerous tendency for the world to move toward a global collapse scenario” in “the absence of ambitious policy and near global adoption and successful implementation.” In other words, without worldwide cooperation, “total societal collapse is a possibility.”
“The key is to get people to perceive that the threat is real,” she tweets, “but also that there are things we can do to effectively reverse the threat.” And therein lies the hope. Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at [email protected]
4. Snow Melt. The majority of Arizona’s snow has melted by now but here’s a little trivia quiz “for the next time”. What natural event causes snow to melter fast than any other? Answer Below.
Rain
Warm Winds
Fog
Sunny day
Source: The Weather Channel
Answer:
Fog
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