Editorial: Global warming punches new hole in water supply
Redding Record Searchlight - 11/5/03

It's an untimely assertion in a week when the temperature fell off a cliff, and up at Donner Pass the first ski lifts started running the day after Halloween, but global warming threatens to severely drain California's elaborate and expensive water storage system.

Oh, you holdout skeptics may scoff, but the science is clear enough for the people whose job is to ensure that our faucets are wet when we turn them on. This week in Sacramento, a Department of Water Resources forum [sic: Water Education Foundation with DWR support] will explain to water users some of the implications climatologists see in rising temperatures. The forecast is not pretty.

Before one cubic foot of concrete was poured in California, before the dams, the pumps, the aqueducts and the canals, the state had one of the most glorious water storage devices on the planet. It was all-natural, environmentally friendly and didn't cost taxpayers a dime: the Sierra Nevada snowpack. Every winter snow piled up in the mountains; every spring and summer it slowly released its life-giving powers.

The system still works, but the timing is a little off. Over the past 50 years, a slow but significant increase in winter temperatures has made it rain a little more when and where it once snowed. The snow line rises. Glaciers shrink. More water runs out to sea or floods the valley in the winter. Less is available in the summer. Large year-to-year fluctuations in the Sacramento River's runoff can't hide a dismal trend line.

Of course, isn't holding water why we built all those dams? Yes, but even massive Lake Shasta can only store so much at once. Farmers need deliveries in the late spring and summer. The only way to keep up a halfway reliable flow to their thirsty plots is for the mountains to do their part.

We don't mean to sound alarmist. The sky will not fall tomorrow, but the snow level will rise next year, and a little more the next. The water pros are looking to the future, and in time some combination of new reservoirs and better stewardship of watersheds will keep the fields of Fresno County fertile and the swimming pools of Los Angeles full.

In the meantime, as if Californians didn't have enough hot-under-the-collar water feuds, global warming will raise the political temperature a degree or two.