By Rick Manning
Global warming alarmists are continually looking for evidence to support their doomsday predictions and just last year, Lake Mead, which results from the Hoover Dam in Nevada, was a prime focal point.
Why should you care? The water levels of Lake Mead serve as a cautionary tale when believing apocalyptic headlines that generate clicks, and cause heads to nod in the “woke” we are all going to die if we don’t end the American economy as we know it within ten years crowd.
The water levels of Lake Mead had dropped more than 45 feet in the three years from January of 2020 to December of 2022. Knowing ‘scientists’ worried that the Lake could approach ‘dead pool’ levels in the near future ending the electricity generation from the dam. A catastrophic event for the Las Vegas and Phoenix population centers.
A December 2022 CNN article worries that “dead pool” status could be reached in two years unless drastic action was taken. To put that worry into perspective, at its lowest level, Lake Mead would have had to drop another fifty feet to become non-functional at the time of the warning.
But something unexpected happened in 2023. It rained and snowed a lot in the California Sierra Nevada mountain range, but more significantly, the Rocky Mountains in Utah and Colorado also received above average rainfall and snow — increasing run off throughout the year. Now, Lake Mead’s water level is a whopping 23 feet higher than a year prior, cutting the effects of the three-year drought in half.
In spite of the erasure of the 2022 drought due to significant rain fall and snow pack generated in the winter of 2022 and spring of 2023, the Las Vegas Review Journal reports that the U.S. Bureau of Land Reclamation continues to predict gloom writing, “Lake Mead is projected to reach near-record lows in 2025, although a hydrologist warns the forecasts are uncertain.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation this month released its November 2023 projections for Lake Powell and Lake Mead’s water levels, which showed Lake Mead’s water levels could reach 1,040.77 feet in September 2025, close to the lake’s record low of 1,040.58 feet in July 2022.
The levels are then projected to rise to 1,043.33 feet in October 2025, according to the forecast, which is used to determine shortage conditions for the Colorado River system for the coming year.”
But then comes the kicker as the LVR continues by quoting Paul Miller, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center in Salt Lake City, saying, “[I]t is unclear what the Colorado River Basin will look like in 2025 in terms of weather conditions and water levels. Many factors that contribute to Lake Mead’s water levels could change the projection, such as how much water will be released from Lake Powell and the amount of snowpack that accumulates and melts before entering the river system.”
In other words, in spite of the official report that Lake Mead is heading back to potentially disastrous water levels, an actual expert on the Colorado River from the National Weather Service admits that they have no idea what the weather will be like in the next two years, negating the entire global warming projected long-term drought prediction.
And this is why I wrote this oped. I follow the Lake Mead water levels because I am from California and clearly southern California’s dense population combined with the population growth in Las Vegas, Nevada and Phoenix, Arizona put a strain on Colorado River water supplies.
But the dire climate-based predictions are little more than politically based, blind-folded dart throwing. When the climate guys can’t tell you what the rainfall will be next week, month or year, you are right to be skeptical when they create news releases for near future disasters with headlines that would embarrass creators of the Sharknado movie series.
Note: As I write this, two atmospheric rivers are projected to dump significant rain/snow on the California Sierra Nevada Mountains with an unknown effect on Lake Mead water levels. Somewhere a climate disaster public relations agent is busily spinning up a story about how climate change is causing these Pacific Ocean moisture bombs, ignoring that similar rainstorms have regularly hit California as the first American residents of Sacramento were flooded out in 1862 due to the same effect. A flood which put much of the state’s Central Valley underwater extending north to the Columbia River on the northern Oregon border into both Idaho and Utah. Hint: this was before the industrial revolution.
Note 2: Tulare Lake has reemerged in central California in 2023 years after drying up. Not a single climate expert predicted that central California communities would be flooded out due to the massive rains of 2023, and that a forgotten natural lake would defy all of the flood controls built by man to overtake the land once again.
Remember Tulare Lake when the man-made climate change experts demand the destruction of the U.S. economy in order to stop a half degree increase of temperatures on the planet. Hint – they are guessing motivated by a political agenda.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
Originally published by the Daily Torch. Republished with permission.
To read more about California water handling, click here.
To read more about the Colorado River, click here.
I’m giving the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation an F- grade for its pseudo science modelling of the Lake Mead water surface elevations in September and October 2025. What a joke and a farce. Are you trying to convince me that the government (which manages to bungle up everything else it touches) somehow has the ability to measure to a hundredth’s of a foot precision what the water surface elevation will be almost two years in the future? Weathermen can barely predict with somewhat reasonable probability a week into the future. But we are supposed believe the ‘science’ of their model that they can predict years into the future and over multiple watersheds that contribute to the lake and a myriad of ever changing weather conditions and patterns, and unknown releases from Lake Powell that we should trust their numbers? At best, it is a guess on their part. And actually quite deceptive because the implication is that they have science to back their claims coupled with the resources, history and knowledge to go about with certainty to the hundredth’s of a foot of precision. There is a difference between precision and accuracy. They are very precise, but only time will tell how far they missed on accuracy. Nevertheless, based on their models, and no doubt without an explanation that at best it is a guess, data from USBR and others will be given/shared to the liberal media (which has long since ignored true science) and ‘environmental’ groups/agencies (ditto) in an attempt to scare people and deceive them into the manufactured crisis of ‘climate change’. We laugh at the superstitions people in the maedieval ages believed, but I’m afraid we’re not much different from them, and we certainly haven’t learned lessons from history.