re: #43 freetoken

BTW, my whole take on Sharron Angle is that she is the perfect result of the nuttiness that is endemic to Vegas and the surrounds. It’s a fantasy world propped up by addiction.

Reality is coming their way, though. I’ve been meaning to post something on Lake Meade, water, and the big problem that is emerging, and with today’s special issue of PNAS on Southwestern drought it’s probably a good time to do it so if I can I will later.

What Las Vegas is about to experience is their water being cut back (more than the voluntary restrictions to date.) Someday it may just be cut off. Those fantasies, including the “patriotic” ones, are going to come crashing down.

This is the first small shoot of a tree that will grow much bigger and bear bitter fruit. As temperatures drift higher and precipitation tends more to come as rain and less as snow, water supplies will get increasingly tight.

For a while, cities such as Las Vegas will cope by reducing their water use. Xeriscaping, reduced-flow toilets, washing machinery that uses less water, and so forth will be put in place.

The best way to move this along would be to price water however high it has to go to drive demand down to meet the supply, but even Republicans lack the moral courage to bear bad news to the voters. Instead, the job will be accomplished by the less efficient and more disruptive expedient of rationing.

Las Vegas, and the West generally, face another problem. Cities that live by cheap transportation for light and casual purposes die by expensive transportation. Cities where everything is far from everything else are in that much worse a fix.

The decline and fall of this sector of the nation will drive millions to seek for human-driven explanations for the slow disaster, rather than look the facts in the face: exhaustion of oil+AGW=trouble.

And we in this country will be far less hard hit than many. The first few decades of a disaster that can assume near-comic dimensions, or be the ruin of our civilization, are pretty much baked in the cake. After that, what will happen will depend on what we do in the meantime.

Bangladesh is in for it. So is Pakistan, it would seem. China, Vietnam, Australia, India perhaps? And random other places that if we could simulate the climate well enough, we’d be able to name, but as it is, we just know the tornado will put down here and there and deal out random destruction.