Scientists are warning Utah officials that the Great Salt Lake is shrinking far faster than experts previously believed, and calling for a major reduction in water consumption across the American West in order to prevent the lake from disappearing in the next five years.
Researchers at Brigham Young University (BYU) led more than 30 scientists from 11 universities and advocacy groups in a report released this week showing that the lake is currently at 37% of its former volume, with its rapid retreat driven by the historic drought that’s continuing across the West.
Amid the climate crisis-fueled megadrought, the continued normal consumption of water in Utah and its neighboring states has led the Great Salt Lake to lose 40 billion gallons of water per year since 2020, reducing its surface level to 10 feet below what is considered the minimum safe level.
“Goodbye, Great Salt Lake,” tweeted the Environmental Defense Fund on Friday.
Goodbye, Great Salt Lake👋 Megadrought and mismanagement have cost the lake 73% of its water. Now experts are warning it could dry up in the next 5 years. And “Its disappearance could cause immense damage to Utah’s public health, environment, and economy”https://t.co/oecZ0qQ8C0
Scientists previously have warned that increased average temperatures in Utah—where it is now about 4°F warmer than it was in the early 1900s—are to blame for a 9% reduction in the amount of water flowing into the lake from streams.
The authors of the BYU study are calling on Utah officials to authorize water releases from the state’s reservoirs and cut water consumption by at least a third and as much as half to allow 2.5 million acre feet of water to reach the lake and prevent the collapse of its ecosystem as well as human exposure to dangerous sediments.
“This is a crisis,” BYU ecologist Ben Abbott, a lead author of the report, told The Washington Post. “The ecosystem is on life support, [and] we need to have this emergency intervention to make sure it doesn’t disappear.”
The shrinking of the Great Salt Lake has already begun creating a new ecosystem that is toxic for the shrimp and flies that make it their habitat, due to the lack of freshwater flowing in. That has endangered millions of birds that stop at the lake as they migrate each year.
The loss of the lake may also already be exposing about 2.5 million people to sediments containing mercury, arsenic, and other toxins.
“Nanoparticles of dust have potential to cause just as much harm if they come from dry lake bed as from a tailpipe or a smokestack,” Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, told the Post. Last month, Moench’s group applauded as Republican Gov. Spencer Cox’s administration, under pressure from residents, walked back its position supporting a plan to allow a magnesium company to pump water from the Great Salt Lake.
Abbott called the rapid shrinking of the lake “honestly jaw-dropping.”
“The lake’s ecosystem is not only on the edge of collapse. It is collapsing,” Abbott told CNN. “The lake is mostly lakebed right now.”
Greta Thunberg (weiĂźes T-Shirt und Megaphon mitte-rechts) und Luisa Neubauer (daneben in GrĂĽn) im Demonstrationszug von Fridays For Future, Berlin, 24.09.21
By Adam Aron, The Conversation
Global warming has increased the number of extreme weather events around the world by 400% since the 1980s. Countries know how to stop the damage from worsening: stop burning fossil fuels and shift to renewable energy, electrify transportation and industry, and reduce the carbon intensity of agriculture.
In my new book, “The Climate Crisis,” I lay out the mechanisms and impacts of the climate crisis and the reasons behind the lack of serious effort to combat it. One powerful reason is the influence that the fossil fuel industry, electric utilities and others with a vested interest in fossil fuels have over policymakers.
But there’s another reason for this inaction that everyone has the ability to change: response skepticism – the public doesn’t believe in its own political power enough or use it.
When people speak up and work together, they can spur powerful changes. You can see this in university students demanding that their chancellor retire the campus fossil fuel power plant and switch to renewable electricity. You can also see it in ranchers in Colorado pushing their governor to enact a clean electricity standard so that they can benefit from having wind turbines on their lands.
Protesters marching. Photo by Kelly on Pexels.
Yet, while 70% of American adults describe climate change as an important concern, only 10% say they volunteered for an activity focused on addressing climate change or contacted an elected official about it in the previous year, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll.
Why do so few adults participate in actions to encourage governments and decision-makers to do more about climate change, even though surveys show they support doing so, and how can they overcome the skepticism holding them back?
What prevents people from speaking out
Polls show some people see how money from wealthy industries and individuals influences politicians and don’t believe politicians listen to the public.
Others are distracted by arguments that can tamp down engagement, such as campaigns that urge people to focus on individual recycling, or ask why the U.S. should do more if other countries aren’t, or argue that that there’s no need to rush because future technology will save humanity. Some believe that corporate and university promises to reach carbon neutrality in the future – often far in the future – are enough.
These narratives can be seductive. The focus on recycling, for example, offers a sense of satisfaction that one accomplished something. The arguments that China emits more greenhouse gases and that future technology will fix everything appear to exonerate people from having to take any steps now.
Studies have found that participating in local climate actions may require a constellation of values, attitudes and beliefs, including believing in one’s own ability, and the group’s, to get things done. Some of these beliefs can be developed through practice in organizing together, which is often downright fun, and has other psychological benefits that flow from increased solidarity in an often alienating society.
What I believe is particularly important is having a local theory of change – believing that, while human-caused climate change is a global problem, it is worthwhile taking local action.
3 reasons local activism matters
Research and history suggest that local action is more powerful than many people realize. Here are three key reasons:
First, much of the policy change that can affect climate change is local rather than national.
For example, replacing fossil fuel power plants with renewable energy technology can help lower greenhouse gas emissions. Much of this is under the control of state governments, which delegate the authority to public utility commissions. The public can pay attention to what utilities and public utility commissions do, and let their governors know that they are watching by writing letters and joining local groups that make their voices heard.
ECO NOT EGO. Global climate change strike – No Planet B – 09-20-2019. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Cities can set policies to replace natural gas with electric appliances in homes and buildings, encourage homeowners to install efficient electric heat pumps and determine whether investments are made in public transit instead of freeways. When pressured, city officials do enact these policies.
Second, local wins can become contagious. In 1997, a handful of advocates in Massachusetts won their battle for a local policy under which a portion of electricity bill payments went to a not-for-profit agency that funneled money toward renewables. By 2022, this policy, known as community choice aggregation, was adopted by over 1,800 local governments across six states, affecting millions of people. Local action can also create learning curves for technology – pushing for more solar and wind turbines leads to increased manufacture and price drops.
Third, local action can trigger national policy, spread to other countries and ultimately trigger global agreements.
There are many historical examples, from the suffragette movement that won U.S. women the right to vote, to the fight for a 40-hour work week. Local action in the Southern U.S. catalyzed 1960s civil rights laws. Local action for same-sex marriage, starting in San Francisco, led to state laws and ultimately to federal legislation signed in December 2022 that prohibits states from refusing to recognize out-of-state marriages based on sex, race or ethnicity.
Fridays for Future climate march. Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash.
Environmental regulation in the 1970s is a striking case. It started with public alarm about cities clouded in smog, rivers catching fire from industrial waste and beaches fouled by oil spills. Citizens organized thousands of protest actions, and municipalities responded by implementing environmental enforcement.
The lawsuits that followed were very costly for corporate interests, which then supported federal intervention as a way to have predictable rules. It was President Richard Nixon who signed some of the furthest reaching legislation ever.
Youth successes in changing climate policy
In 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which authorizes nearly $400 billion of climate-related spending over 10 years. I believe the youth-led Sunrise Movement can claim a major role in its success.
The group has relentlessly organized marches and demonstrations in dozens of cities since 2019 and pressured Democrats in Congress. While the result fell short of the group’s vision for a Green New Deal, it went further than any previous climate-related law.
Hurricane Ian approaches the west coast of Florida, NASA Johnson (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
“To effectively prevent all tipping risks, the global mean temperature increase would need to be limited to no more than 1°C—we are currently already at about 1.2°C,” noted one scientist.
Surpassing the global temperature targets of the Paris climate agreement, even temporarily, could dramatically increase the risk of the world experiencing dangerous “tipping points,” according to research published Friday.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines tipping points as “critical thresholds in a system that, when exceeded, can lead to a significant change in the state of the system, often with an understanding that the change is irreversible.”
Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the new study focuses on the potential shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the Amazon rainforest shifting to savannah, and the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.
Under the 2015 Paris deal, governments agreed to work toward keeping global temperature rise this century below 2°C, ultimately aiming for limiting it to 1.5°C. However, scientists continue to warn the countries’ pledges and actions to cut planet-heating emissions are far from bold enough to reach those goals, and critics blasted the COP27 summit in Egypt last month as “another terrible failure” given that the conference’s final agreement did not call for rapidly phasing out all fossil fuels.
“To effectively prevent all tipping risks, the global mean temperature increase would need to be limited to no more than 1°C—we are currently already at about 1.2°C,” noted study co-author Jonathan Donges, co-lead of the FutureLab on Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “The latest IPCC report is showing that we’re most likely on a path to temporarily overshoot the 1.5°C temperature threshold.”
The researchers examined various scenarios with peak temperatures from 2°C to 4°C. As lead author and PIK scientist Nico Wunderling explained, they found that “the risk for some tipping events could increase very substantially under certain global warming overshoot scenarios.”
“Even if we would manage to limit global warming to 1.5°C after an overshoot of more than 2°C, this would not be enough as the risk of triggering one or more global tipping points would still be more than 50%,” Wunderling said. “With more warming in the long-term, the risks increase dramatically.”
“We found that the risk for the emergence of at least one tipping event increases with rising peak temperatures—already at a peak temperature of 3°C, more than one-third of all simulations showed a tipping event even when overshoot durations were limited strongly,” he added. “At 4°C peak temperature, this risk extends to more than half of all simulations.”
According to the study, “Our model analysis reveals that temporary overshoots can increase tipping risks by up to 72% compared with non-overshoot scenarios, even when the long-term equilibrium temperature stabilizes within the Paris range.”
Study co-author Ricarda Winkelmann, co-lead of the FutureLab on Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene at PIK, pointed out that “especially the Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet are at risk of tipping even for small overshoots, underlining that they are among the most vulnerable tipping elements.”
“While it would take a long time for the ice loss to fully unfold, the temperature levels at which such changes are triggered could already be reached soon,” she said. “Our action in the coming years can thus decide the future trajectory of the ice sheets for centuries or even millennia to come.”
🆕Overshooting #climate targets could significantly increase risk for #tipping cascades, finds new study with PIK scientists Nico Wunderling, @JonathanDonges,@Ricarda_Climate et al. 👉https://t.co/K9LiSlRSY7 pic.twitter.com/9wCy04Hthx
While these scientists found that the Amazon and AMOC have higher critical temperature thresholds, various studies have highlighted the dangers of either system reaching its tipping point.
An analysis of the Amazon released in September by scientists and Indigenous leaders in South America stated that “the tipping point is not a future scenario but rather a stage already present in some areas of the region,” meaning portions of the crucial rainforest may never recover—which could have “profound” consequences on a global scale.
A study on the AMOC from last year, also published in Nature Climate Change, warned that the collapse of the system of currents that carries warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic “would have severe impacts on the global climate system,” from disrupting rains that billions of people need for food and increasing storms to further threatening the Amazon and ice sheets.
Donges stressed that “even though a temporary temperature overshoot would definitely be better than reaching a peak temperature and remaining there, some of the overshoot impacts may lead to irreversible damages in a high climate risk zone and this is why low-temperature overshoots are key here.”
Pointing to estimates that current policies could lead to an average global temperature of up to 3.6°C by 2100, Donges declared that “this is not enough.”
As Winkelmann put it: “Every tenth of a degree counts. We must do what we can to limit global warming as quickly as possible.”
