Utah's Great Salt Lake Disappearing

[TheLurch]

It is what it is, Lurch.

Oh, i don't know enough about the tributaries to the Great Salt Lake or the recent trends in Utah's climate to say anything intelligent here, which is why i joked.

[Cow Poke]

Oh, i don't know enough about the tributaries to the Great Salt Lake or the recent trends in Utah's climate to say anything intelligent here, which is why i joked.

Me either. I know there are droughts - there have been throughout history. Whether they are greater due to climate change, I don't know, and it would be hard to figure that in this case, I would imagine, because we know for a fact that a lot of the water that normally flowed into the GSL (as well as the Dead Sea) has been diverted for other purposes.

I appreciate your input, even if it's joking.

[TheLurch]

Me either. I know there are droughts - there have been throughout history. Whether they are greater due to climate change, I don't know, and it would be hard to figure that in this case, I would imagine, because we know for a fact that a lot of the water that normally flowed into the GSL (as well as the Dead Sea) has been diverted for other purposes.

Well, i think it would be possible to answer in principle, because the amount of water that's diverted is typically tracked - rivers cross state borders or federal lands, etc. and so must be accounted for. The questions are then:
With historic rainfalls, would the lake level be maintained?
Has climate change contributed to lower than historic rainfalls?

Attribution studies (did climate change cause this?) are doable. Typically, you take a climate model that can successfully reproduce historic data in the region. Then you run it with and without the CO2 we've added to the atmosphere. Typically, these don't produce a yes-or-no answer, in that you rarely see situations where weather conditions NEVER happened prior to the onset of climate change. But they can provide a bit of perspective - you get cases where a specific weather pattern might occur once every 100 years without climate change, but now occurs once a decade or something. So you can sometimes make statements about climate change making an event more likely.

[Bret]

Particularly when the water feeding them is diverted to agriculture or human consumption elsewhere.

Right. I'm saying they're on natural trajectories to drying out on a centuries long time scale, but diversion of source water will hasten the process.

[Cow Poke]

Right. I'm saying they're on natural trajectories to drying out on a centuries long time scale, but diversion of source water will hasten the process.

Agreed. Makes total sense.

Just so everybody knows, I didn't post this to argue climate change or anything else - just as a discussion of a natural resource (huge tourist impact economically) potentially going away.

So far, everybody's doing great!