Essay by Eric Worrall
But this might result in less food.
Water conservation works, but climate change is outpacing it: Phoenix, Denver and Las Vegas offer a glimpse of the future
Published: April 8, 2026 10.19pm AEST
Renee Obringer Assistant Professor in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Penn State
Dave White Director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation, Arizona State UniversityWhen a drought turns into an urban water crisis, a city’s first step is often to limit lawn watering and launch a campaign to encourage everyone to conserve. It might raise water-use rates or offer incentives for installing low-flow devices.
While demand management techniques like these have had a lot of success in reducing water use, our new research suggests that they may not be effective enough in the face of climate change.
…
Research shows that the region is likely to experience more intense, frequent droughts that last longer due to climate change, putting the water supplies for farms, people and energy systems at risk.
…These solutions, however, take time and money to implement. Desalination is incredibly expensive. A recently built desalination plant in Carlsbad, California, cost US$1 billion – four times the initial estimate.
Other solutions, such as reducing agricultural water use, require significant buy-in from local farmers and could result in producing less food.
Read more: https://theconversation.com/water-conservation-works-but-climate-change-is-outpacing-it-phoenix-denver-and-las-vegas-offer-a-glimpse-of-the-future-279837
…
I really wish the climate micromanagers would keep their hands off agriculture. How many historical learning examples are required to demonstrate government agricultural policies which reduce productivity always end in disaster?
The solution to lack of water availability is to provide more water, not restrictions on farming. Israelis, Gulf State Arabs and the Chinese have all found ways to make water supply affordable. Desalination, long pipelines, whatever it takes.
If desalination is required but is too expensive, instead of giving up, figure out why it is too expensive. Examine the reason for that high cost. Is the problem that all the components have to be imported from China? Or is the energy too expensive? Both of these problems are fixable.
First, at $250 million, was that too expensive? If the government could learn to propose a budget and then meet it, now that might be inexpensive. The ineptitude of the government is the real problem in that example. The government never seems to get anything done on time and in budget; so why give them more money … so they can take the planned inexpensive and futz it up? And never admit responsibility; and then tell us how expensive climate change is.
Part of the reason the Carlsbad desalination plant cost so much was because of the insane level of law suits they had to deal with. Israel can, and does, bring in desalination plants and fresh water at a fraction of the cost that the Carlsbad plant does.
Correct, Western Australian water supply is 38-50% from desalination depending on climate rainfall. The average quarterly water bill in WA for 2025 is estimated around $220, which is slightly higher than NSW ($215) and SA ($218), but lower than Queensland ($252).
So you not say that desalination is expensive in Australia it is around the same cost as surface water supply.
Well not in Queensland where we have a rotting desal plant sitting idle on the Gold Coast because it is too expensive to run.
Does a hypothetical warmer climate produce more or less rain?
Yes! Both! According to “experts.”
It also produces less and more snow.(and twice as worse as in the rest of the world / than expected)
Just guessing but I bet it depends on which region you want to focus on. Some will get more and some will get less.
If you get too much or too little then it’s definitely proof of climate change according to the experts 🙂
“Does a hypothetical warmer climate produce more or less rain?”
[ Enter “professorial pontification” mode … ]
The WG-1 contribution to the IPCC’s AR6 document cycle can be downloaded (so people can check for themselves) from the following link.
IPCC AR6 WG-1 report link : https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
For the question posed you want Chapter 4, “Future Global Climate: Scenario-based Projections and Near-term Information”.
Section 4.4 covers “Near-term Global Climate Changes”, and the specific item of “Precipitation” is covered in sub-section 4.4.1.3.
An extract from page 584 of the “near-term” effects that are to be expected in “a warmer climate” :
Note that as is often the case for the WG-1 report, the “main body” actually clearly outlines the issues of “uncertainty” and “natural variability”.
.
For “Mid- to Long-term Global Climate Change”, i.e. to the end of the century, you need to advance to section 4.5.
Here the “Precipitation” sub-section is 4.5.1.4 which includes, on page 601 :
So, the “Consensus (Climate) Science” answer to your original “Does a hypothetical warmer climate produce more or less rain?” question can be summarised as follows :
“The ‘wet-get-wetter, dry-get-drier’ paradigm will apply in a warming climate … except in those regions where it won’t.”
For the “global average”, the answer is :
“Nobody knows for sure, the models are all over the place”.
Depends if your topography is upslope or downslope, and the direction and speed of prevailing high or low humidity winds….so is pretty random…and even if it was 7% more rainfall per degree of long term surface warming….would be a lot less than typical annual variation anyway…so you can argue hypothetically that it produces “change” or “no change” based on the duration of your data set…
Local climate is defined by amount of rainfall and its seasonal variability amongst other parameters.
Across the world, all the water which evaporates eventually falls as rain so total 30 year rainfall is probably close to a constant. Depends on whether the poles and glaciers are expanding or contracting rapidly.
Hypothetical climates exist only in the imaginations of humans and the crude models fashioned from there.
If it’s an ‘”urban water crisis” why are they focusing on ‘water’ and not ‘urban’? Seems if we look, we find a lot of other human problems involve ‘urban’. Could it be possible that policies that encourage urban and suburban development might be at issue?
NAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
Phoenix, Denver and Las Vegas have always been places where there is little water. It wasn’t until big dams and big pipelines were built to allow them to grow up, that they did. Maybe that was a bad idea.
Rain and snow supposedly coming to Denver next week. Every little bit helps.
Vegas has been VERY successful in conserving water, 2x’ing or more their population while staying within their originally negotiated water allocation.
The last I read, about a decade ago, they reprocess about 1/2 of their waste water (yes they lose the water used for irrigation but they mandate low-water tolerant yards) and, by agreement with the other signatories on the agreement, return it to Lake Mead to be used again.
Maybe they should reprocess all of the their waste water. Wichita Falls, Texas, does that.
I consider those bad ideas. The environmental destruction caused by urbanization is, IMHO, significantly worse than any negative climate effect of CO2.
Care to name what this “environmental destruction” is?
You forgot California and especially Los Angeles. SoCal gets upwards of 30% of it’s water from the Colorado river. After polluting their own ground water to the point that the LA basin cannot drink its own groundwater without treatment.
What’s your solution? Just get rid of the people you consider to be excess?
Old idea, mooted at beginning of “crisis” epoch. The Population Bomb author claimed peak humanity at 2.5 billion. Kill or prevent conception of all the rest. He lived til 90 still spouting his vile nonsense as humanity was well into the 8 billion and rising.
The IPCC AR4 Chapter 10 Page 750 pdf4 says:
Mean Precipitation
For a future warmer climate, the current generation of
models indicates that precipitation generally increases
in the areas of regional tropical precipitation maxima
(such as the monsoon regimes) and over the tropical
Pacific in particular, with general decreases in the
subtropics, and increases at high latitudes as a
consequence of a general intensification of the global
hydrological cycle. Globally averaged mean water vapour,
evaporation and precipitation are projected to increase.
That’s hardly a recipe more intense more frequent and
longer lasting droughts. Who writes this stuff, Madison
Avenue wannabes?
The IPCC has about 400 gnomes in Bern, Switzerland.
Half of which are on the chopping block with USA exit
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/04/01/funding-gap-threatens-next-round-of-ipcc-climate-science-reports-chair-warns/
The real cost of the desalination plant in California was the years of permitting and litigation.
We won’t begin to recover until the last lawyer is strangled with the entrails of the last environmentalist.
Desalination should be practically free. Since the water is from the ocean they should simply install offshore wind to power the process…I mean Wind power Is Cheap…Right??? 😆🤔😘
Heck, if it only increased four-fold that’s good for California. The fact it was a CA project is the first clue it wasn’t well-designed, well-managed and had so many cost centers related to woke policies and Marxist thinking it was doomed.
They gotta do something to funnel money through Learing Centers and into Democrat coffers
Eric, is there any lie too egregious for these academic politicians to utter? Their statements seem to become more ridiculous the further we get from Paris Accord 2015. Whom do they imagine they are persuading with this tripe?
They ARE the modern equivalent to the Snake Oil Salesman of the past.
I agree. But there’s a difference. Snake oil salesmen had no permanent effect on the public other than shattering the notion of patent medicine. But the climatologists have destroyed the institution of peer review as pertains to climate and weather. This act of intellectual vandalism may last a very long time. For example, who is ever going to trust Michael Mann to be honest about anything? In the view of much of the world, he is permanently labelled a liar just as was the case with Charles Dawson after his creation of the Piltdown Man fraud.
Your question is too egregious because a lie can never be.
Goebbels explained it very well :
” The bigger a lie the more people will believe it. “
It isn’t Climate Change outpacing Water Conservation in the selected cities. It’s population growth creating a lack of supply. Between the 1930’s and now demand has risen exponentially there
Phoenix in 1930 had a population of 48,110 but has blossomed to a burgeoning 1.6M in 2025.
Denver in 1930 had a population of 287,861 and has seen moderate growth to 740,613 in 2025.
Las Vegas in 1930 had just 5,165 which grew to 25,000 when Hoover was under construction. Today Las Vegas has exploded to more than 2.4M in the metropolitan area.
All those people need water, all those people use water every day. It isn’t Climate Change affecting water availability, it’s the desirability to live in those selected locations. Older populations like warmer climates for joint ache relief and younger people like winter sports. (After 30 years of skiing and knee joint abuse they’ll move from Denver to Las Vegas or Phoenix.)
The Denver metropolitan area population in 2026 is approximately 3,025,000.
Bryan, water is indeed the key limiting factor for all urban development throughout history. When the Roman acqueducts were broken during a siege in the early 6th century, the city’s population shrank by 90 per cent to a mere 30,000. Shortage of water infrastructure destroyed the city of Rome. It was never replaced until the late 19th century and the beginning of the city’s recovery. Throughout the middle ages, Rome was a thinly populated city of mostly ruins.
The professors are both geographically and historically challenged. Phoenix and Las Vegas do get their water from the Colorado River system, but Denver does not.
The Colorado River water issues are serious and will get worse. When the Colorado compact was drawn up, the west was wetter than it is now—unfortunately, the historical record left by native Americans says this is part of a natural cycle, nothing to do with rising atmospheric CO2. And Phoenix and Las Vegas were MUCH less populated.
The inevitable solutions are two fold, but unlikely to be self imposed—looks like Interior will soon be stepping in. Limit Colorado river dependent agriculture (for example cotton and alfalfa in arid Arizona), and limit further population expansion in Colorado river dependent regions like Phoenix and Las Vegas via water limited construction and golf course permitting.
Denver does indeed get water from the Colorado River. Part of the justification for building the Moffat Tunnel was to use the pilot tunnel carry water from the western slopes of the Front Range (i.e. Colorado River watershed) to Denver.
The Moffat tunnel is 6.2 miles long and more impressively, the Roberts tunnel is over 23 miles long, delivering 480 million gallons/day.
Actually, Denver does gets a significant amount of water from the Colorado river basin. It’s transported under the Continental Divide via a couple of tunnels.
After a few especially wet years, last year and this year look to be problematic for Denver. The long term problems for Phoenix and Vegas will get worse as you say.
I might be mistaken but doesn’t LA also get water from the Colorado River?
Corrections welcome.
Yes it comes through the aqueduct. LA also gets significant water from northern California.
I had a patient in the 80’s who was an executive with LA metropolitan water district.
He told me the politics with water in California was unbelievable and nasty,
Old saying, whiskey is for drinkin’ water is for fightin’.
30%+ of SoCal water comes from the colorado river.
Hmmm….climate change…not population growth ?
nevah!!! lol
A warming climate is produced by warming oceans and warming oceans emit more water vapor. More clouds, more rain.
Yup, that’s what the IPCC says AR4 Chapter t0
No. Overall, total precipitation equals total evaporation. Not much water is being lost to space.
So let me understand this. You build a city in desert/arid region. A place people flock to to escape the cold and you blame water scarcity on global warming. You knuckleheads.
You mean people actually PREFER warmer areas?
Sounds like they’re trying to use “Global Warming” as an excuse to make the predictions of droughts and famines come true.
Wait until the food trucks stop arriving and see what these urban parasites have to say.
The politicians will blame the farmers for “hoarding” food.
IIRC That’s what happened in Russia in the 1930s, so the farmers had all their crops stolen by the communist government and it all ended in the Ukraine Holodomor when 4 million people died of starvation
In China in the 1950s Mao requisitioned large quantities of food which he sold abroad to get foreign currency
The ‘Great Leap Forward’ ended in many millions also dying of starvation.
All benefits of the government planned economy where they think they know best how to farm. In Russia Lysenko said what the government wanted to hear and put agriculture back decades.
Is there any comparison to be made with some climate activists?
“We’re already seeing the initial impacts and they include a decline in the winter rainfall zone across southern Australia, which is clearly an impact of climate change, but also a decrease in run-off.
Although we’re getting say a 20 per cent decrease in rainfall in some areas of Australia, that’s translating to a 60 per cent decrease in the run-off into the dams and rivers. That’s because the soil is warmer because of global warming and the plants are under more stress and therefore using more moisture. So even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems, and that’s a real worry for the people in the bush. If that trend continues then I think we’re going to have serious problems, particularly for irrigation.” Tim Flannery, 2007
Shortly before a series of exceptionally wet years for large parts of Australia that caused dams to not only fill, but to overfloweth (likely in part due to underinvestment in water management and a reluctance to release water from flood mitigation dams prior to major rains due to the mindset that Flannery himself was a zealot of). Running on a false understanding of how the climate works, it is unsurprising that they make such flawed predictions.
If its anything like Australia, any lack of usable water is purely and infrastructure problem,
Mostly because of the far-left using lawfare and other dirty tactics to stop new dams being built.
Carrying capacity of Australia without civilisation, less than one million people. Ask the most recent migrants who claim they were here since Creation.
So-called UN-style “sustainability” and anthropogenic climate change are joined at the hip. Higher education has tried to create a new profession called sustainability, but it is a largely peopled by folks with little or no practical knowledge of the natural or built environment. Within the university campuses, the sustainability offices can be characterized as busybodies, sticking their noses into everybody’s business, spending money on fruitless and wasteful projects, and taking credit for the good work being done by others.
It is unfortunate that they have bastardized the previously respectable term “sustainability,” pioneered by foresters and other natural resource managers.
Of course, if you build mega cities in the middle of deserts or semiarid regions,such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, you will eventually face limits due to water availability and be vulnerable to naturally occurring periods of drought. Long-term water supply planning and management become critical. Closer to my home, dramatic growth in the Texas Hill Country near Austin and San Antonio, as well as coastal city growth in and around Corpus Christi (currently in severe drought) face similar challenges. These problems are nothing new as is evident if one has an even passing knowledge of biblical Old Testament scriptures.
If climate change means less water for agriculture, does that also mean less water for AI, or does profits before people mean computer cooling trumps people having access to food?
Just curious about the logic and hierarchy.
Any water shortage anywhere is man made. We have the technology, knowledge and ability to capture, store, treat and distribute water wherever it is needed. What is missing is the political will to fund the solution. ergo it is man made.
Would that not be, man can only live where water is locally available, naturally or artificially.
Less food is their goal. Start by putting these “professors” on 800 calories and 1/4 liter water per day and zero electricity/gas/sewage use, see how fast they change their tune.
And then again , it might not .
I would support he restriction of oxygen to these “sustainabiity professors”.