USA Today claims in “Your water bill could skyrocket due to climate change, study says” that hotter, drier conditions caused by global warming could double residential water bills across parts of the western United States. This is highly misleading. The article is built almost entirely on computer model projections of future drought rather than on observed drought trends, and it presents speculative scenarios as though they were inevitable.
Climate Realism has used the word scaremongering many times. Perhaps it’s time for a new word: scaremodeling.
Scaremodeling is what happens when speculative computer simulations are reported as established fact. A model predicts a future problem, another model estimates the economic consequences, and the media reports the worst-case outcome as though it is already unfolding. That is exactly what USA Today has done here.
The article opens by warning readers to “get ready to pay more for your water. A lot more.” It then cites a Stanford study claiming climate change could force expensive investments in desalination, recycled water systems, and water transfers that might double residential water bills in some communities.
Notice the qualifiers could and might. Not will. Not is. Not has.
Everything that follows depends on climate models correctly predicting a hotter, drier future for specific regions decades in advance. Those projections are then fed into economic models that estimate future infrastructure costs. In other words, the article layers one model on top of another before arriving at its alarming headline.
Models built upon models are still models, they are not observations. They are speculative future scenarios. And, because climate and economic models are routinely wrong, and current models are known to be flawed, with incorrect assumptions about the atmosphere’s response to greenhouse gas emissions, this report, and the study it is premised on is quite likely to be a matter of Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Even the article quietly admits that water costs have already been rising primarily because of aging infrastructure and decades of deferred maintenance. Those are real, measurable problems with well-documented causes. Climate change is introduced as an additional speculative pressure layered on top of existing issues.
The article never stops to ask whether the underlying assumption, that America is becoming progressively drier, is actually supported by observations, despite the fact that the evidence says otherwise.
Climate at a Glance documents that there has been no long-term increase in drought across the United States. Drought has always been a recurring feature of the American climate, varying from year to year and decade to decade. Some regions become drier while others become wetter, but nationwide observations do not show the inexorable march toward permanent drought portrayed in media reports.
In fact, the United States has generally become wetter in recent decades.
As the climate has modestly warmed, the United States has experienced more abundant precipitation overall, and 2017 and 2019 set records for the smallest percentage of U.S. land experiencing drought. Those observations are the opposite of the narrative presented by USA Today.
That should not be surprising, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. When conditions are favorable, that can translate into increased precipitation. The observational record reflects this complex reality far better than simplistic stories.
The article also focuses almost exclusively on Santa Cruz, California, using it as a case study for future water affordability. But Santa Cruz is hardly representative of the United States as a whole with all its varied landscapes and weather trends. Santa Cruz relies heavily on local surface water and limited storage capacity, making it uniquely vulnerable to periodic dry spells.
Local infrastructure decisions are not evidence of a national climate emergency.
Nor is it surprising that western states periodically experience drought. They always have. The American West is defined by highly variable precipitation driven by ocean cycles, atmospheric circulation, and mountain snowpack. Long before climate change became today’s explanation for every weather event, the region endured prolonged droughts, sometimes lasting hundreds of years, that shaped its history.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s remains one of the most devastating droughts ever experienced in the United States. Medieval megadroughts lasted decades and far exceeded anything observed during the modern instrumental record.
Those events occurred before SUVs, coal-fired power plants, or modern greenhouse gas emissions, yet USA Today never mentions them.
Instead, readers are presented with a future in which a slight increase in global average temperatures forces expensive infrastructure investments and soaring water bills. That may make for an attention-grabbing headline, but it is speculation, not settled science.
If water rates continue rising, the most immediate reasons will likely remain the same ones that utilities have been citing for years: the costs of replacing aging pipes, repairing reservoirs, modernizing treatment plants to meet stricter regulatory requirements, higher costs for updated parts, materials, and labor, in part due to inflation, all of this resulting from decades of deferred maintenance.
Those costs are real, as opposed to the speculative costs attributed to future climate change by models forecasts.
USA Today’s readers deserve better than speculative headlines built on hypothetical futures. They deserve reporting grounded in observed data, historical context, and the recognition that climate models are tools for exploring possibilities, not crystal balls predicting tomorrow’s water bill.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
