THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT - THE WINTER THAT WASN’T

OK, let’s address the elephant in the room.  Is this, the winter of our discontent, about weather or climate?  Weather is about yesterday and next week.  Climate is about the last millennium and next decade.  The climate is changing, quickly.  Quicker than we predicted.  Exponentially.  Is this anecdotal or Armageddon?

This, winter-that-wasn’t, has been a catastrophe for skiers and the local industry, even for Vail and Alterra, who are somewhat insulated from climate by selling season ski passes in the summer.  Is this an anomaly or is this the way it is going to be?  Will the ski town economy remain vibrant or be replaced with other recreation, lifestyles, or at worst, toxic dust clouds from The Great Salt Lake and The Colorado Plateau?  Can we fix this or should we move?  

Park City has been getting hotter and dryer for years, at a rate of 1 - 3 inches (linearly vs exponential trend) of less snow per year since 1990.   The 2025 Water Year, ending October 1, was the driest in 85 years in Park City, since the dust bowl of the dirty thirties, with only 13 inches of precipitation, or 60% of average, with nothing all summer. Then we had 7 inches of rain by New Years so the Calendar Year looks average and we forgot about the 20-year drought.  This weather and thought pattern has been predicted by Brian McInerney of the NWS for the last 30 years, and the Save our Snow people, as indicative of our new Rain Hydrology.

The last five months in a row were an unbelievable 10 degrees warmer than average, with some days almost 30 - 40 degrees above normal.  We were breaking daily temperature records by 5 - 10 degrees and had the unprecedented warmest winter ever by 2.5 degrees.  We are losing as much as a month on either end of the ski season.  This is anecdotally evident to us all, for even a blind man knows when it is not snowing.  

Average Park City temperatures are up 3 - 5 degrees over 125 years and Summer morning low average temperatures are up 5 - 10 degrees over the past 50 years. Normal weather changes are being compounded by Climate Change and are exponential now and not linear as historically predicted. This pattern was modeled by Dr. Simon Wang of USU 20 years ago with the weakening and vacillating of the polar vortex - jet stream, due to the poles heating much faster than the equator. Now the west gets the winter high pressure and the east gets the low, the cold and the storms  We knew this was coming.

Peak runoff to The Great Salt Lake is usually in May, not June or July anymore, and in April this year.  The total runoff volume has been diminished by 1-2 acre-feet per square mile per year - for 100 years.  That's enough water for a million people and a great big lake.  Statewide snowpack is less than 50% of average this year and The Lake should expect less than 30% of average runoff.  It should hit its historical low next fall and could see ecosystem collapse within 5 years.  That is not to mention the increased toxic, lake bed, dust clouds in the Wasatch that kill people, last for weeks, reach Park City, exacerbate early runoff and diminish the historical lake effect snows.  

The Lake collapse was predicted 30 years ago, using early Ai, by Dr. Upman Lall of the UoU.   We did not listen and we pumped extra runoff water, from the ample 83-84 snowpack, to the West Desert to evaporate.  We would love that water back now for the unintended consequences of Climate Change.  The Lake is only 11,000 years old, reached the record low in the 1960's, and has never dried up.  There are 150 terminal lakes in the world experiencing collapse.  None have been saved. 

Meanwhile The State Legislature was praying and fasting for another big runoff year like 2023 to save us, and proposing authority and funding for more water use development.  They voted to remove the legal protection of the natural streams, Public Welfare benefits for The Lake, to avoid lawsuits and make development approval easier.  Trump has offered to fix The Lake but then it would have to be called The Great Trump Lake and that would just be weird. 

The State could buy the 8-million-acre feet  (the size of Flaming Gorge reservoir) needed to recover the lake from farmers and other users, at a cost of 2-3 billion dollars, but they have not yet allocated a tenth of that amount for the problem.  They would like to drain The North Arm to The South Arm to cover up the dust but some of The People, and all of the The Birds live up north.  The State has turned to private sector philanthrope for a solution and the Romney family has given them 100 million dollars but we need deeper pockets for this one. 

We can blame the cows and alfalfa farmers but this also on us, with our thirsty lawns, green golf courses and exponential population growth.  I believe that the only way to save The Lake is to have The Church step up and help.  They have ':' the money, water, authority, dominion, overpopulation, and the most to gain from saving our little Vatican City II from ruin.  It would be like the seagulls eating the crickets to save Zion. 

The Colorado River, likewise, is expecting less than 30% the average annual runoff volume while Lakes Powell and Mead are only 25% full.  The River was originally allocated for 17-million-acre feet (MAF) in the Colorado Compact of 1922, and now only flows 5 MAF.  This year we will be lucky to get 2 MAF and something has to give.  Lake Powell is looking at Minimum Power pool this year, where they can't make electricity and we have to burn more carbon to replace the lost power, compounding the problem yet again.  Dead Pool could be in 3-5 years, where we lose control of the outflow to the Grand Canyon and downstream Compact deliveries. 

Western Governors met in DC with the Feds and their lawyers to renegotiate The Compact and devise a plan for cuts by the end of the year, since their state representatives punted and just blame Arizona.  The Compact was originally created to avoid the Feds and lawyers.  How's that working out?  This is The Tragedy of the Commons mixed with Russian Roulette and Game Theory, where the only way to win is to cheat.  What we really need is some Quantum Entanglement, synchronized cooperation, to battle our basic human survival nature of greed and fear.   Meanwhile we continue to privatize water profits and ethics while socializing the cost and morality.

The Supreme Court doesn't want water law cases, and forget The Congress so we could give this problem to The President.  Legal or not, he could just take over the Colorado basin and stop people from growing hay, cotton or rice and we could all be great again.   Grow cotton in Alabama and rice in Viet Nam. California could desalinate seawater and Arizona could stop pumping their share into the ground.  Colorado could stop stealing its headwaters, and Utah could stop cooling Ai-Bitcoin data centers in the high desert (put them in  Alaska).  As far as Wyoming,  New Mexico, Las Vegas, Mexico, the Native Americans, the fish, the river, the riparian habitat, the littoral environment and the public trust, well, no one seems to care. 

Lets face it, the issues with The Lake and The River are symptoms of the larger sickness of Climate Change, which is here today and accelerating at unimaginable rates.  It is simply too hot and dry these days to do everything for everybody.  Solutions to both The Lake and The River range from creating free and fair markets for water so we all pay the true price, cost, value and worth of this commodity, while maintaining the self-evident, inalienable right of minimum human water needs.   This would encourage adjustment of the Prior Appropriation doctrine of ‘first in time, first in right’, ‘use it or lose it’ for more equitable and economic water distribution.  

We would finally be incentivized to address climate change and alternative energy instead of subsidizing oil wars and burning more carbon.  We might even grow less hay, lawns and golf courses, and turn off the tap while we shave and brush our teeth, if the price is right.  We might want to Vote Green; to save the planet and make money doing it at the same time.  We need recognize our water, lakes, rivers and most other natural resources, for the best beneficial use by all.  There is enough water out there, we just need to choose wisely how to use it. 

EXESTENTIAL VACUUMING

 

 

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It's a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Paul Simon

 

I was just 17, and you know what I mean; an indestructible non-descript, hippy-sporto-weirdo, with good friends, a car, a gal, good grades, and nothing to worry about except where the next party would be.  I hadn’t had it so good since the day before they taught me to tie my own shoes (left over right, right over left), cross the street alone (look both ways – twice), or go to kindergarten (skipping thru duck – duck - goose) - opening up a new world of responsibility and mystery.  I had settled into an easy coexistence within the all-male, tie wearing, prep school I endured, full of overachieving Catholic, New York Irish and Italian Wise Guys, where humor ruled and nobody took themselves too seriously. 

Sitting in a sleepy, sunny, afternoon Religion - Philosophy class that had, here-to-fore, been composed of warnings of the dangers of hard liquor, refer madness and masturbation, Brother Gravitas gave us a book. by a Jewish guy named Victor Frankel, called Mans Search for Meaning.  It was about Vic surviving Hitlers concentration camps by finding the smallest reasons to live there and translating it to a life of meaning and worth.  Fair enough we thought, good for you.  But that only led to a discussion on Existentialism where life itself had no real meaning and it was up to us to fill the Existential Vacuum with things like family, friends and Jesus.  Seriously. I’m at the top of my game and you have to teach us this depressing dribble, now? I looked at the omnipresent crucifix and cursed my fate.  

My next class was on Classical Music where the squirrely teacher, Mr. Cassata - Stone revived my spirits by playing Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' real loud on 11, on his killer quadrophonic stereo, exalting my human spirit.  English followed where the imposing Sister Harmonica Uptalk taught us to find the Christ figure in Beowulf and Moby Dick and then memorize a plethora of pretentiously haughty vocabulary words nobody ever uses.  It was good practice for the SATs, so we could get into good schools we couldn’t afford but our supercilious parents would be proud to advertise on the back of their cars.    We all just just wanted to go to the bacchanalian, party schools. After that I shuffled off to Calculus where Mr. Huey Newton talked about change and the change in the change.  Why cant things stay the same we wondered, what’s wrong with now, living in the present. 

Finally in my ninth period Physics class Ms. Casavas - Mellon taught us the concept of Entropy where everything in the universe tends to move to a state of randomness and disorder.  Christ, I thought, they are ganging up on us and now they have gone too far.  My adolescent naïveté was shattered in one irresponsible afternoon.  We could have learned about Socrates and the Unit Circle, or an infinite weight on a frictionless plane, but they chose to smash our juvenile complacency and expectations for a crushingly oblivious, manic and mindless future.  Thanks for nothing.  At wrestling practice coach Rotundy told us all to loose more weight but not to get our hopes up for the upcoming tournament, and that only one person in our weight group will finish with a victory.  What does that make the rest of us, losers?  Second rate

For the icing on the cake, we followed this up with a film by the Ohio State Troopers, for Brother Ormondo’s Drivers Ed, of drunk drivers crashing their cars and screaming in pain at the side of the road.  Steven Hemorrhaging was quietly sitting next to me in the back of the carpeted room when he fell to the floor and started convulsing and doing the horizontal bop, tuna flop.  I slid down next to him as he foamed at the mouth and his eyes rolled back in his head and I held him quietly.  As soon as it started, it stopped, and he sat up straight and slinked surreptitiously into his seat.  'Don’t tell anyone' he said, 'they wont give me a license'.  I wasn’t sure I wanted a license at that point.

Finally, before our first spring break in Florida, in Coach Dugolunchski’s Health Class, they showed us graphic films of women having babies; complete with crowning heads an afterbirth on toast.  'Holy crap', we thought, and it put us off women for about 17 minutes.  What’s next – no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or the tooth fairy.  Our world was shattered and the only thing to do now was to get a lousy summer job for $2 an hour, apply to a trophy college and leave home forever.  Then get a job, house, kid and dog and become somnambulist sycophant, succubus succulent with a good vocabulary.  My God, what have they done.

But I am happy to say that I am in a permanent state of arrested development from the day before this entangling enlightenment; where I choose to live in the present and simplify with moderation but not mediocrity.  I try not to change who I am intrinsically, or become random or disorderly, over-procreate or crash my car too much, chase conspicuous consumption or excessive self-entertainment, but find meaning in nature and the little things, the people we love and the places we live and visit.  I let life’s meaning come to me, every day.   I don’t ever wear a tie or even tie my own shoes anymore.