Readers React: Bet on a dry future, Las Vegas
Re “Vegas’ water drying up,” April 21
“Future droughts and a warming climate … could spell trouble for the city’s 2 million residents” — that strikes me as a monumental understatement about what lies ahead for Las Vegas.
Climate forecasts published years ago in respected scientific journals clearly predicted increasing dryness over the next several decades, a pattern that will eventually become devastatingly severe. Long-lasting drought has been predicted for most of Africa, southern Europe, the Middle East, most of the Americas, Australia and Southeast Asia. Las Vegas is smack-dab in the middle of it.
Climate change is already taking hold, and the latest report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts much bigger problems if we don’t change our ways.
The good news is we can make radically positive changes without the pain imagined by some. Dropping fossil fuels could happen quickly with current technology if we’d simply put a price on carbon pollution.
Craig Preston
Costa Mesa
Engineers like me are known to quickly get to the root cause of problems.
What’s the bigger reason for the water shortage and drought other than man’s drive to destroy the global climate? Answer: too many people.
Between 1950 and 2010, the world’s population increased from 2.5 billion to 6.8 billion. We need to focus on reducing population, as the Earth is getting really mad.
Roger Newell
San Diego
A possible first step: For all new residential and commercial buildings, don’t allow lawns. Instead, require desert-type landscaping that doesn’t need irrigation.
Whenever an existing house or commercial property is sold, require the seller to remove any existing grass and replace it with desert-type landscaping.
This seems like a reasonable start for both Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Please tell me that I’m not the first person to think of this.
Jay James
Pico Rivera
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