Climate Change Becomes More Apparent As Water Shortage Threatens American West

A historic drought has hit the Colorado River basin, with lakes and rivers and other connected bodies now reporting a dangerously low level of water. This water is the lifeblood for communities, and it is disappearing thanks to the effects of climate change. The crisis isn't something that we can slowly deal with over time - we have to start coming up with solutions right now just to prevent things from getting even worse at this point. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The Colorado river basin right now is suffering from an extreme dream lack of water. And the reason for that is because the Colorado river did not receive as much snow melt this year, because there was not as much snow. And therefore all of the bodies that the Colorado river feeds are running out of water. Right now you have lake Mead at 35% capacity, and that is the lowest amount of water that lake Mead has had since it was created by the construction of the Hoover dam lake Mead is also the biggest us reservoir by volume.

And it's only

A 35%

Capacity lake

Mead obviously feeds communities downstream. I mean, heck the Colorado river feeds communities, states and countries all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. So what's happening right now is all the states that feed off this river, all the agricultural sites that feed off this Rivel river have been told. You have to limit your water. Use. Mexico has been told you have to limit your water use because we just don't have the water anymore. This as one expert explained it, here is the loudest alarm bell. Yeah. Yet

For climate change,

You know, I explained it recently. Um, the climate change is not knocking on our

Door. Climate change has

Burst into our living room screaming. I am here. And of course the IPC report that we got recently told us that things are looking worse than we thought they were, but we don't need a report to tell us that. And that's actually what a lot of the folks in that region are telling us right now, because they're living it, they're living the effects of climate change right now. The massive wildfires that we just had out in California that only recently got under control. Those people are living through climate change,

The Pacific

Northwest and the heat dome they were under earlier this summer, they were living through climate change, Canada, same thing with the heat dome, the extreme temperatures all across the south, the snow storm that hit Texas back in February. We're living through climate change every day folks. And now is the time to act. And we have to stop thinking about climate change in terms of, okay, well we've got nine, 10 years before the worst effects get. We cannot think that way. We have to start thinking with urgency at this point and we do not need to panic. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying we have to panic, but I'm, we have to stop thinking of climate change as some far off problem, an inconvenient truth from Al gore, you know, the academy award winning documentary about climate

Change, where he

Warned us about, you know, all we're seeing right now because he actually consulted with scientists on it. That movie came out 15 years ago, 15 years, the first testimonies before Congress telling us that climate change was a thing.

Those are 25 years, years ago or 2020

To 25. I'm sorry. I forget the exact day. We've known about this for far too long. At this point, we have seen the warning signs for far too long

And some of

These warning signs at this point might be here to stay, but we can stop more from happening. And that's what we have to focus on right now. We have to push for a better planet. We have to push the Biden administration further on the issue of, you know, emissions, renewable energy.