Abandon hope and abandon the Desert Southwest while you still can — if you can

 Expect the water behind Glen Canyon Dam to become even scarcer, and the red rocks surrounding that, even hotter,  in years and decades to come. (Author photo.)

Via Inside Climate News, a new study from The University of Texas says that the recent ongoing drought in the Southwest is likely to last THROUGH 2100.

That is far longer than the drought that drove the Anasazi from the land 700 years ago.

The lead graphs deserve an extended quote:

The drought in the Southwestern U.S. is likely to last for the rest of the 21st century and potentially beyond as global warming shifts the distribution of heat in the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published last week led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Using sediment cores collected in the Rocky Mountains, paleoclimatology records and climate models, the researchers found warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions can alter patterns of atmospheric and marine heat in the North Pacific Ocean in a way resembling what’s known as the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), fluctuations in sea surface temperatures that result in decreased winter precipitation in the American Southwest. But in this case, the phenomenon can last far longer than the usual 30-year cycle of the PDO 

“If the sea surface temperature patterns in the North Pacific were just the result of processes related to stochastic [random] variability in the past decade or two, we would have just been extremely unlucky, like a really bad roll of the dice,” said Victoria Todd, the lead author of the study and a Ph.D student in geosciences at UT Austin. “But if, as we hypothesize, this is a forced change in the sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific, this will be sustained into the future, and we need to start looking at this as a shift, instead of just the result of bad luck.”

The story goes on to say:

“Planners need to consider that this drought, these reductions in winter precipitation, are likely to continue, and plan for that,” said Tim Shanahan, an associate professor at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences and co-author of the study.

Yeah, that's not happening until, per Max Planck, an old generation of planners (and politicians in general) all die. 

But wait, it gets worse:

The study also revealed that current climate models are underestimating drought conditions, Todd and Shanahan said, and they hope to find better ways to approximate aridity going forward.

So, it's even worse than we have thought. 

I said that instead of HARP and HAMP in the The Great Recession, Dear Leader should have paid new moves with underwater loans to leave Phoenix and Las Vegas and never come back. And, to prevent realtors, developers and mortgage brokers from getting federal guarantees on new mortgages until all the old houses were sold, at a minimum.

Update, Aug. 13: Yale Climate Connections reports on a Nature study on the PDO that largely mirrors the one above. It also notes this issue is making El Niño effects and predictions tougher to determine.

Update, Aug. 20: Aridzona mayors, all surely eyeing the rooftops of development, have their greedy paws out for "their" portion of river water, while not asking their legislature to fix the four-lot development loophole on water supply, and also inviting ZERO leaders of Indian tribes in Aridzona to their "poor us" confab. 

This nation, once again, is so fucking screwed.