科罗拉多河的水去了哪里?

科罗拉多河的水去了哪里?

Climate change isn’t why the Colorado River continues to run low.

气候变化不是科罗拉多河水位持续走低的原因。

Colorado River managers have struggled to administer interstate agreements in the face of dwindling flows. It was a perennial issue long before anyone heard of global warming, yet we’re now told that is why the river has less water than it used to.

面对日益减少的水流，科罗拉多河管理者一直在努力管理州际协议。在人们听说全球变暖之前，这是一个长期存在的问题，然而我们现在被告知，这就是为什么这条河的水量比以前少了。

Two career U.S. Geological Survey bureaucrats have published a paper claiming the Colorado River has 20 percent less water than a century ago, and climate change is the cause. The press is eating it up, but the conclusion is patently absurd.

美国地质调查局的两名官员发表了一篇论文，声称科罗拉多河的水量比一个世纪前减少了20%，气候变化是原因。媒体正在大肆宣扬，但结论显然是荒谬的。

The paper, incidentally, was privately printed, in an academic journal you must subscribe to if you want to read it. So the conclusion is not official policy. Still, it represents an evolution in thinking by Colorado River watchers.

顺便说一句，这篇论文是私人印刷的，如果你想阅读它，你必须订阅学术期刊。所以结论并不是官方政策。尽管如此，它还是代表了科罗拉多河观察家们思想的演变。

For years, water project opponents claimed there just wasn’t any more water, which they blamed on bad engineering.

多年来，反对水利工程的人声称根本就没有水了，他们把这归咎于糟糕的工程。

We were repeatedly told, by no less an authority than the Colorado River District itself, that the engineers who wrote the Interstate agreements in 1922 and 1948 were wrong about the river averaging 15 million acre feet annually, because they only had information from a few unusually wet years.

我们被反复告知，那些在1922年和1948年起草州际协议的工程师，关于这条河每年平均1500万英尺的河流的说法是错误的，因为他们只从一些异常湿润的年份获得信息。

In fact, they were the best engineers in the world, and they had decades of information. They knew exactly how much water there was.

事实上，他们是世界上最好的工程师，他们掌握了几十年的信息。他们确切地知道那里有多少水。

Unquestionably, there is less water in the river now, but why?

毫无疑问，现在河里的水少了，但为什么呢?

I am no “climate denier.” The Earth warmed by roughly 1.6 degrees in the last century and a half. But to attribute a 20 percent drop in the West’s largest river to a temperature change that small strains credulity.

我不是“气候否认者”。“在过去的一个半世纪里，地球变暖了大约1.6度。但是把西部最大河流20%的下降归结于温度的变化，这一点令人难以置信。

In fact, the report’s authors write that for each 1.8 degrees of warming (more than has occurred), the river’s flow has decreased by almost 10 percent. So even if we were to buy their assumption that those two events are related, where did the other 10 percent go?

事实上，报告的作者写道，气温每上升1.8度(比已经发生的温度高)，河流的流量就会减少近10%。因此，即使我们相信他们的假设，即这两个事件是相关的，那么另外10%的河流去了哪里?

There are two very simple explanations, both manmade.

有两个非常简单的解释，都是人为的。

First, “evapotranspiration” has robbed the river of vast quantities of water because public land managers have allowed forests to grow unnaturally clogged with far too many trees — the same bad management that caused 100 million acres of catastrophic fires in the last 20 years.

首先，“蒸发”抢走了河流中大量的水，因为公共土地管理者没有让森林自然生长，因为森林被太多的树木堵塞，同样的糟糕管理在过去20年里造成了1亿英亩的灾难性火灾。

Water evaporates from the trees before ever reaching the ground, much less the river. The Bureau of Reclamation has estimated that the Colorado River loses almost four million acre feet per year to evapotranspiration — more than the entire “missing” flow.

水在到达地面之前就从树上蒸发了，更不用说河流了。据美国垦荒局估计，科罗拉多河每年因蒸发损失近400万英尺，比整个“消失的”水量还要多。

Second, the invasive non-native plant known as tamarisk has spread across virtually every river system in half the United States, consuming unfathomable amounts of water. Despite years of effort, it remains one of the most difficult of all non-native species to control, perhaps the nation’s most insidious water problem.

其次，这种被称为柽柳的外来入侵植物几乎遍布美国一半地区的每一个河流系统，消耗了难以估量的水量。尽管经过多年的努力，它仍然是所有非本地物种中最难控制的物种之一，也许是美国最隐秘的水问题。

The authors of the Colorado River study say that unless greenhouse gas emissions are drastically reduced, the river could shrink another 31 percent by 2050, though their own data obviously does not support that.

科罗拉多河研究的作者说，除非温室气体排放大幅减少，否则到2050年，科罗拉多河可能会再减少31%，尽管他们自己的数据显然不支持这一说法。