OK, let us 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 the next decade.   The climate is changing, quickly. Quicker than we predicted. Exponentially. I s this anecdotal or Armageddon? This winter-that-wasn’t has been a catastrophe for skiers and the local industry, even for Vail Resorts and Alterra, which 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 drier for decades at a rate of roughly 1-3 inches of declining snowfall per year since 1990. The 2025 water year ending Oct. 1 was the driest in 85 years in Park City, rivaling the Dust Bowl of the dirty ’30s, with only 13 inches of precipitation, or 60% of average, and nothing falling all summer. Then we had 7 inches of rain by New Year’s, so the calendar year looks average and we conveniently forgot the 20-year drought. This weather and thought pattern has been predicted for the past 30 years by Brian McInerney of the National Weather Service and advocates like Save our Snow as indicative of our new rain hydrology. The past 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 at each end of 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 Utah State University, 20 years ago with the weakening and vacillating of the polar vortex and 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 now 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 is 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 five years. That is not to mention the increased toxic lake bed dust clouds in the Wasatch that make people sick 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 University of Utah. Instead, we pumped extra runoff water,from the ample 1983-84 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 1960s, 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, while simultaneously proposing expanded authority and funding for more water-use development.  The lawmakers voted to remove the legal protection of the natural streams, public welfare benefits for the lake, to avoid lawsuits and ease development approval.  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 billion to 3 billion, but they have not yet allocated a 10th of that amount for the problem.  Proposals now include draining the north arm to the south arm of the lake to supress dust, but some of the people and all of the the birds live up north. The state has turned to private sector philanthropy for a solution, and the Romney family has given them $100 million, but this issue requires even deeper pockets.  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% of its average annual runoff volume while Lakes Powell and Mead are only 25% full. The river was originally allocated for 17-million-acre feet in the Colorado Compact of 1922, and now only flows 5 million-acre feet. This year we will be lucky to get 2 million-acre feet, and something has to give.   Lake Powell is looking at minimum power pool this year, where they cannot make electricity and we have to burn more carbon — compounding the problem yet again. Dead pool could be in three to five years, where we lose control of the outflow to the Grand Canyon and downstream compact deliveries to the other states.  Western governors met in Washington, D.C., 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. This is the tragedy of the commons mixed with Russian roulette and game theory — 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 Congress, so we could give this problem to the President. Legal or not, federal take over of the Colorado Basin may be the only way to stop people from growing hay, cotton or rice in the desert and we could all be great again.    Grow cotton in Alabama and rice in Vietnam. 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.  Let’s face it, the issues with the lake and the river are symptoms of the larger sickness of climate change here now and accelerating at unimaginable rates. It is simply too hot and dry these days to do everything for everybody.  Solutions for 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.   Finally, we would 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 to 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.  Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. See his website: Waterandwhatever.com The post Water and Whatever: What the winter that never was suggests appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less