科羅拉多河的水去了哪里?

科羅拉多河的水去了哪里?

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

氣候變化不是科羅拉多河水位持續(xù)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.

面對日益減少的水流，科羅拉多河管理者一直在努力管理州際協(xié)議。在人們聽說全球變暖之前，這是一個長期存在的問題，然而我們現(xiàn)在被告知，這就是為什么這條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.

美國地質(zhì)調(diào)查局的兩名官員發(fā)表了一篇論文，聲稱科羅拉多河的水量比一個世紀前減少了20%，氣候變化是原因。媒體正在大肆宣揚，但結(jié)論顯然是荒謬的。

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.

順便說一句，這篇論文是私人印刷的，如果你想閱讀它，你必須訂閱學(xué)術(shù)期刊。所以結(jié)論并不是官方政策。盡管如此，它還是代表了科羅拉多河觀察家們思想的演變。

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

多年來，反對水利工程的人聲稱根本就沒有水了，他們把這歸咎于糟糕的工程。

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.

我們被反復(fù)告知，那些在1922年和1948年起草州際協(xié)議的工程師，關(guān)于這條河每年平均1500萬英尺的河流的說法是錯誤的，因為他們只從一些異常濕潤的年份獲得信息。

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

事實上，他們是世界上最好的工程師，他們掌握了幾十年的信息。他們確切地知道那里有多少水。

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

毫無疑問，現(xiàn)在河里的水少了，但為什么呢?

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“氣候否認者”。“在過去的一個半世紀里，地球變暖了大約1.6度。但是把西部最大河流20%的下降歸結(jié)于溫度的變化，這一點令人難以置信。

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?

事實上，報告的作者寫道，氣溫每上升1.8度(比已經(jīng)發(fā)生的溫度高)，河流的流量就會減少近10%。因此，即使我們相信他們的假設(shè)，即這兩個事件是相關(guān)的，那么另外10%的河流去了哪里?

There are two very simple explanations, both manmade.

有兩個非常簡單的解釋，都是人為的。

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，“蒸發(fā)”搶走了河流中大量的水，因為公共土地管理者沒有讓森林自然生長，因為森林被太多的樹木堵塞，同樣的糟糕管理在過去20年里造成了1億英畝的災(zāi)難性火災(zāi)。

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.

水在到達地面之前就從樹上蒸發(fā)了，更不用說河流了。據(jù)美國墾荒局估計，科羅拉多河每年因蒸發(fā)損失近400萬英尺，比整個“消失的”水量還要多。

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，這種被稱為檉柳的外來入侵植物幾乎遍布美國一半地區(qū)的每一個河流系統(tǒng)，消耗了難以估量的水量。盡管經(jīng)過多年的努力，它仍然是所有非本地物種中最難控制的物種之一，也許是美國最隱秘的水問題。

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.

科羅拉多河研究的作者說，除非溫室氣體排放大幅減少，否則到2050年，科羅拉多河可能會再減少31%，盡管他們自己的數(shù)據(jù)顯然不支持這一說法。