A Long Hot Summer?

It has been a scorcher here in NE Alabama this week. Pretty dry too. But what we're experiencing is nothing compared to the western US. The drought in the West is staggering. Water futures there are scary. So much of their water is being used for crops like alfalfa and corn which are better suited to grow in other regions. It's not like this issue is new.

On January 17, 1890, John Wesley Powell strode into a Senate committee room in Washington, D.C., to testify...Powell had come to testify not as a hero or explorer, but as one of America’s foremost scientists, the head of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and an architect of federal science. He had something deeply important to communicate about America’s future.
He told them all too rightly that the West offered not enough water to reclaim by irrigation more than a tiny fraction of its land. Their dreams of a verdant West needed to be tempered and shaped to reality. Powell might as well have told them the Earth was flat. The senators were outraged.