Take decades of climate change and mismanagement and add arecord warm winter in the West, record-low snowpack, a coming record March heatwave and government that denies climate change, and you’ve got a polycrisis for the Colorado River.

From Bloomberg Opinion (gift link above):

“We live in an era of compounding climate disasters. [Hurricanes](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heat-combined-with-hurricane-beryl-to-cause-misery-in-houston/) lead to power failures that make heat waves more miserable. [Heat waves](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/21/hold-heatwave-in-pakistan-and-climate-change) harden the ground and make flooding worse. The Colorado River might be about to deliver the most complex multilevel train wreck of all.

“The river, which serves 40 million people, has been [losing water](https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-05-22/colorado-river-deal-doesn-t-resolve-the-west-s-water-crisis) for decades as the planet has heated and those millions have used it too much. Then came this past winter, which was unusually warm in the mountains where the Colorado begins. That led to a perilous lack of snow in those mountains, meaning less water is available to melt into the river in spring and summer.

“And now comes a [heat wave](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/12/california-heatwave) that will quickly do away with what little snow there is. As the icing on this many-tiered catastrophe cake, the states along the river are struggling to agree on how to divvy up a resource that has dwindled by 20% since the turn of the century. And the final arbiter in that fight might be a federal government that refuses to acknowledge climate change is even real. Without a realistic plan, the worst of this slow-motion disaster is yet to come.”