But will any of us still be alive if and when that happens? Though, since you want to talk about "climate change" being used for politics, lets talk about the data centers the government is helping push in the Rocky Mountain region, and the amounts of water they need to operate as well as the heat they generate.
As an example, Utah just approved "the world's largest data center" to be built. To give some ideas, it will require 9 gigawatts of energy to run which is double what the entire state of Utah (to include the data centers here already) produces today. That will provide 7 to 8 gigawatts of waste heat (power generation creates lots of heat) or -- as a
professor at Utah State university figured, the equivalent heat as 23 nuclear bombs exploding, per day. He ran some numbers and found the data center would raise the temperature in the valley where it will be built by 5 degrees per day and by 28 degrees each night. A professor at Brigham Young University verified the numbers, as well. And this doesn't count the billions of gallons of water (estimates exist higher than 16 billion gallons of water per year) -- water the area already doesn't have.
Now, while this is in the Great Basin, so doesn't directly affect the Colorado River basin, they've also shown that heat will be pushed into the nearby Colorado River basin -- and that amount of heat will affect the amount of snow, particularly the amount of snow that accumulates. Now, I'm sure, you'll say that it doesn't matter, that they'll still get the precipitation -- but that isn't how it works. While most of this area isn't desert, it is semi-arid. If you get periodic rain, like most places, the ground absorbs as much liquid as it can, and with a semi-arid area with dry ground, it can absorb most normal rainfall.
What makes the Colorado River work (with or without the dams) is that the precipitation, for maybe nine months of the year, largely drops as snow. Since the water is frozen, it sits on top of the ground and doesn't get absorbed. Then in late spring, as the snow starts melting, you are talking about months of rainfall melting. While the ground water absorbs what it can, it is quickly overwhelmed, so the bulk of the melted snow actually flows into the Colorado River.
Now, whether you believe in all this is immaterial, at this point. We have an issue where the West has water demands and, as things currently exist, there just won't be enough water for the next decade or longer. As I pointed out in another post, yes, maybe someday the snowfall will return -- but will any of us be alive when that finally happens? The Western US has a massive water crisis and can't wait for "someday the snow will return."
