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there has been hardly any basic research done in this area since the 1970s. We can’t just invent a completely new branch of mathematics and train a new generation of water experts in it overnight. “Water resources research has been allowed to slide into oblivion over the past thirty years,” Lettenmaier growled later in a separate editorial. “Certainly the profession has been slow to acknowledge these changes and acknowledge that fundamentally new approaches will be required to address them.”253 So even as we’re beginning to grasp the enormity of this problem, we presently have no clear replacement for our old way of doing things. Until we find one, risks will be harder to predict and to price. We can expect insurance companies to react accordingly. In 2010, after failing to win a nearly 50% rate increase from state regulators, Florida’s largest insurance company abruptly canceled 125,000 homeowner policies in the state’s hurricane-prone coastal regions, saying the recent series of devastating hurricanes had rendered its business model unworkable. 254 Get ready for higher premiums, uninsurable properties, and failed or overbuilt bridges.

Nonreturnable Containers

Changing drought and flood statistics are not the only way that rising greenhouse gases harm our water supply. All of our reservoirs, holding tanks, ponds, and other storage containers are trifling compared to the capacity of snowpacks and glaciers. These are free-of-charge water storehouses, and humanity depends upon them mightily.

Snow and ice hoard huge amounts of freshwater on land, then release it in perfect time for the growing season. They do this by bulking up in winter, then melting back in spring and summer. They are the world’s hugest water-management system and, unlike a dam reservoir, displace no one and cost nothing. Glaciers (and permanent, year-round snowpacks) are especially valuable because they outlast the summer. This means they can hoard extra water in cool, wet summers, but give it back in hot, dry summers, by melting deeply into previous years’ accumulations. Put simply, glaciers sock away water in good years when farmers need it least, and release water in bad years when farmers need it most. Glaciologists call these “positive mass-balance” and “negative mass-balance” years, respectively, and they are a gift to humanity. Glaciers keep the rivers full when all else is dry. They are the ultimate sunny-day fund.

If you read the news, then you already know that many of the world’s glaciers are beating a hasty retreat, whether through warmer temperatures, less precipitation, or both. Ohio State University’s glaciologist power-couple Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley-Thompson have been photographing the deaths of their various study glaciers since the 1970s. Some of these are even wasting away at their summits, which is a death knell for a glacier. There are ski resorts in the Alps trying to save theirs by covering them with reflective blankets. Most glaciologists expect that by 2030, Montana’s Glacier National Park will have no glaciers left at all.

Seasonal snowpack, which does not survive the summer, cannot carry forward water storage from year to year like glaciers do, but it is also a critically important storage container. It creates a badly needed time-delay, releasing water when farmers need it the most. By holding back winter precipitation in the form of snow, the retained water flows downstream to farmers later, in the heat of the growing season. Without this huge, free storage container, this water would run off uselessly to the ocean in winter, long before growing season. Rising air temperatures harm this benefit, both by increasing the prevalence of winter rain (which is not retained) and by shifting the melt season to earlier in the spring. Because the growing season is determined not only by temperature but also the length of daylight, farmers are not necessarily able to adapt by planting sooner. By late summer, when the water is needed most, the snowpack is long gone.

This seasonal shift to earlier snowmelt runoff portends