About 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of cropland depend on the Colorado for drinking water and irrigation, but its flow has gradually diminished over the past two decades as the climate becomes warmer and more arid across the West. Now the arcane system of water rights governing the river entitles each state and Mexico to far more water than is actually available. The rules prioritize the longest-established uses of water, in many cases dating to the 1850s and 1860s.
Not really discussed much: the water mostly goes to food for cows and cars, not people
Its really not “normal”, global warming has caused huge shifts in how snowpack is put down, and how aquafers are (not) being recharged, as well as hotter temps driving a huge change in rainfall patterns, so that vegetation drinks a lot of the snowmelt that would normally make it into the river.
Global warming sure doesn’t help, but the Colorado basin was dry AF even before the industrial revolution. IIRC, the Anasazi got fucked over in a similar way.
There have been droughts before, but the Colorado Basin is not typically in drought conditions.
The current drought is the worse we have had in 1200 years, the last time we can find a worse drought we had to invent a whole new way to determine water levels so we could get data going back 1800 years.
There have been droughts before, but all the data we have says that the current period would be dry, but not critically so…except for global warming.