Even without climate change, we would have a problem because we're taking more water out than Colorado River could provide, but climate change has made the problem much worse by substantially reducing the flow in Colorado River.

John Fleck

When the reservoirs are full, people blow it off, when they are draining, that's when these opportunities arise. This creates a moment of opportunity ; there are hard decisions to be made.

The vast majority of this water is used for irrigated agriculture across the basin ; there's just no way around the footprint of irrigated agriculture shrinking.

This [ rapid decline ] scares me, it's dropping so fast that it may be overreaching our ability to cope with the problems. I did not anticipate the bottom to drop this quickly, and we're only talking about Lake Mead.

What we need to do is recognize the science behind this reality and that this does not get better, we're all going to have to deal with less and collaborate on a new set of numbers that reflects the reality of the science today.

There's a risk when [ water managers ] cling to the hope of a big snowpack bailing us out, we need to recognize that there's going to be less water to work with.

We're now seeing the model for what the future of Colorado River Basin water use looks like, where scarcity is the norm and drought is not some special short-term thing, this is the way of life we're in now with climate change reducing the flow on Colorado River.

This shows us that the kind of dire scenarios that we've been preparing for and hoping would not happen are here now.