Water on the earth is a finite recycled resource. H2O changes state — ice, water, steam, vapor — but there is a fixed amount of it on earth. Yes, over the next billion years or so, it’s expected that some atmosphere and water will disperse into space, but that is not the immediate problem. Water that does not fall onto Colorado as rain or snow either goes somewhere else or stays somewhere else on earth. It’s complicated.

Perhaps Colorado should increase its program of seeding clouds with dry ice and silver iodide. China used this technique to increase snowfall for their Olympics and is currently seeding clouds to enhance agricultural production. (Is China also stealing our water?) In 1952, Britain tried “Operation Cumulus” which, reports suggest, resulted in huge downpours, killing 35 people in floods and mudslides. It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. It’s complicated.

A byproduct of combustion is water. In nature, forest fires and volcanoes add a small amount of water to the atmosphere, but we need more jet airplanes to create contrails of water vapor in the sky. We need more internal combustion engines to add water to the atmosphere. (You’ve seen the vapor coming from your vehicle’s tailpipe on those cold Colorado mornings.) We need to burn more fossil fuels. It’s complicated.

We need to get more water vapor into the atmosphere so that it can fall as rain or snow. Let’s warm up the oceans to evaporate more water. Let’s melt those useless ice caps at the North and South Poles so we can put the water that’s trapped there to use. Let’s return to the good old days when Utah and most of the American West was a tropical rain forest where the dinosaurs roamed. We need climate change! 

Water, water everywhere. It’s complicated.