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When a group of scientists and advocates signed on to a report about the dire situation of the Great Salt Lake in the weeks before the 2023 legislative session. They didn't see it as risky or presumptuous. They were looking at the pattern of decline in the lake's elevation on a graph and in person. And if you followed that line of progression, in five years, if nothing was done,

the lake was on track to disappear as we know it. Those were the words they used. But then,

and not that long after, the conditions changed. We had an incredibly wet winter, and some people, like the governor,

figured these scientists and advocates had overreacted and oversimplified the complex dynamics

of climate change, and either way, they certainly had gotten it wrong. Ben Abbott and

Bonnie Baxter helped write that report, and recently they

explained to us why. Abbott is an ecologist at Brigham Young University, Baxter, a biologist

at Westminster University. Now, they knew things were bad, but when they went to a conference about

the lake, the Salt Lake County Watershed Symposium, this was in October,

they realized it was worse than they thought. Contrary to public opinion, scientists are

actually extremely conservative. Even when things are really bad, they're couching it in terms

of, okay, what's the likelihood of this happening? And in fact,

presenter after presenter, right, the bird team got up and talked about the threat to migratory

birds. The dust team got up and talked about how two-thirds of the lake bed was exposed.

The hydrological team got up and said, groundwater's depleted, reservoirs are empty,

there's nothing we can do. The brine shrimp team got up and said, groundwater's depleted, reservoirs are empty. There's nothing we can do.

The brine shrimp team got up and said,

we're right at the threshold.

The shrimp aren't going to be able to reproduce.

The brine flies are going to have problems.

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