A stark warning about the Great Salt Lake led lawmakers to act. Would more nuance have gotten results? Read Part 3.

Editor’s note • This is the final installment of a three-part series in partnership with Utah Public Radio exploring a widely publicized warning about the health of the Great Salt Lake and whether the two wet winters that followed have rescued the body of water from harm’s way.

Part 3 • ‘On to the next climate change hoax’

The warning was stark and scary.

“Excessive water use is destroying Great Salt Lake,” the authors of a much-publicized, Brigham Young University-led report wrote in early 2023. “The lake’s drop has accelerated since 2020, with an average deficit of 1.2 million acre-feet per year. If this loss rate continues, the lake as we know it is on track to disappear in five years.”

In tying record-low water levels to diversions for municipalities, industry and especially agriculture, the scientists and activists who wrote the report — which was not formally peer-reviewed — had set up an unambiguous connection, one that was further accentuated as their findings were shared by news organizations around the world.

Less emphasized were the many other factors contributing to the lake’s decline — the natural ebbs and flows of precipitation in the surrounding mountains, the long-term pressures of climate change and the slow role of groundwater in recharging the lake.

When those factors are taken into consideration, the probability of complete desiccation for the Great Salt Lake falls precipitously.

But that’s not the message the Utah Legislature got. In the months after the report, lawmakers passed nine bills aimed at water conservation and saving the lake from collapse.

Would a more nuanced warning — that the Great Salt Lake, while unlikely to disappear, could possibly face extreme further drying in coming decades as a result of diversions and global factors beyond any Utahn’s control — have gotten as much attention and spurred as much action from legislators as a report warning that desiccation might be imminent?

Almost certainly not.

Now, some Utah scientists, activists, politicians and policymakers are trying to figure out what to make of that paradox.

‘Accused of crying wolf’

Baylor Fox-Kemper, a professor at Brown University and the co-author of a study that looks at how climate scientists communicate risk, acknowledged that it can be hard to describe scenarios in which the actual likelihood of something happening is difficult to quantify — occurrences, for instance, such as the complete desiccation of the Great Salt Lake. And scientists, he said, frequently want a “big splash,” even before their work is peer-reviewed, in order to drive change — especially if the risk seems substantial.

“You don’t want to do something that you don’t have to do, but you also don’t want to fail to do something when you really should,” Fox-Kemper said. “It’s a hard problem.”

But the consequences of creating that big splash and getting it wrong, he said, can be dire.

“I guess there is an argument that people need to be jolted into understanding what the real risks are, and one of the ways to do that is to talk about the more acute risks,” said Peter Girard, a veteran media strategist who now leads communication efforts for Climate Central, a nonprofit organization that analyzes and reports on climate science.

The other risk is “being part of the team involved that gets accused of crying wolf,” Girard said. “And, you know, that’s going to come from anybody who’s trying to politicize science, or sort of mock the inability of science to predict the future.”

That’s what happened in Utah. This year, Gov. Spencer Cox pronounced to a national audience that the five-year warning had been “a joke.”

In doing so, Cox — who has long encouraged others to “disagree better” but has conceded that he sometimes fails to do so himself — was reflecting the misgivings of many of his constituents, who had already said as much and more.

“On to the next climate change hoax,” a rancher from central Utah wrote in response to an article on KSL.com about rising reservoir levels across the state. “The Great Salt Lake isn’t going to work for you anymore.”

“Drying up was never in the realm of possibility,” another Utahn, who lives in Clinton, just east of the lake, wrote on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, in January as legislators prepared to consider more bills intended to protect the body of water. “$600 million allocated if passed. All based on a lie.”

‘A collective freak-out’

Not everyone in Cox’s administration agrees the report was overwrought. Brian Steed, who was appointed by the governor as the state’s first Great Salt Lake commissioner in May 2023, believes it was likely beneficial.

“It’s complicated. But in truth, I think that, on the whole, bringing attention to the Great Salt Lake, and even bringing attention to the Great Salt Lake in that way has been overall positive,” said Steed, who previously served as a co-chair of the Great Salt Lake Strike Team, a cooperative effort by multiple universities and state agencies to analyze the risks to the lake and opportunities to protect it.

That group, he said, looked independently at the risk of desiccation around the same time as the BYU-led team was conducting its assessment and didn’t come to the same conclusions. “While we didn’t find in our Great Salt Lake Strike Team report that the lake was going to dry up in five years, in truth that distinction is a little irrelevant,” he said. “What we all found was that, indeed, there were going to be stark environmental consequences from a drying lake.”

Utahns may not be able to completely control the lake’s fate, Steed said, but everyone can contribute in some way.

“We can save more water, and we can save more water by being more conscientious on how we use it,” he said. “That message stands as true today as it did at the end of 2022, when all of us were having a collective freak-out about what was going on with the lake.”

‘We need to also talk about hope’

It was March 16, 2023 — barely two months after the report warned that the Great Salt Lake could be headed toward total devastation — and a series of late winter storms meant there was still plenty of snow outside of the Wallace Stegner Center at the University of Utah.

There, Westminster University microbiologist Bonnie Baxter was scheduled to give a conference presentation on the fragility and resilience of the Great Salt Lake’s food chains. Also on the speaker’s roster on that day was Utah’s governor.

“I’m going to do something that will probably offend many of you,” Cox began, “but that’s OK.”

After acknowledging that he would be abandoning the talking points he had before him, Cox spent much of the next 30 minutes criticizing scientists for being poor communicators.

“Because scientists are highly intelligent, especially in their area of expertise,” he said, “there is often an unwillingness to share that nuance with the public.”

The governor shared that he sometimes “would have conversations with experts in the field who would, to me, admit nuance — ‘you know this is what we think, but we’re not sure’ — and then their messages to the public was that this is true, you cannot question it or challenge it, and this is the only way.”

Baxter was stunned.

“He just went on and on and on about scientists,” she said, “and I was like, ‘who are the people he’s talking about?’”

About halfway into his lecture, Cox made what appeared to be a direct reference to the BYU-led report that Baxter had helped write a few months earlier.

“I believe that doom and gloom does not result in change,” he said. “I believe it has never inspired change, and I think that is core to our human nature that, when we tell people the sky is falling, what most people do is they give up. They just think, ‘well, there’s nothing I can do about it … if the Great Salt Lake is already done, if it’s already dried up and we’re all going to die from toxic dust, then I’m just going to go ahead and water my lawn.’”

‘The sky is falling’

Baxter remains upset by the governor’s “adversarial” tone, but she said she sympathizes with Cox in one respect.

“He said ‘when we tell people the sky is falling, people give up,’ and I agree with him,” she said. “I think that we need to also talk about solutions, and we need to also talk about hope.”

But even knowing what she knows now about the past two winters and the lake’s resultant rebound, when Baxter thinks about what she and her collaborators wrote — about how they framed their message, about how they calculated the lake’s trajectories, about how they communicated the risk — she has a hard time imagining doing anything differently.

Baxter said she’s not going to change her actions in response to the governor’s criticism. Instead, she said, she would continue to be driven by what she believes is the best possible science. “What politicians call that is up to them,” she said, “but that is not my problem.”

For his part, Ben Abbott, a professor of aquatic ecology at BYU and the lead author of the 2023 report, said the negative consequences of a drying Great Salt Lake kick in long before total desiccation. He’s talked to some who fear the past two wet years may have actually left the lake worse off, he said, because there could be less political appetite to act.

”These two good water years have not solved the problem,” he said. “They have given us a chance of averting crisis if we act very quickly and decisively. And so if people conclude the lake has come up a few feet and it’s therefore saved, then we’re actually moving in the wrong direction.”

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.

Matthew D. LaPlante is a climate scientist and associate professor of journalism at Utah State University. He is a former staff reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune and the host of the science-themed program “UnDisciplined” on Utah Public Radio. The show will release three episodes to accompany this series.

LaPlante is the co-author, along with Piyush Dahal, Shih-Yu Simon Wang, Kirsti Hakala, and Avik Mukherjee, of the peer-reviewed study “A ‘nuclear bomb’ or just ‘a joke’? Groundwater models may help communicate nuanced risks to the Great Salt Lake,” which was published in the journal Water on Aug. 6. None of the individuals quoted in this series was involved in the study.