Gnarled, ugly trees are the trees that you need to analyze to find climate trends. Complacent trees are not good for finding about history because they pack on think rings of wood even in dry years. In 2002 the flow of the Colorado River fell to a quarter of its long-term average. This got people attention, which helped raise funds for tree-ring fieldwork. The Colorado River supplies seven states and Mexico with water so this was a very big deal; the west was in a major drought.

The 20^th century has bin the wettest in the pat millennium. In July of 2007 it got extremely dry and there were several wild fires burning all over Nevada. From stumps found in the Sierra Nevada they found out that the stumps were from a drought that lasted from 900 to around 1100. Then another starting up around 1200 and ending in 1350. Most droughts in the southwest follow the pattern of La Niña, which is a periodic cooling of the eastern equatorial Pacific.

Climate theorist Isaac Held, from NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, says that global warming will most likely make the dry lands even dryer. People are not yet suffering because of this, but the trees are. By studying sections cut from extremely old trees, Tom Swetnam found that fires used to burn often in the Sierra Nevada, but the fires would never reach very large in size. Now the fires reach gigantic proportions because we try to put them out leaving small trees up, which serve as a ladder for the fire to reach the tops of the trees.

Dark beetles can almost smell that some of the trees are dying from the drought, so they come and finish them off basically. Allen predicts that people in the southwest will be seeing a lot of death in the trees and not a lot of new life. Ever since the Hoover Dam was built there has never been not enough water to supply to the areas that are needed. Now as the weather is getting dryer people are looking for other ways to get water. Some people even are thinking about the Pacific as a place to get water. The west was built by dreamers and it seems that the people who will try to keep the west the same, are also dreamers.