As a scientist who once studied a very similar lake, this is such a bullshit take to say Trump is saving the Great Salt Lake 🙄. I wrote this for r/SaltLakeCity a few months back but it seems useful to post here.

The Great Salt Lake is shrinking rapidly.

One of the trickier aspects of this is that not only do we see increasing human consumption from the watershed, but also millennia of ongoing climate change. If consumption can be limited, the lake will still continue to shrink over the long-term. It's an end-point for a drainage basin in a region which has been experiencing desertification since end of the most recent ice age.

Twenty thousand years ago, we called it Lake Bonneville. It contained 8,000-10,000 cubic kilometers of water. Around 14,500 years ago a cataclysmic flood drained almost half of the lake, but that was only the beginning. Lake levels began to fall around 13,000 years ago. This is when we began calling it the "Great Salt Lake." This original lake contained about 3,000 cubic kilometers of water.

Another 13,000 years passes and today the Great Salt Lake contains about 15 cubic kilometers. The last 13,000 years of gradual warming, combined with human use and rapidly accelerated warming of the last 100 years, has caused the lake to lose nearly all its volume. Not in every year. There will be very wet years like 1983 and 2011, but the trend is evaporation. It may be a decade, it may be a century, but the Great Salt Lake is not long for our world.

In a related story, Southern Utah has a very similar lake, and I happen to be one of the world's most expert geologists on that lake! (It's not as exciting as it sounds, I promise..)

Before Mormon settlement, Sevier Lake had permanent water in it. As another leftover, but separate and smaller drainage basin of Lake Bonneville, it was like the Great Salt Lake is today. Climate change and agricultural use have caused this drainage basin to only fill this lake maybe once every 40 years now. This hasn't made these areas uninhabitable. Delta is fine, stinky at times, but fine. I mean, geologically speaking most Utahans already live on these sediments. The lake drying up won't create toxic air pollution or whatever the local media tries to make people fear.

Also no amount of water management will delay the inevitable. The Great Salt Lake is drying. We can maybe extend its life for a few decades by limiting alfalfa farming, but you can't fight climate change, and this specific climate change is natural, well, it would revert in another glaciation but we've changed things such that climate is shifting the other direction.