Another "climate catastrophe"?

I took this picture last year at the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde in Colorado.

For hundreds of years the Puebloan people (also sometimes called Anasazi), ancestors of the Hopi, Pueblo and Navajo Indians, made their home in the Four Corners region where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah meet. Sometime around 1150, they left. Nobody knows why, but one of the theories is that they were driven out by a 50-year drought.

The Southwest U.S. has been in a drought since 1999. Today, there was an interesting story on NPR about scientists studying Chaco Canyon (in New Mexico) to see if they can learn anything that might relate to today. Do we have 42 more years of this to go? Will some future civilization one day be studying the emptied streets of Denver, Phoenix & Albuquerque? Somehow, xeriscaping doesn't seem like enough.