A World Of Thirst

A World Of Thirst

A World of Thirst
Poor sanitation. Pollution. Wasteful irrigation. The planet's freshwater supply is terribly managed
By Bret Schulte

Posted 5/27/07

Over the course of the past 40 years, north Africa's Lake Chad has shriveled to one tenth its earlier size, beset by decades of drought and agricultural irrigation that have sucked water from the rivers that feed it—even as the number of people whose lives depend on its existence has grown. In 1990, the Lake Chad basin supported about 26 million people; by 2004 the total was 37.2 million. In the next 15 years, experts predict, the incredible shrinking lake and its tapped rivers will need to support 55 million. "You don't have much room for error at this point," says hydrologist Michael Coe.

The population growth has coincided with a 25 percent decrease in rainfall, with global warming very likely a factor. As oceans store more heat, the temperature difference between water and land dissipates, sapping power from rainmaking monsoons. At the same time, desperate people are overusing wells. Coe recently concluded that water supplies in the basin are "stretched to their limits, and future needs will far outstrip the accessible supply."

Lake Chad, with its confluence of troubles, is emblematic of a burgeoning water crisis around the world. While the western United States faces serious water problems, American money and know-how can at least soften the blow. Not so elsewhere. Worldwide, 1.1 billion people lack clean water, 2.6 billion people go without sanitation, and 1.8 million children die every year because of one or the other, or both. By 2025, the United Nations predicts 3 billion people will be scrambling for clean water. There are myriad problems: industrial contaminants flooding waterways, wasteful irrigation, an exploding world population, political corruption and incompetence, and a changing climate—to name a few.

In a report issued in November, the United Nations declared water "a global crisis," announcing that 55 member nations are failing to meet their water-related Millennium Development Goal target, agreed upon in 2000, of halving the proportion of people without clean water and sanitation by 2015. The real crisis, experts say, is not a lack of water but a lack of water management. Water doesn't always appear in the right places, or at the right times. And it has to be cared for. "It's a terrible situation around the world," says Peter Rogers, a Harvard environmental engineering professor, "but it doesn't have to be."

One percent. Just 3 percent of the world's water is fresh. Of that, most is locked in the ground, glaciers, or ice caps. That leaves about 1 percent for the world's 6.6 billion people. As population grows, so does demand for water—but at two to three times the rate. People consume water for drinking, for hygiene, through food production, and in a variety of industrial processes. A blossoming middle class in Southeast Asia, India, and China will join the West in consuming far more than the minimum 20 to 50 liters (about five to 13 gallons) of water per day necessary per person. (Americans lead the world by consuming 400 to 600 liters per day, or as much as 158 gallons.) Upward mobility has yielded more flush toilets and a dietary shift from grain to meat-heavy diets. Raising a cow requires a thousand times more water than the equivalent average for grain.

End of excerpt.

Much more at the link. And it is good to see articles on this important topic for all of our lives being printed in publications like U.S. News And World Report. We need to see more of this.

Bottled Water Has High Environmental Costs

Bottled Water Has High Environmental Costs

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON, May 10 (Reuters) - Bottled water, the world's fastest growing beverage, carries a heavy environmental cost, adding plastic to landfills and putting pressure on natural springs, the author of a new report said on Thursday.

"Bottled water is really expensive, in terms of environmental costs and economically," said Ling Li, who wrote the report for the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute.

While many in developed countries thirst for safety, cleanliness, taste and social cachet when they buy bottled water, more than 1 billion of the world's poorest lack access to clean drinking water, bottled or not.

And in developed countries, bottled water may be scrutinized using lower standards than plain tap water, the report said.

The environmental impact can start at the source, where some local streams and underground aquifers become depleted when there is "excessive withdrawal" for bottled water, according to the report.

In addition to the energy cost of producing, bottling, packaging, storing and shipping bottled water, there is also the environmental cost of the millions of tonnes of oil-derived plastic needed to make the bottles.

"The beverage industry benefits the most from our bottled water obsession," Ling said in a statement. "But this does nothing for the staggering number of the world's poor who see safe drinking water as at best a luxury and at worst an unattainable goal."

Worldwatch estimated 35 to 50 percent of urban dwellers in Africa and Asia lack adequate access to safe potable water.

Most water is bottled in polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, which requires less energy to recycle and does not release chlorine into the atmosphere when burned. But recycling rates have declined: about 23.1 percent of PET water bottles were recycled in the United States in 2005, compared with 39.7 percent 10 years earlier, the report said.

Bottled water costs from 240 to 10,000 times as much as water straight from the tap. In dollars, that means such water sold in most industrialized countries costs $500 to $1,000 per 1 cubic metre (35.3 cu ft), compared with 50 cents per cubic metre in California, where the quality of tap water is high.

World consumption of bottled water more than doubled between 1997 and 2005, with the United States being the largest consumer. U.S. residents drank nearly 6.3 billion gallons (28.6 billion litres) in 2005, the report found.

Among the countries that use bottled water, India's consumption nearly tripled for the period, and China's more than doubled between 2000 and 2005. Mexico, Brazil, Italy, Germany, France, Indonesia and Spain round out the top 10.
~~~~~~~~~~
Corporations that sell bottled water are depleting natural resources, inflating prices, and lying when they tell you their water is purer and tastes better than the water that comes out of the tap. And Americans have been the unwitting targets of a grand campaign to make them believe that tap water is always substandard and bottled is always from a pristine flowing stream in the mountains of Maine untouched by man... and the reason for that deception should not be surprising...PROFITS.

In the past ten years the bottled water market has more than doubled in the United States becoming the second most popular beverage behind soda. Three out of four Americans drink bottled water, and spent $10 billion on bottled water last year alone which comes to an average of about 26 gallons per person. That's a lot of environmental degradation and landfill plastic just to have convenience and feel "safe" about a product that for the most part is no different than the water coming out of your tap.

Just as with the tobacco industy and the oil industy, the bottled water industry is spending tens of millions of dollars every year to undermine your confidence in tap water even though the water systems we rely on are better regulated than the bottled water industry. Tap water is regulated by the EPA which has strict guidelines regarding chemicals with testing by government agencies. Bottled water is regulated by the FDA with regulations that only apply to water that is bottled and transported between states. That leaves out a huge chunk of the water transported within states that have no guidelines attached to them with states many times leaving them to self police themselves.

Three companies control more than half the water market presently: Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Nestle. Both Coke and Pepsi exclusively use tap water for their source while Nestle uses tap water in some brands, and even though they make claims that it is filtered several times with the processes they use it is hardly state of the art and prone to the same dangers as any other product and people are paying dearly for it. These companies harm the environment by depleting underground water sources and damaging stream systems by using affiliate companies to bottle the water for a song as they mark it up exhorbitantly to make a profit. This while people in water scarce countries literally die of thirst. To me, this practice is totally immoral. That is because this misrepresentation about tap water prohibits proper funds from being alloted to update water systems, thus opening the door up to privitization. And that is something people must fight as those in Cochabamaba Bolivia did in 2000 when Bechtel sought to privitize their water.

The first step of course is to have water declared a global human right, and for people to become more aware of just what entity is overseeing their water system. At the frantic pace of population, the excelled pace of resources dwindling including glacier melt that is happening at an accelerated rate globally and drought due to climate change, and the continued wasteful practices of humans, we are headed for a crisis of untold proportions if we do not get a handle on it now. And that also means standing up to those who would dare use this crisis as a way to make a profit from it as people in developing countries dig ever deeper hoping for just one drink a day.

People are being hoodwinked into giving huge amounts of money to an industry that takes advantage of our environment and brings in more profits than the pharmaceutical industry. One hundred billion dollars could have done a lot to bring potable water to the over one billion people in this world now without it and fix the water systems here that need it.

Water is not a commodity it is a human right. It is time those companies exploiting that right know that we are not going to take it anymore.

My other writings on this:

Stand Up To Corporations That Kill

Globalization/Time To Take Action

Who Owns The Water?

Warming Triggers Alarming Retreat Of Himalayan Glaciers

Warming Triggers Alarming Retreat of Himalayan Glaciers

Excerpt:

Glacial runoff in the Himalayas is the largest source of freshwater for northern India, and provides more than half the water to its most important river, the Ganges.

Glacial runoff also is the source of the headwaters for the Indus River in Pakistan, the Brahmaputra that flows through Bangladesh, the Mekong that descends through Southeast Asia, the Irrawaddy in Burma, and the Yellow and Yangtze rivers of China.

Scientists say 1.3 billion people reside in areas affected by glacial retreat, either in flood-prone areas or in locales that rely on year-round supplies of fresh water from glaciers rather than from the monsoon rainfall of only three or four months.

The retreating glaciers are occurring across an area that's the largest high-altitude land mass on the planet, bordered by the Himalayas to the south, the Tian Shan range to the north, and the Pamirs and the Karakorum mountains to the west.

Throughout the area, experts say, dwindling glaciers may lead to unstable mountainsides, greater sedimentation in rivers and disrupted irrigation systems, in addition to threatening water supplies to large populations.

China issued its first ever report on climate change in late December, saying average temperatures will rise two to three degrees Fahrenheit by 2020 and up to 6.4 degrees by the end of the century, unleashing more frequent "extreme weather events."

Scientists say glacial retreat will bring a feast-or-famine cycle to the Himalayas.

In the near term, accelerated glacial melting will bring a bonanza of water flow, perhaps even intense flooding, with great impact on biodiversity.

"The flooding events will scour the species that live in the river areas," said Dr. Lara Hansen, chief scientist for the global climate change program at the World Wildlife Fund. High-altitude plants and animals that are highly dependent on the glacial melt during the non-rainy season also will be affected, she added.

As climate change intensifies, she said, humans growing desperate for year-round water are likely to pay less attention to the needs of protecting biodiversity.

Small villages in Nepal, Bhutan, India and Pakistan that rely on glacier-fed water "are already feeling the pinch of this," Kulkarni said.

Far from the highest peaks in Tibet, large lakes fed by glacial runoff are rising by as much as 30 feet, experts said, submerging new areas and displacing some nomads. Experts say permafrost, or perennially frozen ground, is also beginning to melt.

"Sometimes when we camp out, we see water seeping up from the tent floor," said Bendo, a senior engineer with Remote Sensing Application Research Center of the Tibet Autonomous Region, who goes by only one name.

The Himalayas, with 17 percent glacial cover, have far more extensive glaciers than other ranges, such as the Alps, which have only a 2 percent cap of glacier and icepack.

End of excerpt


Photo Slideshow/The Roof Of The World Is Melting

Southwest Water Woes

A bleached "bathtub ring," the result of a six-year drought that has dramatically dropped the level of the reservoir, shows on red Navajo sandstone formations near Last Chance Bay at Lake Powell near Page, Ariz. Lake Powell and the next biggest Colorado River reservoir, the nearly 100-year-old Lake Mead, are at the lowest levels ever recorded.
David Mcnew / Getty Images














Southwest Water Woes

You can listen to the radio program at a link at the original link noted above. Here is part of the transcript:

There’s been a drought in the Southwestern U.S. since 1998, but that hasn’t stopped the population in the region from rising by a million people per year. Brian Mann reports on the Colorado River’s struggle to meet growing water demands in the Southwest:

CURWOOD: It's Living on Earth. I'm Steve Curwood. Every day, it seems, thousands of Americans pack up for the sunny skies of the Southwest, especially the booming cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix. The Southwest is a desert, of course, but thanks to the massive water projects of the 1930's it became hospitable for millions of settlers. But now there's trouble in the Southwest. The region is suffering through its eighth year of drought with little or no relief in sight. For much of its water the Southwest relies on the Colorado River to brings snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains. But snow patterns are changing and the Colorado is carrying a lot less water than it did a century ago. Overall it seems global warming is hitting the region harder than just about anywhere else in the country

Brian Mann of North Country Public Radio has our story.

snip

MANN: Seventy-five years later, big crowds of tourists squeeze through the dam's visitor center.

ANNOUNCER: Come on in, folks, Find a place where you can see!

MANN: This may be one of the world's modern engineering marvels. But tour guide Bruce Laughlin, who works for the Federal Bureau of Reclamation, acknowledges that the Colorado River's great reservoirs -- at Lake Powell and here at Lake Mead -- were built for much wetter times. For nearly a decade, they've been drying up.

LAUGHLIN: I think we're about 54%.

TOURIST: How long since it's been full?

LAUGHLIN: This lake was filled right to the top before this drought started in 1998. This coming year, they're going to hold as much water as they can in the upper lake because they need to fill up Lake Powell, because it's getting dangerously low. This lake's probably gonna go down more.

MANN: Scientists now believe that the West was settled during an unusually wet period. The people who built these reservoirs had unrealistic expectations for how much rain and snow would fall each year. Recent climate models predict further drying, less precipitation for the Southwest.

GLEICK: If nature gives us a little less water, then there just is not enough to go around.

MANN: Peter Gleick is a water expert at an environment and resources think tank in Oakland, California called the Pacific Institute.

GLEICK: It turns out that a very small decrease in average flow of the Colorado, in the long run, drains those reservoirs dry.

MANN: A new study by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University -- published in the journal Science -- focused on predictions for the Southwest. Atmospheric scientist and lead researcher Richard Seager says he expects precipitation in the region to drop by 10-20 percent before mid-century. Meanwhile the population of the Southwest is still growing by roughly a million people a year.

SEAGER: With declining water availability there's going to be quite a tussle about who gets the water and whether it's going to be possible to reallocate water in a way that will retain agriculture that's needed, but also sustain a growing urban population.

MANN: Rising temperatures are already shrinking the mountain snow pack, which feeds Western rivers through the summer. In the future, by summer's end, there may be no more snow to melt.

SEAGER: So that natural system of water storage that the water supply system is relying on is going to become less effective.

MANN: Water experts say these incremental changes could disrupt the Colorado River's complicated system of dams, reservoirs and allocation treaties that now supply water to 25 million people.

MULROY: What resources we do have, given what global warming could present to us, could evaporate tomorrow.

MANN: Patricia Mulroy is general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which is charged with supplying water to the city of Las Vegas.

MULROY: I do believe that the Colorado River is going to be severely challenged as we go through global warming. We're already behind in developing those alternatives on how to protect human existence in the West.

MANN: Conservation is a necessity. And some fast-growing cities have implemented water-use restrictions unheard of in water-rich parts of the U.S. Denver and Aurora, Colorado are seen as models -- as is Tucson, Arizona. Here in Las Vegas, there are actually water detectives, who sniff out waste.

snip

MANN: The Water Authority has combined this kind of enforcement with new incentives, urging people to convert from grass and shrubs to desert plants and rock gardens. But critics say the city isn't doing nearly enough. Down on Vegas's casino strip, there is water everywhere -- flowing from extravagant fountains, gushing over manmade waterfalls.

[WATER SOUNDS]

MANN: Outside the Venetian, one of Vegas's showcase casinos, gondolas ferry tourists through glittering canals. This water is re-circulated and reused, but Jill Rowland-Legan says it's a symbol of the city's outdated thinking.

LEGAN: Are they being smart about growth? Should they have some type of moratorium on growth until we get this water issue taken care of? Are they still catering to the major casinos and the major contractors?

MANN: Jill Rowland-Legan heads the chamber of commerce in Boulder City, a small town that lies between Las Vegas Vegas and the Lake Mead reservoir. Her community has embraced a slow-growth ordinance that limits new home construction.

LEGAN: We don't even take our complete allocation of water here in Boulder City because it's all going to Vegas to make sure that they're taken care of.

MANN: But Patricia Mulroy, with the Southern Nevada Water Authority, says slowing Las Vega's growth is not an option. Construction cranes punctuate the horizon. With eight thousand new residents arriving every month, neighborhoods push steadily toward the arid hills.

MULROY: Every piece of private land is acquired with an expectation to not leave it desert, but to build on it. And the private property owner has a right to develop his property.

MANN: Eighty percent of the Colorado River's water is still used for agriculture and Mulroy says that has to change. The Water Authority has already begun buying up farms and ranches in rural Nevada, in a bid to control more water rights.

But as the drought deepens, Columbia University researcher Richard Seager says rain and snowfall in this region will decline to levels not experienced since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Only this time, the dry spell won't end.

SEAGER: That level of reduction was enough to cause really severe trouble and that level of reduction persisting for an even longer period of time will equally cause a lot of trouble.

For Living On Earth I'm Brian Mann in Las Vegas, Nevada.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It is always the same. People moving to the desert to swim in their pools, water their desert lawns, and live a life in excess not thinking about the future. Well, the future is here and it isn't looking so good unless those people wake up and think about something other than themselves. It sometimes is as simple as that.

Weather patterns are changing and temperatures are warming due to the climate crisis we face. That means as we are seeing, that snowpack that feeds the rivers will be no more if the current level is sustained and what is left will have to be allocated amicably and equitably with a rising population. Just how do people propose that will happen without tensions? How will people be able to live with most of the water being used in agriculture? You think what has happened in Australia can't happen here in the U.S.? Think again. It has already started.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Scientists Predict Southwest Mega Drought

WASHINGTON - Changing climate will mean increasing drought in the American Southwest — a region where water already is in tight supply — according to a new study.

“The bottom line message for the average person and also for the states and federal government is that they’d better start planning for a Southwest region in which the water resources are increasingly stretched,” said Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. Seager is lead author of the study published online Thursday by the journal Science.

Researchers studied 19 computer models of the climate, using data dating back to 1860 and projecting into the future, to the year 2100. The same models were used in preparing the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The consensus of the models was that climate in the southwestern United States and parts of northern Mexico began a transition to drier conditions late in the 20th century and is continuing the trend in this century, as climate change alters the movement of storms and moisture in the atmosphere. The models show the drying trend continuing all the way to 2100 — for more than 90 years.

"If these models are correct, the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought, or the Dust Bowl and 1950s droughts, will, within the coming years to decades, become the new climatology of the American Southwest," the researchers wrote.

In a telephone interview, Seager said that doesn’t mean there would be dust storms like those of the 1930s Dust Bowl, because conditions at that time were also complicated by poor agricultural practices. But he said the reduction in rainfall could be equivalent to those times when thousands of farmers abandoned their parched land and moved away in search of jobs.
Currently, the majority of water in the Southwest is used in agriculture, but the urban population of the region is growing and so the water needs of people are growing as well, he explained.

“So, in a case where there is a reduced water supply, there will have to be some reallocation between the users,” Seager said. “The water available is already fully allocated.” He said feels that adjustments can be made to deal with the change, perhaps by withdrawing some land from production and by conserving water in urban areas. “But it’s something that needs to be planned for,” Seager said. “It’s time to start thinking how to deal with that.”

Jonathan T. Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona, said the finding “agrees with what is already happening in the Southwest, and will be further complicated by the already declining spring snowpack due to warming.”

“These are scary results, but scary in part because they are results of well thought-out scientific work by a large number of strong scientists,” said Overpeck, who was not part of the research team.

Drought Drops Italy's Po River to Historic Lows

Drought Drops Italy's Po River To Historic Low, Threatens Crops Across Europe

May 4, 2007 12:08 p.m. EST
Linda Young - AHN Staff Writer

Rome, Italy (AHN) - A severe drought in several European countries is threatening crops and has caused Italy to declare a state of emergency in its northern and central regions a day after France imposed water rationing. Farmers in Italy, France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland say it is the worst drought they have seen.

Italy acted on Thursday even as it was beginning to rain in the worst affected areas, saying that the forecasted rain would not make up for the rain deficit in the region.

The lack of rain in many parts of Europe has lowered river levels to historic lows. That includes Italy's Po River, which runs west to east across northern Italy. It feeds the fertile Po Valley where about a third of Italy's food is grown.

The German Weather Service said that April broke records kept since 1901 as the hottest and driest month. Italian officials say this winter was the warmest on record in 200 years.

Italy's warm winter caused the level of the Po River to start the Spring season low because there was very little snow in the Alps to melt and runoff into the river. That combined with a warm dry spring brought the river levels down further.

The Po Valley is also heavily industrialized and about 15 percent of Italy's electricity is from hydropower plants. Officials said the drought might force industries to shut down.

In Italy, sugar and rice crops are threatened. The drought has also dried up feed for dairy cows that produce milk for such classic Italian cheeses as Grana Padano and parmesan and feed for hogs that are used for Parma and San Daniele prosciutto.

In Germany, wheat, rye, barley, rapeseed, strawberries and lettuce crops are threatened by the drought. Dry meadows mean farmers have to buy fodder for cattle, which drives the price of milk up.

In Switzerland, the drought threatens the dairy industry, a large exporter of cheese and premium butter to the United States, that is suffering a lack of hay and meadows for cows.
~~~~~~~

About the Po River

The Freshwater Boom Is Over/Our Rivers Are Starting To Run Dry

The Freshwater Boom Is Over

The freshwater boom is over. Our rivers are starting to run dry

We can avert global thirst - but it means cutting carbon emissions by 60%. Sounds ridiculous? Consider the alternative

George Monbiot
Tuesday October 10, 2006
The Guardian


It looks dull, almost impenetrable in places. But if its findings are verified, it could turn out to be the most important scientific report published so far this year. In this month's edition of the Journal of Hydrometeorology is a paper written by scientists at the Met Office, which predicts future patterns of rainfall and evaporation.

Those who dispute that climate change is taking place, such as Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail, like to point out that that the predicted effects of global warming rely on computer models, rather than "observable facts". That's the problem with the future - you can't observe it. But to have any hope of working out what might happen, you need a framework of understanding. It's either this or the uninformed guesswork that Phillips seems to prefer.

The models can be tested by means of what climate scientists call backcasting - seeing whether or not they would have predicted changes that have already taken place. The global climate model used by the Met Office still needs to be refined. While it tracks past temperature changes pretty closely, it does not accurately backcast the drought patterns in every region. But it correctly reproduces the total global water trends over the past 50 years. When the same model is used to forecast the pattern over the 21st century, it uncovers "a net overall global drying trend" if greenhouse gas emissions are moderate or high. "On a global basis, drought events are slightly more frequent and of much longer duration by the second half of the 21st century relative to the present day." In these dry, stodgy phrases, we find an account of almost unimaginable future misery.

Many parts of the world, for reasons that have little to do with climate change, are already beginning to lose their water. In When the Rivers Run Dry, Fred Pearce, who is New Scientist's environment consultant, travels around the world trying to assess the state of our water resources. He finds that we survive today as a result of borrowing from the future.

The great famines predicted for the 1970s were averted by new varieties of rice, wheat and maize, whose development was known as the "green revolution". They produce tremendous yields, but require plenty of water. This has been provided by irrigation, much of which uses underground reserves. Unfortunately, many of them are being exploited much faster than they are being replenished. In India, for example, some 250 cubic kilometres (a cubic kilometre is a billion cubic metres or a trillion litres) are extracted for irrigation every year, of which about 150 are replaced by the rain. "Two hundred million people [are] facing a waterless future. The groundwater boom is turning to bust and, for some, the green revolution is over."

In China, 100 million people live on crops grown with underground water that is not being refilled: water tables are falling fast all over the north China plain. Many more rely on the Huang He (the Yellow river), which already appears to be drying up as a result of abstraction and, possibly, climate change. Around 90% of the crops in Pakistan are watered by irrigation from the Indus. Almost all the river's water is already diverted into the fields - it often fails now to reach the sea. The Ogallala aquifer that lies under the western and south-western United States, and which has fed much of the world, has fallen by 30 metres in many places. It now produces half as much water as it did in the 1970s.

All this was known before the new paper was published. While climate scientists have been predicting for some time that the wet parts of the world are likely to become wetter and the dry parts drier, they had assumed that overall rainfall would rise, as higher temperatures increase evaporation. At the same time - and for the same reason - soils could become drier. It was unclear what the net effects would be. But the new paper's "drought index" covers both rainfall and evaporation: overall, the world becomes drier.

Even this account - of rising demand and falling supply - does not tell the whole grim story. Roughly half the world's population lives within 60 kilometres of the coast. Eight of the 10 largest cities on earth have been built beside the sea. Many of them rely on underground lenses of fresh water, effectively floating, within the porous rocks, on salt water which has soaked into the land from the sea. As the fresh water is sucked out, the salt water rises and can start to contaminate the aquifer. This is already happening in hundreds of places. The worst case is the Gaza Strip, which relies entirely on underground water that is now almost undrinkable. As the sea level rises as a result of climate change, salt pollution in coastal regions is likely to accelerate.

As these two effects of climate change - global drying and rising salt pollution - run up against the growing demand for water, and as irrigation systems run dry or become contaminated, the possibility arises of a permanent global food deficit. Even with a net food surplus, 800 million people are malnourished. Nothing I could write would begin to describe what a world in deficit - carrying 9 billion people - would look like.

There are four possible means of adapting to this crisis. One is to abandon regions that are drying up and shift production to the wettest parts of the world - the Amazon and Congo basins, for example. But as these are generally the most forested places, this will lead to a great acceleration of climate change, and of the global drying it's likely to cause, as the carbon in the trees is turned to carbon dioxide. Another is to invest in desalination plants. But even the new desalination technologies produce expensive water, and they use a great deal of energy. Again this means more global warming.

Another is to shift water, on a massive scale, to the drying lands. But vast hydro-engineering projects have seldom succeeded in helping the poor. Giant dams and canals - like the Narmada system in India, the Three Gorges in China and Colonel Gadafy's "Great Man-Made River" - are constructed at stupendous cost. Then, when no further glory can be extracted by the government officials and companies who built them, the fiddly work of ensuring the water reaches the poor is forgotten, and the money is wasted. As Fred Pearce shows, perhaps the best method, which in the past has kept cities alive even in the Negev desert, is the small-scale capture of rainwater in ponds and tanks.

But to stand a high chance of averting this catastrophe, we must ensure that the drying doesn't happen. The predictions in the new paper refer to global warming in the middle or at the high end of the expected range. Beneath that point - 2C of warming or so - a great global drying is less likely to occur. As the figures I've published show, to keep the rise in temperature below this level requires a global cut in carbon emissions of 60% by 2030 - which means a 90% reduction in rich nations such as the United Kingdom. It sounds ridiculous . But then you consider the alternative.

George Monbiot's book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning is published by Penguin monbiot.com

Interview With Fred Pearce
Very good and informative interview.

Trade Off Looms for Arid U.S. Regions. :Water or Power?

Trade Off Looms for Arid U.S. Regions: Water Or Power?

Trade-off looms for arid US regions: water or power?
By Peter N. Spotts,
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Albuquerque, N.M. - The drive to build more power plants for a growing nation – as well as the push to use biofuels – is running smack into the limits of a fundamental resource: water.

Already, a power plant uses three times as much water to provide electricity to the average household than the household itself uses through showers, toilets, and the tap. The total water consumed by electric utilities accounts for 20 percent of all the nonfarm water consumed in the United States. By 2030, utilities could account for up to 60 percent of the nonfarm water, because they use water for cooling and to scrub pollutants.

This water-versus-energy challenge is likely to be most acute in fast-growing regions of the US, such as the Southeast and the arid Southwest. Assuming current climate conditions, continued growth in these regions could eventually require tighter restrictions on water use, on electricity use, or both during the hottest months, when demand for both skyrockets, researchers say. Factor in climate change and the projections look worse. This is prompting utilities to find ways to alleviate the squeeze.

Here in New Mexico, scientists and water managers are already wrestling with the issue. One of the state's main sources of electricity is the San Juan generating station. Its main source of cooling water is the Navajo Reservoir, which straddles the state's border with Colorado. Under today's climate conditions, a three-year drought might require users of the reservoir to cut their water consumption by 18 percent, according to preliminary research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. But a three-year drought with an average temperature rise of 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F.) could mean a 65 percent reduction by the end of the third year.

"This isn't just the San Juan River basin we're talking about," says Andrew Wolfsberg, a hydrologist at the lab. If the US decides to develop oil shale deposits in southern Colorado, which is likely to be water-intensive, it will be difficult to keep oil shale development going, he adds.

A large-scale move to biofuels would be even more water-intensive, says Ronald Pate, a researcher at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque.

Over the past five years, water availability and quality have become rallying points for opponents of new plants around the country, according to a December 2006 Department of Energy report on the issue. By some estimates, electric utilities plan to build 150 coal-fired generating stations in the US over the next 30 years.

"Utilities are beginning to recognize that water is becoming a greater permitting issue than air quality," says Thomas Feeley III, a technology manager at the US Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh.

The potential collision of water, energy, and climate is not limited to the US. "This is a big issue in other arid and semi-arid parts of the world," says Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit environmental think tank in Washington. The challenge is especially acute in China and India. India already faces serious water shortages around the country, he says. And in China, he says, the central government is losing control over energy planning as local governments drive the push for more power plants. In the future, if climate forecasts are correct, the demand for thermoelectric power could continue to grow as mountain glaciers melt, reducing the amount of electricity hydroelectric dams downstream can generate.

In the US, utilities are exploring ways to cut water consumption at power plants or are looking for alternative water sources.

In West Virginia, for example, construction began in February on a 600-megawatt coal-fired plant that will pull its water from pools in the same mine that it's tapping for coal. Although the plant is a commercial facility, it also is a test bed for approaches to tapping mine pools, which are found throughout the region, notes Joseph Donovan, who heads the Hydrological Research Center at West Virginia University in Morgantown.

And at the San Juan generating station outside Farmington, N.M., the Public Service Company of New Mexico has been exploring a range of approaches to reducing the plant's water consumption, notes Timothy Jones, the utility's water resources manager. In June, the plant will test a new design for cooling towers that attempts to capture and recycle the cloud of condensation that towers give off. The plant already recycles water from 20 to 50 times before it's evaporated off or becomes so tainted that it needs to be hauled off for disposal. The plant also has looked into using water produced as a byproduct of oil and gas extraction in the region.

"It has a fabulous potential for power plants," he says. But today's water-treatment technologies are too expensive and don't have enough capacity to fit the need.

The plant also is using a hybrid cooling tower that uses water only when air temperatures rise too high; otherwise the plant uses air for cooling.

In the end, "there is no single silver bullet" for coping with the projected effects of global warming, Mr. Jones says. "Renewables will play an important role, but energy efficiency is the only way you can deal with it without environmental impacts."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We are on a collision course with our own morals. At what cost progress? Our demand is growing as our population grows as the very resource we need to sustain us begins to dwindle. And this is not something that is news. The looming global water crisis (that does include the U.S.) due to mismanagement, corruption, governmental indifference, privitization, outdated infrastructure, waste, and now climate change has been warned about for at least twenty years. And yet, not only until now when it is beginning to be felt economically by the energy companies who waste it will it be considered to be a crisis.

And it is ironic that the very fossil fuels that exacerbate climate change which contributes to the soil evaporation, erratic rainfall patterns, glacial melt and droughts that are depleting our water are still the preferred energy choices. I wonder if we will EVER learn. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either we conserve and get SERIOUS about alternate energy sources like solar and other water management incentives especially regarding agricultural irrigation, or we are heading for a very dry future for which we will have no one to blame but ourselves.