[♥]

Tennessee town is out of water. How long before Atlanta is out of water?

Are any of you affected by the drought? Australia has a severe drought as does the Southeastern United States.

Things are just going from bad to worse. (This thread might just end up in the Political Lounge.)

[Mastrap]

The water levels in the Great Lakes are at a record low. Canadians especially never had to worry about water conservation, but these days appear to be over.

[peeb]

Yeah. It's a good job that all of that Climate Crisis nonsense isn't really happening.

[andi*pandi]

the reservoir near here is almost dry.

[osiris]

kinda related, NY's Central Park had to have its trees and lawns watered by sprinklers and hoses this year. it's been like a desert because of the ultra dry summer.

[Cold Warrior]

Thank goodness the ice caps are melting. Someone needs to build pipelines and water barges, just like Big Oil has now.

[Dakarʒ]

I blame El Niño

[Mastrap]

The Next Big Conflict™ will not be about oil, but water.

The rate at which China, for example, is poisoning it's environment in general and it's water supply in particular is just astounding.

[peeb]

Yep - that's going to be pretty hairy.

[nonhuman]

Good thing all the models and projections say that global warming will make the Earth wetter...

[Mastrap]

In certain areas, not overall. Parts of Europe and the US for example are predicted to turn into desert. The Sahara for example has been steadily moving north and has now arrived in southern Spain.

Link

The Sahara is about to leap across the Mediterranean. According to the Spanish government one third of the country is in immediate danger of turning into desert. 'Costing the Earth' investigates the causes and weighs up the competing solutions.

Unrestricted tourist and residential development is sucking the water out of the coastal regions whilst the vast vegetable fields of Almeria and Murcia are dehydrating the interior. Both holiday and agricultural developments rely for their water on the digging of illegal boreholes. There are estimated to be 510,000 in Spain already and government attempts to shut them down have been met with fierce opposition. A new Spanish desert is bad news not just for local people and wildlife. It may also spell the end of the industry that supplies British supermarkets with cheap fruit and veg.

Solutions to desertification range from re-learning the canny irrigation techniques imported by the Moors to hi-tech solutions like heat islands. This is a technique whereby dark fabric is laid across a patch of land. The fabric absorbs the sun's heat, just as a large city does. A few miles up-wind you get higher rainfall, just as areas up-wind of cities currently do. (BBC)

Other points mentioned

UN says 12% of Europe at risk of turning into desert. Between 30-60% of Spain is at inmediate risk from desertification.
Causes: water demands from tourism and urbanisation (golf course, etc), fire, and above all intensive irrigated agriculture, fueled in part by demand from British supermarkets
Summer 2005Worst dought in 60 years
Doñana river dried out 3 years ago due overuse of boreholes. Doñana aquifer drying up. Key to survival of Doñana and therefore Iberian lynx. Park is surrounded by 1000 illegal boreholes.
80% of water use is by agriculture in Spain as a whole. This rises to 88% in much of Southern Spain.

[RAILhead]

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
And I feel fine.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by peeb 

Yeah. It's a good job that all of that Climate Crisis nonsense isn't really happening.

Because carbon is the only reason humans could possibly use more of a resource than they have.

[peeb]

You have a point - it's a collision of the two!

[sek929]

We have some of the best drinking water in the country around here.

How? Conservation of precious wetlands, nature's water treatment plant.

[TheWOAT]

I say keep the golf courses, trash the agriculture.

[ort888]

Who needs water anyway. Our Pepsi supplies are higher then ever.

[peeb]

It's got what plants crave! It's got electrolytes!
Did you know the Gatorade plant in Atlanta is the largest consumer of water?

[Lava Lamp Freak]

Water. Like out the toilet?

[Paco500]

Plenty of water here. It's been an incredibly mild summer- and well hydrated.

[MacosNerd]

Originally Posted by sek929 

We have some of the best drinking water in the country around here.

How? Conservation of precious wetlands, nature's water treatment plant.

wetlands require rain to remain, well, wet. The problem in the south is that it has not rained. Wouldn't take much for those precious wetlands to dry right up, if it incurred a similar drought.

There's also other factors to the lack of water, especially in Florida. The explosive population growth has outstripped the state's ability to provide water. That is the there's not enough supply to meet the demand, or just bare enough supply. Throw in a drought and that changes the equation drastically.

Its extremely conceivable to see this occur in the northeast. Various Reservoir are low now, if that continues Massachusetts will be facing a water shortage problem also.

I read online that in the coming years 36 states are going to have problems with water shortage because of population growth and droughts brought on my global warming.

Edit: I was wrong about the reservoir levels I just read that the quabbin (boston area's water supply) is at 86% not too low at all. My argument still stands that it wouldn't take much of a push for the northeast to be feeling a water shortage though.

[KeriVit]

There are 1.1 billion people in the world without water. 5 million children die every year from waterborne disease.

How am I supposed to care or understand why we use 50 times as much water as the rest of the world? We PAY for bottled water and fill up landfills with the bottles. We pay less for municipal water than most of the world.

Maybe if we all run out of water here and have to buy evian to bathe and cook with we'll see what it's like.

BTW, I'm guilty as anyone else, it's not an accusation just a point.

[OldManMac]

Originally Posted by peeb 

It's got what plants crave! It's got electrolytes!
Did you know the Gatorade plant in Atlanta is the largest consumer of water?

Not for much longer.

[nonhuman]

Originally Posted by KeriVit 

There are 1.1 billion people in the world without water. 5 million children die every year from waterborne disease.

How am I supposed to care or understand why we use 50 times as much water as the rest of the world? We PAY for bottled water and fill up landfills with the bottles. We pay less for municipal water than most of the world.

Maybe if we all run out of water here and have to buy evian to bathe and cook with we'll see what it's like.

BTW, I'm guilty as anyone else, it's not an accusation just a point.

Exactly. The problem is that water is too cheap. The reason that water is too cheap is that various governments (federal and state) have acted to ensure that people can afford pretty much as much water as they want. The result is that Phoenix, Arizona, in the middle of the desert, has some of the lowest water prices in the country despite it being obvious to anyone with any understanding of economics that it should be some of the most expensive. The result of that is that Phoenix, Arizona has way more people and way more golf courses than it can reasonably be expected to support. This happens all over the place because the places with less water are the places with 'good' weather so everyone wants to live there. Eventually we have to completely disrupt the water cycle in order to keep everyone alive which makes us much more vulnerable to things like drought.

If water prices were controlled by market forces, it would be expensive in places with not much water and cheap in places with a lot of water. The result would be national (and global) water consumption that more logical and balanced.

Unfortunately, there are obvious and significant flaws with the idea of privatizing water supplies. That has been demonstrated over and over again. But the main cause of that problem is the main cause of the problems with all movement in a more libertarian direction: the system so far has caused people and resources to be distributed in a very poor manner. Any reform absolutely necessitates a massive re-distribution of both people and resources the cost of which is simply untenable in the short term. A transition to a more Libertarian system would necessitate either very un-Libertarian actions (such as forced relocation) or would lead to massive poverty and death which would make most people think that Libertarianism is a failed cause.

The truth is simply that we've painted ourselves into a corner. We've pursued moronic resource management strategies to the point where any move we make will hurt us.

[imitchellg5]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

Thank goodness the ice caps are melting. Someone needs to build pipelines and water barges, just like Big Oil has now.

There's no such thing as global warming. Chuck Norris was just cold so he turned up the sun.

[- - e r i k - -]

We're used to the drought down here. We just drink beer instead

[ghporter]

San Antonio is on the edge of the Sonoran desert. Typically by July we're into some form of limited or restricted water use, and that's just part of life. This year may actually go down in the books as "the year it rained." The aquifer we use, the Edwards Aquifer, has been so full that until just a couple of weeks ago, previously unknown springs were flowing daily-it's like the aquifer was overflowing. This is NOT something that just happened. It IS because of El Niño. Now why are we having more El Niño events lately? Things are getting hotter. Whether that's because of a natural cycle or our own tinkering with the environment, we're certainly not helping.

But "we're running out of water" has been a boogie man tale for decades. Literally decades; in the 1960s there were dire predictions about a water crisis, people were beginning to look at things like "what would happen if everyone working on Manhattan Island had to stay there for more than a day or two (the answer was and to some extent still is-not have enough water or sewer capacity). There is PLENTY of water. The hard part is making it drinkable, and just dipping it out of a lake or stream or aquifer is not going to be good enough anymore. But it's trivial to purify water-it just takes some hefty investment in infrastructure. We're paying way more for bottled water (which usually comes from someone else's taps) than we are for gasoline right now-how hard is it to envision paying just a little more for tap water over a few years to fund (and apply pressure to the utilities to actually take action) that investment?

[Atomic Rooster]

Hmmm, I thought we were in a La Niña?

Water cheap! Hell I pee in the sink or out the back door. Can't afford to flush the toilet. And I go to my friends place and poop.

I blame the terrists.

[Cipher13]

Originally Posted by ♥ 

Are any of you affected by the drought? Australia has a severe drought as does the Southeastern United States.

We've been under a severe drought for as long as I can remember. It's nothing new to us, unfortunately. It's just getting worse.

[voodoo]

Es falta de los Niños.

V

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by voodoo 

Es falta de los Niños.

V

<Cranky Old Guy>You lousy kids! Get out of my weather patterns!!!!!</Cranky Old Guy>

[iranfromthezoo]

ghporter...we here in Mississippi are experiencing the same thing as you. We just got finished with a week of steady rain....It's been nice but we are definitely not taking it for granted.

[JoshuaZ]

Originally Posted by Mastrap 

The Next Big Conflict™ will not be about oil, but water.

The rate at which China, for example, is poisoning it's environment in general and it's water supply in particular is just astounding.

God, I hate that quote. Its so wrong, and old. I was using that quote in High School like 9 years ago. If you haven't noticed the last two wars the US of A fought were about oil. In your face saying. Maybe if we say it long and hard enough it'll eventually come true.

[nonhuman]

Originally Posted by JoshuaZ 

God, I hate that quote. Its so wrong, and old. I was using that quote in High School like 9 years ago. If you haven't noticed the last two wars the US of A fought were about oil. In your face saying. Maybe if we say it long and hard enough it'll eventually come true.

Depends on what you consider to be 'the next big conflict'. The root cause of the problems in Darfur right now is water.

[Cold Warrior]

Darfur is an isolated conflict in a region that wars all the time.

A 'big conflict' would be one that engulfs several major nations in important regions (North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East.

[MacosNerd]

Well the northeast (I live outside of Boston) is getting inundated with the remnants of hurricane Noel. No water shortage here.

[ThinkInsane]

Originally Posted by peeb 

It's got what plants crave! It's got electrolytes!

Damn, you beat me to it!

[scaught]

A year ago, I was close to perfecting
the first magnetic desalinisation process.
So revolutionary, it was capable of removing the salt
from over million gallons of sea water a day.
Do you realise what that could mean to the starving nations of the earth?

They'd have enough salt to last forever.

....

[nonhuman]

Originally Posted by MacosNerd 

Well the northeast (I live outside of Boston) is getting inundated with the remnants of hurricane Noel. No water shortage here.

Fun isn't it? So much for our brunch plans...

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by iranfromthezoo 

ghporter...we here in Mississippi are experiencing the same thing as you. We just got finished with a week of steady rain....It's been nice but we are definitely not taking it for granted.

I remember the way rain is in Southern Mississippi. I sat through Hurricane Frederick in '79 and again for Andrew in '92 (which missed us and was pretty much used up by trashing Florida a little while before), plus the odd non-tropical stuff. It's good when it's coming down steady and for a limited time, but sometimes it gets excessive. I once saw a pine tree decide to just fall over because of soaking rains over a week's span. This was something like 60 or 70 feet tall and it just moved the way the wind took it, making a very loud "ripping" sound as its roots left the ground. Kind of shocking.