http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com
http://albertpeia.com/30factsonwatercrisis.htm
‘The world is rapidly running out of clean
water. Some of the largest lakes and rivers on the globe are being depleted at
a very frightening pace, and many of the most important underground aquifers
that we depend on to irrigate our crops will soon be gone. At this point,
approximately 40 percent of the entire population of the planet has little or
no access to clean water, and it is being projected that by 2025 two-thirds of
humanity will live in "water-stressed" areas. But most Americans are
not too concerned about all of this because they assume that North America has
more fresh water than anyone else does. And actually they would be right about
that, but the truth is that even North America is rapidly running out of water
and it is going to change all of our lives. Today, the most important
underground water source in America, the Ogallala Aquifer, is rapidly running
dry. The most important lake in the western United States, Lake Mead, is
rapidly running dry. The most important river in the western United States, the
Colorado River, is rapidly running dry. Putting our heads in the sand and
pretending that we are not on the verge of an absolutely horrific water crisis
is not going to make it go away. Without water, you cannot grow crops, you
cannot raise livestock and you cannot support modern cities. As this global
water crisis gets worse, it is going to affect every single man, woman and child
on the planet. I encourage you to keep reading and learn more.
The U.S. intelligence community
understands what is happening. According to one shocking government report that
was released last year, the global need for water will exceed the global supply
of water by 40 percent by the year 2030...
This
sobering message emerges from the first U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment
of Global Water Security.
The document predicts that by 2030 humanity's "annual global water
requirements" will exceed "current sustainable water supplies"
by forty percent.
Oh,
but our scientists will find a solution to our problems long before then, won't
they?
But
what if they don't?
Most
Americans tend to think of a "water crisis" as something that happens
in very dry places such as Africa or the Middle East, but the truth is that
almost the entire western half of the United States is historically a very dry
place. The western U.S. has been hit very hard by drought in recent years, and
many communities are on the verge of having to make some very hard decisions.
For example, just look at what is happening to Lake Mead. Scientists are
projecting that Lake Mead has a 50 percent chance of running dry by the year
2025. If that happens, it will mean the end of Las Vegas as we know it. But the
problems will not be limited just to Las Vegas. The truth is that if Lake Mead
runs dry, it will be a major disaster for that entire region of the country.
This was explained in a recent article by Alex Daley...
Way
before people run out of drinking water, something else happens: When Lake Mead
falls below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam's turbines shut down – less than four
years from now, if the current trend holds – and in Vegas the lights start
going out.
Ominously,
these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts signed by
President Obama in December 2011, Nevada gets only 23.37% of the electricity
generated by the Hoover Dam. The other top recipients: Metropolitan Water
District of Southern California (28.53%); state of Arizona (18.95%); city of
Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California Edison (5.54%).
You
can always build more power plants, but you can't build more rivers, and the
mighty Colorado carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the water
needs of an area the size of France, in which live 40 million people. In its
natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acre-feet of water into the Gulf
of California each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced the flow
to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it; at
its mouth, the riverbed is nothing but dust.
Nor
is the decline in the water supply important only to the citizens of Las Vegas,
Phoenix, and Los Angeles. It's critical to the whole country. The Colorado is
the sole source of water for southeastern California's Imperial Valley, which
has been made into one of the most productive agricultural areas in the US despite
receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.
Are
you starting to get an idea of just how serious this all is?
But
it is not just our lakes and our rivers that are going dry.
We
are also depleting our groundwater at a very frightening pace as a recent Science Daily article
discussed...
Three
results of the new study are particularly striking: First, during the most
recent drought in California's Central Valley, from 2006 to 2009, farmers in
the south depleted enough groundwater to fill the nation's largest human-made
reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas -- a level of groundwater depletion that is
unsustainable at current recharge rates.
Second,
a third of the groundwater depletion in the High Plains occurs in just 4% of
the land area. And third, the researchers project that if current trends
continue some parts of the southern High Plains that currently support
irrigated agriculture, mostly in the Texas Panhandle and western Kansas, will
be unable to do so within a few decades.
In
the United States we have massive underground aquifers that have allowed our
nation to be the breadbasket of the world. But once the water from those aquifers
is gone, it is gone for good. That is why what is happening to the Ogallala
Aquifer is so alarming. The Ogallala Aquifer is one of the largest sources of
fresh water in the world, and U.S. farmers use water from it to irrigate more
than 15 million acres of crops each year. The Ogallala Aquifer covers more than
100,000 square miles and it sits underneath the states of Texas, New Mexico,
Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota. Most Americans
have never even heard of it, but it is absolutely crucial to our way of life.
Sadly, it is being drained at a rate that is almost unimaginable.
The
following are some facts about the Ogallala Aquifer and the growing water
crisis that we are facing in the United States. A number of these facts were
taken from one of my previous articles.
I think that you will agree that many of these facts are quite alarming...
The
Ogallala Aquifer is being drained at a rate of approximately 800 gallons per minute.
According
to the U.S. Geological Survey, "a volume
equivalent to two-thirds of the water in Lake Erie" has been
permanently drained from the Ogallala Aquifer since 1940.
Decades
ago, the Ogallala Aquifer had an average depth of approximately 240 feet, but
today the average depth is just 80 feet. In some areas of Texas,
the water is gone completely.
Scientists
are warning that nothing can be done to stop the depletion of the Ogallala
Aquifer. The ominous words of David Brauer of the Ogallala
Research Service should alarm us all...
"Our
goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That's all we can do."
According
to a recent National Geographic article,
the average depletion rate of the Ogallala Aquifer is picking up speed....
Even
more worrisome, the draining of the High Plains water account has picked up
speed. The average annual depletion rate between 2000 and 2007 was more than
twice that during the previous fifty years. The depletion is most severe in the
southern portion of the aquifer, especially in Texas, where the water table
beneath sizeable areas has dropped 100-150 feet; in smaller pockets, it has
dropped more than 150 feet.
According
to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. interior west is now the
driest that it has been in 500 years.
Wildfires
have burned millions of acres of vegetation in the central part of the United
States in recent years. For example, wildfires burned an astounding 3.6 million acres in the state of
Texas alone during 2011. This helps set the stage for huge dust storms in the
future.
Unfortunately,
scientists tell us that it would be normal for extremely dry conditions to
persist in parts of western North America for decades. The following is from an
article in the Vancouver Sun...
But
University of Regina paleoclimatologist Jeannine-Marie St. Jacques says that
decade-long drought is nowhere near as bad as it can get.
St.
Jacques and her colleagues have been studying tree ring data and, at the
American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Vancouver
over the weekend, she explained the reality of droughts.
"What
we're seeing in the climate records is these megadroughts, and they don't last
a decade—they last 20 years, 30 years, maybe 60 years, and they'll be
semi-continental in expanse," she told the Regina Leader-Post by phone
from Vancouver.
"So
it's like what we saw in the Dirty Thirties, but imagine the Dirty Thirties
going on for 30 years. That's what scares those of us who are in the community
studying this data pool."
Experts
tell us that U.S. water bills are likely to soar in the coming years. It is
being projected that repairing and expanding our decaying drinking water
infrastructure will cost more than one trillion dollars over the next 25 years,
and as a result our water bills will likely approximately triple over that
time period.
Right
now, the United States uses approximately 148 trillion gallons of fresh water a year,
and there is no way that is sustainable in the long run.
According
to a U.S. government report, 36 states are already facing water
shortages or will be facing water shortages within the next few years.
Lake
Mead supplies about 85 percent of the water to Las Vegas, and since 1998 the
level of water in Lake Mead has dropped by
about 5.6 trillion gallons.
It
has been estimated that the state of California only has a 20 year supply of fresh water
left.
It
has been estimated that the state of New Mexico only has a 10 year supply of fresh water
left.
Approximately
40 percent of all rivers in the United
States and approximately 46 percent of all lakes in the United
States have become so polluted that they are are no longer fit for human use.
The
1,450 mile long Colorado River is a good example of what we have done to our
precious water supplies. It is probably the most important body of water in the
southwestern United States, and it is rapidly dying.
The
following is an excerpt from an outstanding article by Jonathan Waterman about how
the once mighty Colorado River is rapidly drying up...
Fifty
miles from the sea, 1.5 miles south of the Mexican border, I saw a river
evaporate into a scum of phosphates and discarded water bottles. This dirty
water sent me home with feet so badly infected that I couldn’t walk for a week.
And a delta once renowned for its wildlife and wetlands is now all but part of
the surrounding and parched Sonoran Desert. According to Mexican scientists
whom I met with, the river has not flowed to the sea since 1998. If the
Endangered Species Act had any teeth in Mexico, we might have a chance to save
the giant sea bass (totoaba), clams, the Sea of Cortez shrimp fishery that
depends upon freshwater returns, and dozens of bird species.
So
let this stand as an open invitation to the former Secretary of the Interior
and all water buffalos who insist upon telling us that there is no scarcity of
water here or in the Mexican Delta. Leave the sprinklered green lawns outside
the Aspen conferences, come with me, and I’ll show you a Colorado River running
dry from its headwaters to the sea. It is polluted and compromised by industry
and agriculture. It is overallocated, drought stricken, and soon to suffer
greatly from population growth. If other leaders in our administration continue
the whitewash, the scarcity of knowledge and lack of conservation measures will
cripple a western civilization built upon water.
But
of course North America is in far better shape when it comes to fresh water
than the rest of the world is.
In
fact, in many areas of the world today water has already become the most
important issue.
The
following are some incredible facts about the global water crisis that is
getting even worse with each passing day...
Total
global water use has quadrupled over the past 100
years, and it is now increasing faster than it ever has been before.
Today,
there are 1.6 billion people that live in
areas of the globe that are considered to be "water-stressed", and it
is being projected that two-thirds of the entire population of the globe will
be experiencing "water-stressed" conditions by the year 2025.
According
to USAID, one-third of the people on
earth will be facing "severe" or "chronic" water
shortages by the year 2025.
Once
upon a time, the Aral Sea was the 4th largest freshwater lake in the entire
world. At this point, it less than 10 percent the size
that it used to be, and it is being projected that it will dry up completely by
the year 2020.
If
you can believe it, the flow of water along the Jordan River is down to only 2 percent of its historic rate.
It
is being projected that the demand for water in China will exceed the supply by 25 percent by the year 2030.
According
to the United Nations, the world is going to need at least 30 percent more fresh water by the year 2030.
Sadly,
it is estimated that approximately 40 percent of the children living in
Africa and India have had their growth stunted due to unclean water and
malnutrition.
Of
the 60 million people added to the cities of the world each year, the vast
majority of them live in deeply impoverished areas that have no sanitation facilities
whatsoever.
It
has been estimated that 75 percent of all surface water in India
has been heavily contaminated by human or agricultural waste.
Sadly,
according to one
UN study on sanitation, far more people in India have access to a cell
phone than to a toilet.
Every
8 seconds, somewhere in the world a child
dies from drinking dirty water.
Due
to a lack of water, Saudi Arabia has given up on trying to grow wheat and will
be 100 percent dependent on wheat imports by the year 2016.
Each
year in northern China, the water table drops by an average of about one meter due to severe drought and
overpumping, and the size of the desert increases by an area equivalent to the
state of Rhode Island.
In
China, 80 percent of the major rivers have
become so horribly polluted that they do not support any aquatic life at all at
this point.
So
is there any hope that the coming global water crisis can be averted?
If
not, what can we do to prepare?
Please
feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below...’