Peak Water?

[interestrateripoff]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-19/25-shocking-facts-about-earths-dwindling-water-resources

#1 Right now, 1.6 billion people live in areas of the world that are facing "absolute water scarcity".

#2 Global water use has quadrupled over the past 100 years and continues to rise rapidly.

#3 One recent study found that a third of all global corn crops are facing "water stress".

#4 A child dies from a water-related disease every 15 seconds.

#5 By 2025, two-thirds of the population of Earth will "be living under water stressed conditions".

#6 Due to a lack of water, Chinese food imports now require more land than the entire state of California.

#7 At this point, the amount of water that China imports is already greater than the amount of oil that the United States imports.

#8 Approximately 80 percent of the major rivers in China have become so polluted that they no longer support any aquatic life at all.

#9 The Great Lakes hold about 21 percent of the total supply of fresh water in the entire world, but Barack Obama is allowing water from those lakes "to be drained, bottled and shipped to China" at a frightening pace.

#10 It is being projected that India will essentially "run out of water" by the year 2050.

#11 It has been estimated that 75 percent of all surface water in India has been heavily contaminated by human or agricultural waste.

#12 In the Middle East, the flow of water in the Jordan River is down to only 2 percent of its historic rate.

#13 Due to a lack of water, Saudi Arabia has essentially given up on trying to grow wheat and will be 100 percent dependent on wheat imports by the year 2016.

#14 Of the 60 million people added to the major cities of the world every year, the vast majority of them live in deeply impoverished areas that have no sanitation facilities whatsoever.

#15 Nearly the entire southwestern United States is experiencing drought conditions as you read this article. It has been this way for most of the past several years.

#16 Thanks in part to the seemingly endless drought, the price index for meat, poultry, fish, and eggs in the U.S. just hit a new all-time high.

#17 As underground aquifers are relentlessly drained in California, some areas of the San Joaquin Valley are sinking by 11 inches a year.

#18 It is being projected that Lake Mead has a 50 percent chance of running dry by the year 2025.

#19 Most Americans don't realize this, but the once mighty Colorado River has become so depleted that it no longer runs all the way to the ocean.

#20 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, and it is currently being drained at a rate of approximately 800 gallons per minute.

#21 Once upon a time, 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 already completely gone.

#22 Approximately 40 percent of all rivers 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.

#23 Because of the high cost and the inefficient use of energy, desalination is not considered to be a widely feasible solution to our water problems at this time...

The largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere is

currently under construction

in Carlsbad in San Diego County at great expense. The price tag:

$1 billion

.

Right now, San Diego is almost totally dependent on

imported water from Sierra snowmelt and the Colorado River

. When the desalination plant comes online in 2016, it will produce 50 million gallons per day, enough to offset just 7 percent of the county’s water usage. That’s a huge bill for not very much additional water.

#24 We have filled the North Pacific Ocean with 100 million tons of plastic, and this is starting to have a very serious affect on the marine food chain. Ultimately, this could mean a lot less food available from the Pacific Ocean for humans.

#25 One very shocking U.S. government report concluded that the global demand for water will exceed the global supply of water by 40 percent by the year 2030.

So forget gold buy water!

China and India clearly have major issues looming.

[Mrs Bear]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-19/25-shocking-facts-about-earths-dwindling-water-resources

So forget gold buy water!

China and India clearly have major issues looming.

I was in California recently (mostly for niece's graduation from Berkeley) - we drove to Yosemite afterwards. A four hour drive through mostly miles and miles and miles of parched brown landscape. Exceptions only where there is obviously irrigation for fields of fruit etc. The drought is very bad. The waterfalls were running in Yosemite ( which is spectacular) but they are apparently all largely from snowmelt and we were told that they have had only 10% of the usual snow, so they will all be dry by high summer.

I heard it said years ago that water would be the new oil.

[winkie]

So forget gold buy water!

...you can live without gold.

[Wurzel Of Highbridge]

We won't have to worry here, it was flooded in Somerset earlier in the year + they're building a new reservoir in Cheddar

http://cheddar-reservoir-two.co.uk/

When we lived in Dover, I can recall water being a bit short.

[zugzwang]

Revenge of the deep, hot biosphere? Surface life may be simply a transient adaptation.

[StainlessSteelCat]

Aye, there's plenty of water here in North Wales too - but if it runs out elsewhere you can bet they'll be after ours.

Edited June 20, 2014 by StainlessSteelCat

[okaycuckoo]

Fracking takes up huge amounts of water. California, Kent.

Just sayin'.

[Executive Sadman]

I heard the sawdis own most the aquifers in scotland.

Im sure the patriot salmond will rectify things.

[Caius]

Aye, there's plenty of water here in North Wales too - but if it runs out elsewhere you can bet they'll be after ours.

They've already been an pillaged it with the drowning of Welsh inhabited valleys to provide English cities with water.

[Tankus]

Maybe they could use fracking technology to get more out of the aquifers ........errr.....?????.

Heh

[singlemalt]

Technology will undoubtedly lessen the impact of water scarcity (or rather misuse imo).

When I was in the UAE much of their fresh water was desalinated.

[White Craw]

I heard the sawdis own most the aquifers in scotland.

Im sure the patriot salmond will rectify things.

Aquifers will be a very small proportion of Scottish water supply.

You might have seen that foreign owners own a lot of salmon rivers, i.e. fishing rights and often the estates where they are located.

Doubt these people have any right to divert or otherwise modify the actual flow of water without local and/or Scottish government approval.

Alex no doubt dreams of threatening England with turning off the water pipe from Scotland.

[Caius]

Alex no doubt dreams of threatening England with turning off the water pipe from Scotland.

It would be interesting to know on what do you base that statement. Or did you dream about it?

[honkydonkey]

Technology will undoubtedly lessen the impact of water scarcity (or rather misuse imo).

When I was in the UAE much of their fresh water was desalinated.

Easily done with an almost unlimited supply of oil. Evaporating water uses an huge amount of energy.

Edited June 21, 2014 by honkydonkey

[Scunnered]

I heard the sawdis own most the aquifers in scotland.

Im sure the patriot salmond will rectify things.

That'll be Highland Spring. The vast majority of household water in Scotland comes out of the sky, not from deep underground the way it does in SE England.

[geezer466]

I was in California recently (mostly for niece's graduation from Berkeley) - we drove to Yosemite afterwards. A four hour drive through mostly miles and miles and miles of parched brown landscape. Exceptions only where there is obviously irrigation for fields of fruit etc. The drought is very bad. The waterfalls were running in Yosemite ( which is spectacular) but they are apparently all largely from snowmelt and we were told that they have had only 10% of the usual snow, so they will all be dry by high summer.

I heard it said years ago that water would be the new oil.

If you are ever around the Hoover Dam Lake mead area have a look at the tide mark on the rock walls of Lake Mead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Mead

Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States in maximum water capacity. It is located on the Colorado River about 24 mi (39 km) from the Strip southeast of Las Vegas, Nevada, in the states of Nevada and Arizona. Formed by the Hoover Dam, Lake Mead is 112 miles (180 km) long when the lake is full, has 759 miles (1,221 km) of shoreline, is 532 feet (152 meters) at greatest depth, with a surface elevation of 1,221.4 feet (327.3 metres) above sea level, and has 247 square miles (640 km²) of surface, and when filled to capacity, 28 million acre-feet (35 km³) of water. However, the lake has not fully reached this capacity since 1983 due to a combination of drought and increased water demand

Lake Mead supplies the water for one large US city (and it's surrounding area) Las Vegas.

It's frightening the rate at which they use it..

The picture shows the white tide mark. Consider that along with the size of the lake and you can see there is a problem.

[Mrs Bear]

If you are ever around the Hoover Dam Lake mead area have a look at the tide mark on the rock walls of Lake Mead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Mead

Lake Mead supplies the water for one large US city (and it's surrounding area) Las Vegas.

It's frightening the rate at which they use it..

The picture shows the white tide mark. Consider that along with the size of the lake and you can see there is a problem.

Yes, very scary. Having lived in Gulf State deserts for 13 years I never mind the rain. (Well, not very often...). The students I used to teach in Oman called it 'God's bounty' and would excitedly charge out to stand in it on the very rare occasions when we had a little rain in 'winter'. They were all adults, too.

[Errol]

Russia well placed for peak water.

Lake Baikal alone has more than 20% of the world's total unfrozen freshwater reserve.

[bearwithasorehead]

Russia well placed for peak water.

Lake Baikal alone has more than 20% of the world's total unfrozen freshwater reserve.

But a similar problem to China - v. polluted (generally, not Baikal) and lack of infrastructure to transport it and clean it.

However, I do call ******** on one of the stats in the OP:

"Approximately 80 percent of the major rivers in China have become so polluted that they no longer support any aquatic life at all."

Edited June 21, 2014 by bearwithasorehead

[davidg]

So the problem is not lack of water but poor water management.

[Qetesuesi]

http://www.elementfour.com/products/the-watermill

Easily done with an almost unlimited supply of oil. Evaporating water uses an huge amount of energy.

If you think about it, all fossil fuel and nuclear electricity generation, as well as some solar (which together I suppose comprise the vast majority of the global total) involves turning water into steam to drive turbines. Would I be wrong in thinking that this might as well be raising steam from salt water, which when it condenses can be isolated as fresh water, and therefore involves little or no marginal running cost to produce the latter? One would think that much of a nation's drinking water could be obtained as a cost-effective byproduct of its electricity generation base.

One obvious snag with this, of course, is that to have ready access to the salt water the plants would need to be based on the coasts, whereas for effective distribution after that, the desalinated water would need to be pumped to a decent altitude. I suppose the thing would be to distribute such water first and foremost to the presumably sizeable coastal populations for miles in either direction, thus minimising the need to elevate the water.

Meanwhile, not going so outlandish as towing icebergs, what about the idea of filling oil tanker sized ships with polar ice for transport? What would it take for this to be economically worthwhile for certain countries?

[winkie]

So the problem is not lack of water but poor water management.

Those at the source have more control than those lower down stream.....other lands often control who gets what, where and when.

[porca misèria]

Easily done with an almost unlimited supply of oil. Evaporating water uses an huge amount of energy.

Easily done with a sheet of PVC. Just put it up tent-like above the salt water where it attracts condensation, and tap the runoff. Desalination by solar energy, in parts of the world where it's plentiful.

[porca misèria]

Russia well placed for peak water.

Lake Baikal alone has more than 20% of the world's total unfrozen freshwater reserve.

Only because humanity hasn't drawn on it. Contrast the Aral Sea.