Drying Up

The global climate crisis is causing some rivers to dry up.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Rivers in some of the world's most populated regions are losing water, many because of climate change, researchers reported on Tuesday.

Affected rivers include the Yellow River in northern China, the Ganges in India, the Niger in West Africa, and the Colorado in the southwestern United States.

When added to the effects from damming, irrigation and other water use, these changes could add up to a threat to future supplies of food and water, the researchers reported in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate.

"Reduced runoff is increasing the pressure on freshwater resources in much of the world, especially with more demand for water as population increases," Aiguo Dai of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, who led the study, said in a statement.

"Freshwater being a vital resource, the downward trends are a great concern."

You can live without oil. You will die without water. It is going to be an interesting couple of decades.

Getting Dryer

The global climate crisis is making it rain less.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Global warming is more than a third to blame for a major drop in rainfall that includes a decade-long drought in Australia and a lengthy dry spell in the United States, a scientist said on Wednesday.

Peter Baines of Melbourne University in Australia analyzed global rainfall observations, sea surface temperature data as well as a reconstruction of how the atmosphere has behaved over the past 50 years to reveal rainfall winners and losers.

What he found was an underlying trend where rainfall over the past 15 years or so has been steadily decreasing, with global warming 37 percent responsible for the drop.

"The 37 percent is probably going to increase if global warming continues," Baines told Reuters from Perth in Western Australia, where he presented his findings at a major climate change conference.

Baines' analysis revealed four regions where rainfall has been declining. The affected areas were the continental United States, southeastern Australia, a large region of equatorial Africa and the Altiplano in South America.

It is hard to grow food in drought conditions.

I Take Offense

At the headline of this article. "US energy future hits a snag in rural Pennsylvania" The article is about gas production fowling the ground water. The future of energy is wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources. Gas, oil and coal are the past. We need to stop using them. Especially if they are destroying the ground water. We can live without gas. We can not live without water. A resource that is getting scarce

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Ron and Jean Carter suspected there was a leak when the water supply to their trailer home started to taste and smell bad after Cabot started drilling 200 yards (meters) away.

Not wanting to risk the health of a new grandchild living with them, the 70-year-old retirees scraped together $6,500 for a water purification system.

"It was kind of funny that the water was good in July but after they drilled, it wasn't," said Ron Carter.

Tim and Debbie Maye, a truck driver and post office worker who have three teenage children, have been cooking and drinking only bottled water since their well water turned brown in November after Cabot started drilling.

But she can't afford bottled water for her animals. Her cats have been losing fur and projectile vomiting because they lick drips from the spigot that carries water from their well. Her three horses -- one of which is losing its hair -- drink as much as 50 gallons a day.

"I tell my husband, 'I'm going out to poison the horses,'" she said.

The drilling in Dimock has released methane into the water supply, a fact acknowledged by Cabot and state regulators.

Some homeowners said they were able to ignite their well water. In one case, a gas buildup blew the cap off a well.

"The well was capped with six to eight inches of concrete," said Norma Fiorentino, 66. "The explosion broke it into three big pieces and blew a huge hole in the ground."

This type of gas harvesting known as fracking, must stop. Everywhere it is done the water becomes fouled. The corporate assholes put all kinds of nasty chemicals in the ground. Which chemicals you ask? Well, they will not tell us it is proprietary. We can not tell you because our competitors might just find out. Or most likely it is such a nasty chemical brew that it is illegal to put them in the ground.

Not Good

The US is off to the driest start since record keeping began in 1985.

Too Little Too Late?

California is slowing the diversion of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California officials ordered on Friday an additional 17 percent cut in the amount of water pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to protect a fish in the most populous U.S. state's fresh water hub.

Combined with a prior U.S. court order to reduce pumping to protect another fish in the delta, the amount of water drawn from it by state and federal water systems will be cut by nearly half from average levels, said Don Strickland, a spokesman for California's Department of Water Resources.

Water from the delta, which is east of San Francisco, is distributed as far away as Southern California, where a number of local water authorities in the most populated part of the state have already imposed water use restrictions after two years of below-average rainfall and snow in California.

Is it enough to bring back the smelt that the salmon feed on, and have the salmon return? I kind of doubt it.

Peak Water

OK, we are not really there.

Global food needs are expected to roughly double by 2050, at the same time as climate change and dwindling oil reserves are pressuring countries to set aside ever more land for producing biomass to replace greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels.

These parallel global trends risk colliding with "the water-constrained biophysical reality of the planet," according to SIWI, which hosted the the World Water Week in the Swedish capital last week.

"Almost every increase in water used in agriculture will affect water availability for other uses, including that needed to keep ecosystems healthy and resilient in the face of change and perturbation," the institute said in a recent study.

It is going to be an interesting couple of decades coming up.

Water Pollution

The EPA under republicans are for it. Are you?

From the Washington Independent.

Global Warming To Affect Beer Production

Scientists in New Zealand are worried about global warming's effects on barley production.

Better barley breeds could be the salvation for the beer brewing industry as global warming threatens crop production, an industry conference has heard.

Industry scientists and brewers from more than 24 countries in Auckland for the Institute of Brewing and Distilling's convention heard yesterday that climate modelling pointed to an increased drying in barley growing areas in New Zealand and Australia.

Jim Salinger, principal scientist with the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, told the conference that Canterbury, the main barley growing area in New Zealand, would likely be adversely affected as it gets hotter and drier.

We need to start working on solutions to the looming water crisis.

Water is going to be such an issue of global concern that any water wastage is going to be seen as unacceptable," he told the conference.

Thirsty

Twenty percent of the worlds population does not have safe drinking water.

PARIS (AFP) - A world without fresh water would be a world bereft of humans, and yet one in five people lacks regular access to this most basic of life-sustaining substances.

By 2025, fully a third of the planet's growing population could find itself scavenging for safe drinking water, the United Nations has warned ahead of World Water Day on Saturday.

More than two million people in developing countries -- the vast majority children -- die every year from diseases associated with unsanitary water.

There are a number of interlocking causes for this scourge.

Global economic growth, population pressures and the rise of mega-cities have all driven water use to record levels.

Mexico City, Jakarta and Bangkok, to name a few, have underground water sources -- some of them nonrenewable -- depleting at alarming rates.

Lets throw in some global warming and see what happens.

But even as scientists and governments look for ways to satisfy a thirsty world, another threat looms on the horizon: global warming.

Rising sea levels are already forcing salt water into aquifers beneath megadeltas that are home to tens of millions, and changing weather patterns are set to intensify droughts in large swathes of Africa, southern Europe and Asia, according to UN's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).

I think rich nations may be able to fix there drinking water problems. Some of the poor ones may have trouble.