Not that we needed any more proof that our energy consumption patterns are affecting the planet’s hydrosphere, but the evidence keeps piling up…
Water – another global ‘crisis’? :
If you look at the numbers, it is hard to see how many East African communities made it through the long drought of 2005 and 2006.
Among people who study human development, it is a widely-held view that each person needs about 20 litres of water each day for the basics – to drink, cook and wash sufficiently to avoid disease transmission.
Yet at the height of the East African drought, people were getting by on less than five litres a day – in some cases, less than one litre a day, enough for just three glasses of drinking water and nothing left over.
…
Two key questions arise, then.
Why do some communities have so little access to water? And how will the current picture change in a world where the human population is growing, where societies are urbanising and industrialising, and where climate change may alter the raw availability of water significantly?
Wow. Water is “another” crisis, and “climate change may alter the raw availability of water significantly”??? Somebody contact the BBC and let them in a couple of details:
It’s not “another” crisis, it’s a different facet of the same crisis–climate chaos. By disturbing one aspect of one part of the biosphere (the CO2 content of the atmosphere), we’re setting off a chain reaction. Glaciers are disappearing, the ocean is acidifying, species are threatened (or running amok, like the beetles that are chewing their way through portions of the forests in the western US and Canada), sea levels are rising (in some cases causing salt water to invade farm land), and tropical storms will have even more fuel to burn in the form of warmer oceans.
Of course climate change will make the potable water situation far worse. Just ask any of the hundreds of millions of people who depend on shrinking snow packs for their drinking and crop irrigation water.
New Report: We’re Heading for “Water Bankruptcy”:
In case you haven’t been following recent headlines around water, they go something like this:
“Argentine farmers face ruin as drought kills cattle, crops” (CNN)
“Nevada a natural disaster area due to drought” (AP)
“Kingdom braces for drought-like conditions” (Jordan Times)
“Calif. facing worst drought in modern history” (USA Today)
“Kenya to declare national emergency over drought” (Reuters)
And to sum that all up, a new report recently released said that: “The world is heading toward ‘water bankruptcy’ as demand for the precious commodity outstrips even high population growth,” AFP reported.
See the article for links to the various news reports.
The “report” mentioned in the title appears to be from the World Economic Forum’s Water Initiative. You can download the report from this page, or grab it directly here [4.4MB PDF].
From the Overview of that document:
There is a structural problem in how we manage water across the web of our global economy. Worsening water security will soon tear into various parts of the global economic system. It will start to emerge as a headline geopolitical issue. The volatility in food prices in 2008 should be treated as an early warning sign of what is to come.
In many places around the world, we have consistently under-priced water, wasting and overusing it as a result. We have depleted stocks of groundwater at the expense of our future water needs. In effect, we have enjoyed a series of regional water “bubbles” to support economic growth over the past 50 years or so, especially in agriculture. We are now on the verge of water bankruptcy in many places with no way of paying the debt back. In fact, a number of these regional water bubbles are now bursting in parts of China, the Middle East, the southwestern US and India; more will follow. The consequences for regional economic and political stability will be serious.
This set of regional challenges becomes a fast approaching global crisis, when placed against future needs for water. As the world economy expands, demand for water will rise and continue to outpace population growth. This means that there will not be enough water to do all the things we want as inefficiently as they are done now. Unlike energy, water has no substitutes or alternatives. We simply cannot manage water in the future as we have in the past or the economic web will collapse.
Of course, some of our demented denier friends will no doubt dismiss this as so much “alarmism”.
Rising CO2 levels acidifying oceans, threatening sea life:
Carbon-dioxide emissions are threatening marine life and human food supplies by making the oceans more acidic, an international group of scientists says.
“Ocean acidification is accelerating and severe damages are imminent,” according to the Monaco Declaration, a document signed by 155 marine scientists from 26 countries and issued last Friday.
That could destroy coral reefs, threaten the fishing and tourism industries and affect the food supplies of millions of people unless policy makers work to curb carbon dioxide levels, the declaration said.
Carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere have climbed sharply over the last century, largely due to human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels. The gas is one of the main “greenhouse gases” blamed by scientists for helping trap heat in the atmosphere, leading to climate change.
That in itself has been blamed for damaging coral reefs, as warmer temperatures lead to the spread of coral diseases.
But the oceans also absorb about a quarter of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, forming carbonic acid.
The Monaco Declaration is here [4 page, 5.2MB PDF].
See this article on Green Car Congress for more details and linkage.
Climate change might be altering waters along US west coast:
The spectre of an ocean floor littered with dead shellfish, rock fish, sea stars and other marine life off the Oregon coast spurred Mark Snyder, a climate change expert, to investigate whether California’s coast faced a similar calamity.
It could, the University of California Santa Cruz earth scientist said, citing climate change, which some scientists believe is responsible for stronger and more persistent winds along the coast. There’s no debate that windier conditions drive more upwelling of nutrient-rich deep ocean waters.
At normal levels, this upwelling sustains the abundance of marine life, but too much of these rich waters leads to a boom-and-bust cycle that ultimately creates ocean “dead zones” with little or no oxygen. Marine life that can’t swim or scuttle away from these lethal zones suffocate.
To assess future wind and upwelling scenarios along the California coast, Snyder and his colleagues at UC Santa Cruz ran climate simulations for two time periods. One spanned from 1968 to 2000, verifying the accuracy of the modelling. The second simulated the region’s estimated climate from 2038 to 2070, using the intergovernmental panel on climate change “high-growth” emissions projections. Snyder said he chose the high emissions scenario because today’s are exceeding earlier IPCC estimates.
The results showed increases in wind speeds of as much as 2 meters per second, a 40% increase from current wind speeds, which now average 5 meters per second, Snyder said.
The change in wind speeds is already happening, Snyder said. California winds have been growing in strength in the past 30 years.
The Ocean Acidification Network:
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the ocean has absorbed approximately 48% of the anthropogenic CO2 released to the atmosphere, significantly reducing its impact on climate. At current “emissions-avoidance” costs of $10-35 US dollars per ton of CO2 emissions avoided, this represents an ecosystem service worth trillions of dollars. However, this valuable service comes at a steep ecological cost – the acidification of the ocean. As CO2 dissolves in seawater, the pH of the water decreases, making it more acidic. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, ocean pH has dropped globally by 0.12 pH units. While these pH levels are not alarming in themselves, the rate of change is cause for concern. To the best of our knowledge, the ocean has never experienced such a rapid acidification. By the end of this century, if concentrations of CO2 continue to rise exponentially, we may expect to see changes in pH that are three times greater and 100 times faster than those experienced during the transitions from glacial to interglacial periods. Such large changes in ocean pH have probably not been experienced on the planet for the past 21 million years. How marine ecosystems, coral reefs, and fisheries will respond to this rapid acidification is unknown.
In May 2004, SCOR and UNESCO-IOC co-hosted an international symposium to address these issues and to evaluate what is known about the possible benefits and impacts of CO2 mitigation strategies using the ocean, such as iron fertilization and direct injection of liquid CO2 into the deep ocean. Following this symposium, several international groups requested SCOR and the IOC to keep this issue under review, and the two organizations agreed to make this symposium a regular event to be held every 4 years.
For the 2008 symposium, SCOR and IOC will be joined by two new international organizations: the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Marine Environmental Laboratory and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, enhancing links to the UN system and to interdisciplinary Earth science.
This web-site is a follow-up of the first symposium and is meant to provide a central source of information for ocean scientists on research activities in this area.
