tagged w/ Peak Water
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A Peruvian watershed has likely passed 'peak water,' dropping river flows 30 percent. New lakes are draining the Himalaya, and say good-bye to Rocky Mountains' glaciers.
By Douglas Fischer
Daily Climate editor
SAN FRANCISCO – New data underscores the bleak prospects facing glaciers across the world as emissions continue to rise. In many instances, particularly the tropics, researchers expect the ice serving as key mountain reservoirs will disappear or severely degrade, leaving downstream communities to cope with scarce and unreliable supplies.
We are going to be witness over the next century to the disappearance of glaciers in western North America. - Garry Clarke, University of British Columbia
Exhibit A is the Andes, where the glacial runoff provides water for hundreds of thousands throughout Peru and Ecuador. Where scientists once thought the region had 10 years to 40 years to adapt to reduced runoff, that time is now up, said Michel Baraër of McGill University in Montreal.
"We have passed peak water," he said on Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. "As a consequence, (during) the dry season, we will get lower discharge and increased variability in flow."
Meanwhile, accelerated melting rates suggest North American glaciers will not survive the century, said Garry Clarke, emeritus professor at the University of British Columbia.
And in the Himalaya, the increasing emergence of mid-glacier lakes has become a rising concern for researchers who say the lakes fill, drain and refill at surprising rates.
The drop in the Rio Santo, in northern Peru, could leave river flows during the dry season 30 percent below current levels.
Considering that 80 percent of the water in the Rio Santo is diverted near its mouth for agriculture, that spells trouble. "Instead of having 10, 20, 40 years to find water to use, or some sort of adaptation, in fact this time does not exist," Baraër said.
More at the linkA Peruvian watershed has likely passed 'peak water,' dropping river flows 30... more
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International Energy Agency: “On planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change.”
“… we are on an even more dangerous track to an increase of 6°C [11°F]…. Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”
The International Energy Agency has issued yet another clarion call for urgent action on climate. Their 2011 World Energy Outlook [WEO] release should end once and for all any notion that delay is the rational course for the nation and the world.
The UK Guardian‘s headline captures the urgency:
World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns
If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change
We must start aggressively deploying clean energy now through myriad policies, including a price on carbon. That has been the conclusion of most authoritative studies, of course, including the recent one by California’s independent state science and technology advisory panel (see “Study Confirms Optimal Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, Research and Develop, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy“).
The IEA report deserves the label “bombshell,” though, because for most of the past two decades, the IEA was the source of bland, conservative, business-as-usual analysis. When I was Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, no one at DOE paid much attention to IEA reports. And that perspective continued through most of the 2000s.
But in just the last few years they have woken up to the risks posed to peak oil — see IEA top economist warns (8/09): “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us” — and especially climate change. In releasing its 2009 WEO, the IEA warned, “The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a major assault on global warming.”
Now the IEA has done the calculation a different way, concluding, “Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.” Those who counsel waiting for breakthrough technologies are urging us on a path that is unsustainable, irreversible, potentially catastrophic, and economically indefensible, according to the IEA.
The IEA is one of the few organizations in the world with a sophisticated enough global energy model to do credible (i.e non-hand-waving) projections of the cost of different emissions pathways and the costs of delaying efforts to achieve them. Their 2008 analysis of the 2°C warming pathway demonstrated that the total shift in investment needed to stabilize at 450 ppm is only about 1.1% of GDP per year — and that is not a “cost” or hit to GDP, because much of that investment goes towards saving expensive fuel (see “IEA report: Climate Progress has the 450-ppm solution about right“).
The new analysis shows that because of soaring emissions, we are running out of time for the “450 Scenario.” We are at risk of irreversibly “locking in” dangerous warming — a point I agree with mostly, but not entirely:
More at the linkInternational Energy Agency: “On planned policies, rising fossil energy use... more
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Earlier this month, officials in the South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu had to confront a pretty dire problem: they were running out of water. Due to a severe and lasting drought, water reserves in this country of 11,000 people had dwindled to just a few days' worth. Climate change plays a role here: as sea levels rose, Tuvalu's groundwater became increasingly saline and undrinkable, leaving the island dependent on rainwater. But now a La Niña–influenced drought has severely curtailed rainfall, leaving Tuvalu dry as a bone. "This situation is bad," Pusinelli Laafai, Tuvalu's permanent secretary of home affairs, told the Associated Press earlier this month. "It's really bad."
So far Tuvalu has been bailed out by its neighbors Australia and New Zealand, which have donated rehydration packets and desalination equipment. But the archipelago's water woes are just beginning — and it's far from the only part of the world facing a big dry. Other island nations like the Maldives and Kiribati will see their groundwater spoil as sea levels rise. Texas, along with much of the American Southwest, is in the grip of a truly record-breaking drought — even after days of storms in the past month, Houston's total 2011 rainfall is still short of its yearly average by a whopping 2 ft., or 60 cm. Australia has experienced severely dry weather for so long, it's not even clear whether the country is in a state of drought, or more worryingly, a new and permanent dry climate that could forever alter life Down Under. "Climate-change impacts on water resources continue to appear in the form of growing influence on the severity and intensity of extreme events," says Peter Gleick, one of the foremost water experts in the U.S. and head of the Pacific Institute, an NGO based in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on global water issues. "Australia's recent extraordinary extreme drought should be an eye-opener for the rest of us."
(See photos of the world's water crisis.)
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2097159,00.html#ixzz1bAUCHxtB
More at the link.Earlier this month, officials in the South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu had to... more
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Peak oil, biodiversity loss, peak water, pollution, illness, diseases and an industrial agricultural system broken due to reliance on fossil fuels that threaten our ability to maintain ours and other species. All reasons along with the intensification of the effects of CO2 and greenhouse gas forcings upon the Earth's natural cycles to work towards a clean energy economy. It matters not your politics, your beliefs or your religion, the need to switch to other energy sources due to overconsumption and waste is now essential. This documentary shows us how to get there. And we need to get there fast.Peak oil, biodiversity loss, peak water, pollution, illness, diseases and an... more
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Rivers and lakes are what experts call "blue water", but most at issue is "green water" - the stuff that sits in the soil. Modern farming's withdrawal of green water is like an open-ended blood donation - the planet's surface, in developed areas, is becoming cadaverous as its life drains away. This threatens the modern agricultural revolution in which crop yields in some countries quadrupled since the 1960s and fed the huge population boom.
These facts make people think of "water wars". American journalists use the term to cover the multitude of disputes between states over diminishing supplies, but for most of us it conjures up ideas of conflict. One example is the dispute between Israel and its Arab neighbours. There are familiar reasons why Tel Aviv took the Golan Heights in 1967 and occupied Gaza and the West Bank, but the water factor is often overlooked. The promise of citrus groves and running water in Tel Aviv taps was explicit from the beginning of the Zionist state.
To provide enough water so that Israelis could enjoy a comfortable modern lifestyle was beyond the capacity of the aquifers and rainfall within its original borders. The underground aquifer in the West Bank and the headwaters of the River Jordan in the Golan ensured that life in Jerusalem could be sufficiently resourced. Now, the Israeli leadership can never give up this access to, and control of, water - which means it will never give up the land.
The promise of supplying and controlling water has been central to the idea of civilisation since its beginnings in southern Iraq in the 4th millennium BC - irrigation transformed farming into a less risky, more productive pursuit, which in turn fed a population boom and the growth of cities. The very first legal codes, including those of the early Hindu tradition, were based on the assumption that a king would protect water supplies, and in return the people would obey him. This promise is also set out in Roman law. From the pharaohs and the Nile to Joseph Stalin and the Aral Sea, nations and their leaders have been entranced by the notion that water could deliver some kind of paradise.
Historically, it is only when the wet north gets its hands on power that the link between man and water is broken. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and France had only one water problem - they had too much of it. The early stages of their industrial and agricultural development were often focused on improving rivers and draining the land. They built economies that took water for granted.
Water has pervaded our culture, as well as our history. When the Grand Coulee Dam in north-west America was completed in 1942, Woody Guthrie sang about how the new mastery of water would deliver a socialist heaven for the US worker. People can project any dream they have in tamed currents.
We know a left-wing paradise didn't flow from the Grand Coulee, but that is not to say that water doesn't deliver a very fundamental form of justice. To have enough clean water to live on is to be liberated. Only places with a surplus of water can indulge thoughts about future planning and improvement. Water shortages - or dirty water - undermine assumptions of freedom and can be politically destabilising.
Yemen and Pakistan, countries that the west thinks of as centres of fundamentalist terrorism, both have critically unstable economies in large part because of water shortage. The UN thinks that Yemen will become the first nation to run out of water, possibly as soon as 2015. Pakistan, meanwhile, had huge wealth and population booms after Partition in August 1947, thanks to the irrigation schemes of the
Indus. These allowed an increase in the cotton yield and rice crop. But those schemes are now salting up, and the Indus is reduced to a pathetic trickle as it reaches the sea.
In Yemen and Pakistan, there is rural unemployment, slum growth and discontent. International conferences are held to address the crises facing both countries (and others similar to them), when it is obvious what we should be doing. For a fraction of what we invest in the so-called war on terror, we could fix their water distribution, educate their citizens and manage their waste and irrigation more effectively.
This is the tragedy of the world's water problem: whether in Cyprus, Palestine or Pakistan, there are solutions, but immense resistance to adopting them. No country should run out of water - but providing water will have to become a more careful process.
continuedRivers and lakes are what experts call "blue water", but most at issue is... more
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I am here to cover a war - but not the one that has seen shabby oil drums erected in higgledy-piggledy piles as barriers dividing the city.
Water stocks have been hit by a series of droughts in recent years
The war I'm interested in is the water war - not an armed conflict, but a struggle nonetheless, between people and a rapidly disappearing resource.
The alarming thing, for those working to ease this new conflict, is that Cypriots don't even seem to realise that hostilities between them and nature have begun.
Charalampos Theopemptou is the Greek Cypriot side's Environment Commissioner, and it was he who told me the story about the old man in the classroom. He explains its meaning: that within living memory Cyprus was wet - there were plenty of rivers and lakes to swim in. Now, they are all gone.
The island has reached what geographers call Peak Water - when demand meets and then outstrips supply.
Peak Oil is already a familiar concept, and commands international attention. However, water, despite being central to life, is having a much harder time getting on to the political radar.
Dying land
Dig into the details of the current war and it seems to have less to do with fighting than it does with land.
The irony is that the Cypriots, all of them, are fighting over land, which is slowly dying
The issue that stalls peace talks is the question of houses and farms that were seized in the 1974 conflict. On both sides, people would like their houses back, or a cheque in compensation.
The gradual effect of increasing wealth, EU membership for the south, and the opening of the borders, has defused tension, and means that the eternal subject of property prices is now at the heart of the issue.
The irony is that the Cypriots, all of them, are fighting over land, which is slowly dying.
The famous trees of Cyprus are rotting on their waterless roots, turning to dry kindling as they stand in the blazing sun.
Ever since the 1970s, rainfall has been scarcer, meaning far less water reaching the reservoirs.
For the past four decades, getting enough water to the farms and the people has been a struggle.
The general dampness of nature is drying up, like a rag that is being wrung ever tighter.
This is why the European Commission believes Cyprus is the canary in the coalmine: what happens on this island is threatened to happen all across the drier parts of the continent.
Experts agree that this crisis can be tackled, but first you have to recognise it's there - and that's part of the problem.
cont.I am here to cover a war - but not the one that has seen shabby oil drums erected in... more
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Maude Barlow is co-founder of the Blue Planet Project and a very vocal advocate for clean water for all. Her new book (The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water) lays out three main plans that must be instituted in order for our planet to avert a catastrophe regarding this crisis that according to the UN should be our top priority which include: Water conservation, water justice, and water democracy. We must as a global community see beyond the borders to the moral courage necessary to conserve and share this precious resource, as well as working on a treaty like the one we hope to see regarding the climate crisis that sets goals for conservation, sharing of resources, providing technology necessary to developing countries that helps them with conserving through agriculture, infrastructure, and basic education. And most importantly, declaring access to clean water a human right.This along with the climate crisis is the most crucial environmental issue we will face in this century. For me it is the most crucial because without water there is no life.Maude Barlow is co-founder of the Blue Planet Project and a very vocal advocate for... more
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