Global Water Shortages

[KNOWTHIS]

Now here's a perfect way to reduce the population.

news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080319/ts_afp/healthsciencetechnologywaterun

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.

In Beijing, home to 16 million, aquifers have fallen by more than a dozen metres (40 feet) in 30 years, forcing the government to earmark tens of billions of dollars for a scheme to ferry water from the Yangzte River in the south to the country's parched north.

Aggravating the shortages are pathogen and chemical pollution, which have transformed many primary sources of water in the developing world into toxic repositories of disease.

Desperation forces people to consume these contaminated waters.

"In the coming decades, water scarcity may be a watchword that prompts action ranging from wholesale population migration to war, unless new ways to supply clean water are found," comment a team of researchers in a review of water purification technology published Thursday in the British journal Nature.

[Mech]

No water shortage up here in the Northeast.

Much lesss the midwest...they are practically underwater right now.

These bought and paid for researchers are simply pushing the CONTROL THE POPULATION THROUGH SCARCITY agenda...as ususal.

Im glad i have well water...F**K these control freaks.

[Mech]

Floods sweep central U.S.

By Ros Krasny

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Swollen rivers flooded parts of the central United States on Friday and threatened to engulf a major interstate highway in Missouri, after violent rainstorms caused at least 16 deaths, according to reports on Friday.



www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN2019975320080321

[KNOWTHIS]

Monsanto to capitalize on worsening drought conditions with "drought tolerant" corn. The more we pollute our own water, the more money we'll end up paying for it and the less control we'll have over it.

abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=4477260

Investors warm to water as shortages mount

Water shortages are on the rise -- stemming from soaring demand, growing populations, rising living standards and changing diets. A lack of supply is compounded by pollution and climate change.

Investors are mobilizing funds to buy the assets that control water and improve supplies, especially in developing countries such as China where urban populations are booming, further tightening supply.

Water shortage is already a serious problem in many regions of the world, as underlined in a December report from Zurich-based Sustainable Asset Management (SAM), which manages about 8.5 billion Swiss francs in assets.

These include southern Spain, the Maghreb, the Middle East, Central Asia, Pakistan, southern India and northern China. In the Americas, the U.S. mid-west, Mexico and the Andes are the worst-hit areas. Eastern Australia is also badly affected.

China is a particularly strong example. It has a fifth of the world's population but just 7 percent of the water.

Most of the length of the country's five main rivers is unsafe for direct human contact, and the country will have to build 1,000 wastewater treatment plants between 2006 and 2010 to meet national pollution targets, Citigroup analysts say.

But not everyone will benefit. While some Chinese cities are now investment hotspots, rural areas are being by-passed, underscoring a trend of under-funding in poorer regions and countries most vulnerable to shortages.

"The most advanced of these is now a drought-tolerant corn product ... commercializable within several years. We expect this to be the first generation of an ongoing stream."

Monsanto is currently trading at nearly 39 times its forecast earnings for the year to August 2008: almost double the valuation for an emblem of growth in another sector, Google, according to data from Reuters Estimates.

[KNOWTHIS]

Canada....

www.canada.com/cityguides/hamilton/story.html?id=724706d0-33b7-4ebe-b33a-99a997dde8f5&k=55264

In a major forthcoming report on Canada's changing climate, scientists warn of everything from increased severe storm activity in Atlantic Canada to hotter summers and poorer air quality in urban Ontario.

British Columbia may face retreating glaciers and snow loss on its mountains, causing potential water shortages. The Prairie provinces will continue to struggle with drought, impacting agriculture rurally and potentially causing water rationing in urban areas.

[KNOWTHIS]

Who would understand the situation better than a farmer who would have no reason to lie?

link

Pressure on Farmers is Mounting as Droughts Increase

In 2006, droughts resulted in the lowest corn production in 50 years in France and Spain. In Australia, where drought has been persistent since 2002, some wheat farmers failed that year to harvest a crop for the first time in four decades, while in the United States corn production fell 5 percent.

The trends are not just a concern for agriculture. Business leaders worry that intensified competition for water, driven by the boom in biofuel crop cultivation, could hurt other industries and trigger problems in manufacturing hubs like China.

[KNOWTHIS]

New Jersey…

www.wastenews.com/wnreg.html?goto=%2Fheadlines2.html%3Fid%3D1206114100

New Jersey is looking into ways to encourage more reclamation of treated wastewater to help fend off water shortages in some parts of the state.

The Department of Environmental Protection has proposed new rules that could enable municipalities to increase their use of treated wastewater to irrigate lawns, parks, golf courses and athletic fields as well as for industrial processes.

The initiatives are amendments to the proposed re-adoption of the New Jersey Pollutant Discharge Elimination System rule and set high treatment standards, said Lisa P. Jackson, DEP commissioner. They would require wastewater treatment facilities that discharge into coastal waters or those located in parts of the state labeled Critical Water Supply Areas to study the feasibility of using reclaimed wastewater as a condition of NJPDES permits.

"By going through this study process, some wastewater facilities may discover that reclaiming wastewater makes a lot of sense economically and benefits their local communities," Jackson said.

Facilities whose reduced discharges would adversely impact water resources are exempt from the rules, as are wastewater treatment plants that discharge less than 100,000 gallons per day.

[KNOWTHIS]

Just heard about this on the radio. Major water disputes are taking place in Las Vegas requiring billion dollar projects.

www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1724411,00.html

Lake Mead

There is no shortage of ways to see just how short of water Lake Mead is. You can count the white bathtub rings of mineral deposits on the bedrock walls of the sprawling, 250-sq.-mi. (647 sq km) reservoir, indicating the old high-water mark--now left nakedly exposed 100 ft. up. You can look at the docks that have been moved repeatedly, chasing the receding lake. Or you can simply read a line graph at the reservoir's visitor center, which tracks the water elevation of Lake Mead since it was created by the construction of the Hoover Dam in 1935. After years of relative stability, starting in 2000 the graph resembles the record of a stock-market crash. The visitor center's chart stops at 2006, but as a park ranger tells me, "It just keeps going down from there."

Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., last month estimated that there is a 50% chance that Lake Mead could be effectively dry by 2021 if the climate changes as forecast and water use is not curtailed.

www.alternet.org/columnists/story/78286/

The Corporate Threat to Water and the Water Justice Movement's Fight to Protect it

There are private corporate interests that have decided that water is going to be put on the open market for sale. It's going to be commodified and treated as any other saleable good.

REPORTER: Water is now a $400 billion global industry, the third-largest behind electricity and oil.

WATER EXECUTIVE: I bought the green. I had the blue. And I have about half of the yellow.

MAUDE BARLOW: The market is amoral, and it's going to lead you to taking advantage of pollution and scarcity, frankly. It's going to lead you to selling it to those who can buy it but not to those who need it.

ROD PARSLEY: The water sector is going to grow two to three times the global economy over the next 20 years. By buying the companies that source, treat, distribute and monitor our water supply, you're likely to have a pretty strong investment over the next decade or so.

b> People say that, well, water is a lot like air. Do you charge for air? Of course not. You shouldn't charge for water. Well, OK, watch what happens.

[Mech]

Forecasters warn of historic flooding in Arkansas




LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Forecasters warned communities in the Arkansas prairie along the White River that they could suffer their worst flooding in more than a quarter-century under clear skies and sunshine.


"You may be wondering why we issued a flash flood watch in eastern Arkansas when there is little to no rain in the forecast," John Robinson of the National Weather Service in North Little Rock wrote Sunday in an e-mail to reporters.

"There will be water going into areas where people have not seen it before, and may not be expecting to see high water," Robinson wrote.

Upstream, the Black River sliced through a 60-year-old levee before emergency workers and volunteers could stem the tide with a mountain of sandbags Saturday. The Black enters the White River near Newport in northeast Arkansas.

Forecasters issued a flash flood warning through Monday morning for communities along the White River.

The Arkansas Department of Emergency Management said water broke through two spots of the Black River levee. Spokeswoman Renee Preslar said the break was fueled by water pouring in from soaked southeastern Missouri, flooding outlying areas to the south of Pocahontas.

Arkansas emergency management officials have said early estimates for statewide damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure was at $2 million, though that figure was expected to grow. Forecasts show it likely will be the middle of this week before rivers statewide see significant drops.

Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe has declared 35 counties disaster areas.

Last week's torrential rainstorms also caused flooding in parts of Ohio and southern Illinois and in wide areas of Missouri.

At least 17 deaths have been linked to flooding, wet roads and other weather effects over the past week, and one person is missing in Arkansas. Thousands of Missouri residents have had fled to Red Cross shelters or to the homes of friends or relatives.

The Mississippi River at Cape Girardeau was 40.9 feet Sunday, 9 feet above flood stage, and was expected to crest at 41.5 feet Monday morning.

Towns south of where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet in Cairo, Ill., braced for flooding expected in the next couple of days.

"They're not going down yet," said John Campbell, operations chief at Missouri's State Emergency Management Agency. "They're still rising."

The Mississippi at Cairo, Ill., was expected to crest at 54 feet Tuesday morning, 14 feet above flood stage.

Moderate flooding was forecast for New Madrid, where the river was expected to crest at 42 feet Wednesday evening. The river will crest at 41 feet in Caruthersville Friday morning, the National Weather Service said.

[Swamp Gas]

www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/23/2715/


Global Warming has Already Changed World’s Rainfall Patterns: Study

PARIS — A study has yielded the first confirmation that global warming is already affecting world’s rainfall patterns, bringing more precipitation to northern Europe, Canada and northern Russia but less to swathes of sub-Saharan Africa, southern India and Southeast Asia.

0723 06The changes “may have already had significant effects on ecosystems, agriculture and human regions that are sensitive to changes in precipitation, such as the Sahel,” warns the paper, released on Monday by Nature, the British science journal.

Scientists have long said that global warming is bound to interfere with snow and rainfall patterns, because air and sea temperatures and sea-level atmospheric pressure — the underlying forces behind these patterns — are already changing.

But, until now, evidence for declaring that the interference is already happening existed anecdotally or in computer models, rather than from observation.

One problem for researchers has been a lack of accurate, long-term rainfall data from around the world that would enable them to distinguish between regional or cyclical shifts in rainfall.

Francis Zwiers, a scientists with Environment Canada, Toronto, found a way around these problems by using two data-sets of global rainfall pattern beginning, conservatively, in 1925 and ending in 1999.

They compared these figures with 14 powerful computer models that simulate the world’s climate system, and found a remarkably close fit.

Over the 75-year period under study, global warming “contributed significantly” to increases in precipitation in the Northern Hemisphere’s mid-latitudes, a region between 40 and 70 degrees north, they say.

In contrast, the Northern Hemisphere’s tropics and subtropics, a region spanning from the equator to 30 degrees latitude north became drier.

And the Southern Hemisphere’s tropics (equator to 30 degrees latitude south) became wetter.

The study looked at annual average rainfall on the land, not at sea. In addition, it did not look at extreme weather events — episodes of drought and flooding — whose frequency and severity are also seen as likely to increase as a result of global warming.

The investigation is published by Nature on Thursday.

Previous work in the past few years has highlighted the loss of alpine glaciers and snow cover and the retreat of Arctic permafrost.

These were interpreted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a landmark report published this year, as confirmation that global warming has already started to affect parts of the climate system.

[KNOWTHIS]

www.foodandwaterwatch.org/water/private-vs-public/usa/felton-ca/

The Fight for Public Water in Felton, California

Many of the 3,000 adult residents of the Felton Water District had been organizing for nearly six years to buy the community's water system from California American Water. Cal-Am is a subsidiary of American Water, which, despite an ongoing sell-off, remains under the ownership of German multinational energy and water titan RWE.

Surprisingly, less than a week before an eminent domain trial to decide the value of the water system, the announcement came that the San Lorenzo Valley Water District would pay Cal-Am $10.5 million in cash for the system. Of course, Cal-Am went for the deal to settle the eminent domain suit against it and avoid a jury trial, said Jim Mosher, who heads up the legal committee for Felton FLOW - Friends of Locally Owned Water.

"This is a great victory for the citizens of Felton and should inspire other communities to challenge private water utilities that are extorting huge, unjustified rate increases and failing to protect sensitive watershed properties," Mosher said. "The SLV Water District has done an excellent job representing us and we look forward to having them manage the Felton water system."

In addition, the agreement states that Cal-Am will donate the 250 acres of forested watershed land in hopes of getting a tax break. Mosher questions whether the land transfer is a donation, however, since it appears to be an integral part of the deal and the price.

Background

In 2001, American Water purchased Felton's water system, which has been privately owned since the late 1800s, as part of its larger acquisition of Citizen's Utilities. Shortly after that, Essen-based RWE gobbled up American Water.

The trouble started in November 2002 when California American Water ignited furor in the Felton community, nestled amongst coastal redwood trees, with a 74 percent rate hike. In response, the Friends of Locally Owned Water was born and flew into action. FLOW fought to reduce the amount of the rate hike, urged Santa Cruz County to create a public agency to control the water system and opposed the company's plan to merge the Felton and Monterey water districts.

The push for public water in Felton found its first success in July 2005 when FLOW spearheaded passage of Measure W, despite Cal-Am's deep-pocketed opposition. With their lopsided 3-to-1 approval of the $11 million bond issue, residents agreed to higher taxes and authorized the SLV Water District to use the bond proceeds to buy the water system.

The district offered California American $7.6 million, but Cal-Am refused. Its leadership stated, flatly, that the system was not for sale at any price and expressed its determination to oppose all public acquisition efforts so that Felton did not start a domino effect of citizens taking control of their water resources. Felton's petition to the California Public Utilities Commission to approve the proposed public buyout failed after the commission succumbed to heavy CalAm lobbying pressure.....