http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=7454"April 3, 2006 - The Canadian prairies are facing an unprecedented water crisis due to a combination of climate warming, increased human activity and historic drought, according to new research by the University of Alberta's Dr. David Schindler, one of the world's leading environmental scientists.
"The western prairies are worse than other areas of Canada," said Schindler, co-author of a paper published in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, early online edition. "One of the referees of this paper said, "wow, it's like looking out the window of the locomotive 10 seconds before the train crashes.' It is a very dire situation.""
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2006/04/04/prairiedrought20060404.html"David Schindler, an ecology professor at the University of Alberta, says future droughts will likely be far worse than the ones that turned the Prairies into a dust bowl in the 1930s."
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"The authors say water levels in some rivers in Alberta have declined by 20 to 84 per cent in the past 100 years."
Two thoughts on this. First, this will obviously reduce grain production from what is now a major wheat-producing area of the world.
Secondly, the vaulted Alberta oil sands will become inaccessible without a constant source of water to aid in the oil extraction process. At the very least, it will mean that oil production will not be able to be scaled up significantly from what it is currently at without, say, a water pipeline from the Great Lakes. This bodes poorly for using Canada's oil resources to slow the crash after Saudi Arabia's reserves begin to decline.
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