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The Global Water Crisis In Relation To An Inconvenient Truth

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RestoreGore Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Sep-06-06 07:00 PM
Original message
The Global Water Crisis In Relation To An Inconvenient Truth
Edited on Wed Sep-06-06 07:04 PM by RestoreGore
An Inconvenient Truth not only discusses what we are doing to our atmosphere regarding the burning of fossil fuels. Related to that is also the looming water crisis we now face that is predicted to lead us into wars for this precious resource should current trends continue, and as human activity continues to contribute to the conditions causing severe drought in our world through melting permafrost and glaciers.

In Al Gore's prescient movie, An Inconvenient Truth, he presents to us a scenario of a planet that is now evolving and will continue to evolve from our current rapacious use of fossil fuels because of our continued denial about the consequences of our actions in denying our role in it's making, and reneging on our moral responsibility to our planet to stem the tide of those effects.

It is a movie that I believe must be seen by all, as it truly depicts the world we are creating for our children and the hope and will we need to solve this crisis, which I too believe can be done if we begin now. And inextricably linked to the climate crisis we now face is also a looming global water crisis.

I cannot stress enough how absolutely crucial an issue this is to our world and our lives. It is so complex an issue that I could not hope to cover all that is involved in it in this one entry. However, I truly hope I can convey the sense of urgency that we must have regarding this issue in this entry, as water will be the resource fought over in years to come should present conditions persist or worsen, as it is the one resource we cannot live without.

As populations increase globally and water use per person rises, the demand for freshwater is increasing. This is the most crucial environmental issue of our future. The supply of freshwater on Earth is finite and the majority of it globally is threatened by pollution. Pollution we are making. This presents many countries with difficult choices between demand and the increasing percentages of polluted water that leave whole populations without anything else to use for sanitation, drinking, and everyday living. Populations continue to grow rapidly while there is no more water on Earth now than there was 2,000 years ago when the population was less than 3% of its current size.

Farming, domestic (municipal) consumption, and privatization that does not take these issues into account are causing wars over allocation of scarce water resources and pollution issues regarding freshwater available. Today, 31 countries counting for under 8% of the world population, face chronic freshwater shortages. By the year 2025, however, 48 countries are expected to face shortages affecting more than 2.8 billion people, -35% of the world's projected population.

Among countries likely to run short of water in the next 25 years are Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, and Peru. Other large countries such as China, already faces chronic water problems due to economic expansion with poor policies in place regarding water safety and scarcity, and severe drought due to excessive heat brought on in part by climate change. And in much of the world polluted water, improper waste disposal, and poor water management cause deadly public health problems.

Water-related diseases such as malaria, cholera, typhoid, and schistosomiasis harm or kill millions of people every year. Overuse and pollution of water supplies also are taking a heavy toll on the natural environment and pose increasing risks for many species of life.

Water-borne diseases caused by the lack of adequate sanitary waste disposal clean water for drinking, cooking, and washing is to blame for over 12 million deaths a year... twelve million preventable deaths a year. This figure does not even take into account those who die due to droughts that also affect food supplies. Countries such as Niger and Kenya have been experiencing droughts beyond the crisis stage for many years, yet there seems to be no viable solutions being brought forward aggressively to alleviate the suffering of these people even as scientists corroborate the human activity that is contributing to the drought conditions over 30% of this world now faces.

More than one billion people worldwide have no access to safe drinking water (that's four times the U.S. population).

More than 2.5 billion people worldwide have no access to adequate sanitation facilities.

More than 8,000 children die every day (nearly one child every 10 seconds) from illness linked to inadequate and unsafe water supplies and waste disposal in poor countries. Nearly all of this illness is preventable.

Improvements in water supply and sanitation reduce infant mortality by an average of 55%.

The twenty-first century is here and still one of every six persons on Earth faces a daily life threatening struggle... the struggle just to get water to drink. Now with climate change becoming part of this equation, there is an added factor to consider. Appropriate policies and strategies must be formulated and acted on soon by the world community. Whatever the reason for water's use be it for farming, municipal use, or industry, there is much more room for conservation and more effective management to eliminate waste, emphasize conservation, and stress sustainability.

To avoid a global catastrophe over the long term, it also is important to act now to slow the growth in demand for freshwater by slowing population growth and bringing the inconvenient truth to people that we simply must stop the rapacious emitting of greenhouse gases that are contributing to the effects we are seeing in much of the world.

And now as recently as today, scientists have reported that due to melting permafrost, more CO2 and methane is being released into our atmosphere at a rate six times faster than was anticipated, and human activity is also exacerbating this viscous cycle which once again does and will also have an effect on global water supplies in relation to drought, dams, diversion, and lack of water due to waste and privatization.

I then submit that there needs to be a global sustainability summit held (which most definitely should be presided over by Mr. Gore) where the needs of the world's poor are truly represented regarding issues of future sustainability. I think that would be one way for Al Gore to bring this message to the world community all at once, and to truly have a meeting of minds to seriously plan for our future. And we need to see major legislation on the part of this nation's Congress addressing the climate crisis that is affecting our world also in regards to water scarcity.

Without planning now for the repercussions of over population, pollution, economic unrest, and our own contributions to the climate crisis we now face (which all contribute to these preventable deaths in the millions due to diseases borne of our own greed and indifference to our world and fellow citizens,) we surely may see the closing of that ten year window Dr. James Hansen of NASA warned us about. And for our future sustainability, that is simply not an option.

As Al Gore stated in An Inconvenient Truth, we are reaching a period of consequences, but we do have all we need to mitigate this crisis. What we lack is the will and the hope. It's time to stop using our resources for war and death which take away that will and hope, and start using them for the work they were meant to do: Giving life. This is then most definitely the moral issue of our time.


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Xithras Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Sep-06-06 09:09 PM
Response to Original message
1. Well written, but wrong on one point.
The supply of freshwater on Earth is finite

Incorrect. The supply of freshwater on Earth changes every day. As freshwater glaciers melt into the sea, the supply of freshwater declines. As global warming heats the oceans and increases oceanic evaporation, the supply of freshwater increases.

Most importantly, we humans have the ability, if we choose, to increase our own supplies as needed. Why don't we do so? Our economic system makes it infeasible. We live on a planet that is 2/3rds covered in water, and yet drought and water wars rage across the globe. Why is this? Why isn't there SERIOUS research and funding invested in developing sustainable desalinization alternatives? The answer is actually quite clear...we don't do these things because they are expensive. Fighting wars, or turning your head from another's suffering, is easier and cheaper than building desalinization plants laying countless thousands of miles of pipes. With a proper investment in water infrastructure, we would have more than enough water for every farm, person, and animal on this planet. But we won't make that investment because it's not "profitable".
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RestoreGore Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Sep-07-06 07:52 AM
Response to Reply #1
2. Desalinization is not the answer
Well, at least not the answer for all of us... perhaps in the Middle East it is, as that is all many countries there have. Conservation and proper management of the resources we have truly is the answer. Seventy percent of our water is wasted on irrigation, and there is technology that is useful in curbing it. Why don't we invest in that? The desalinization process also emits too much CO2 into the air, that actually is contributing to the droughts and the permafrost melting. It is a viscious cycle regardless. The ONLY way to see this problem through is to conserve, and to change our behavior regarding what and the amount of what we spew into the air everyday. In my view, building desalinisation plants is then too a way to just look the other way and condone the waste. And actually, there is only a finite supply of water that is potable for humans on this planet, and it gets smaller everyday the more the population grows.
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ramapo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Sep-07-06 09:18 AM
Response to Reply #2
3. Water, like oil, is too inexpensive
People waste water. Lots and lots of water. They do so because it is relatively cheap.

Suburbanites think little of pouring thousands of gallons on their grass, even in the desert. Farm irrigation is most wasteful, mostly because it is cheap.

So while our aquifers are being relentlessly drawn down, there is not yet an observable problem. Humans just don't react well without a serious problem at hand.

The availability of fresh water is a huge problem in much of the third-world. But that really doesn't concern us here in the U.S.

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Xithras Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Sep-07-06 01:38 PM
Response to Reply #2
4. Desalinization IS the answer.
Current desalinization methods are NOT the answer. The problem with current desalinization methods is that they are too energy intensive. That requires lots of greenhouse spewing energy plants, which does defeat the purpose.

We need to find a BETTER way to desalinize seawater. A method that doesn't require so much energy. Failing in that, we need to figure out how to build sustainable desalinization plants (solar powered maybe?) Either way, there is plenty of water on this planet, but without the "profit motive" there just hasn't been any concerted effort to make it drinkable.

If you want to discuss benefits to the environment, imagine the benefit we'll get from tearing down the dams and letting the rivers run free and the wetlands re-form. How much better off would the natural world be if the Colorado river didn't dry up before reaching the Sea of Cortez? How many species of animals face extinction because of habitat degradation spawned by dam building? My home backs up to a river that carried ferryboats and barges in the 1800's, but today I can cross it midsummer without even getting my knees wet. Global warming? No...water diversions from upstream dams. The problem with conservation is that it assumes well managed use of our CURRENT RESOURCES. I hate to tell you this, but our use of those current resources is wreaking havoc on the natural world, is driving species to extinction, and is driving the very environmental degradation you want to fix.

The solution is to find a new water source that doesn't destroy natural habitat. As I see it, our options are A) Catch comets, melt them, and drink the runoff. B) Make seawater potable. I guarantee that B is the cheaper solution.

During the 1970's and 1980's, the Soviets developed filtration systems for their space stations designed to make urine and other wastewater drinkable again. They did this because there was a genuine need, and because the funding was available to complete the research. If we can turn pee into Evian, why can't we do the same with the oceans? We can, it's just a matter of will and motivation.
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