Booming Alberta vulnerable to drought: water experts

[tuvor]

With the Prairies likely to face a severe drought within the next couple of decades, Alberta should limit the number of people who move there, warns a report by two Canadian water experts.

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.

He says Alberta's booming economy and rapid growth have made it the province vulnerable to water shortages.

Schindler co-authored the study with W.F. Donahue. It was published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2006/04/04/prairiedrought20060404.html

Hmm, no mention of the water-depleting industry known as the tar sands.

[u4ic]

1. Yes, I noticed that, too

How did the CBC miss that? The Edmonton Journal article is more in depth.


EDMONTON - If Alberta doesn't put the brakes on the oil industry and re-examine its population explosion, the Prairies will face a critical water shortage unprecedented in scope, says a renowned water ecologist at the University of Alberta.

"If we continue to act the way we're acting, there won't be any water in Saskatoon and Saskatchewan in some summers," said David Schindler, an environmental scientist whose paper on the impending water crisis on Canada's Prairies is published in this week's on-line version of the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"If we let the oil revenues continue with no thought to what we're going to be like here when the oilsands are gone, it will be like Newfoundland after the cod are gone," Schindler said.

"Most ecologists and most climate people will tell you it's almost certain to be disastrous. We need to pull out all the stops on conservation."

http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=b6151f3d-9825-40d3-ad02-d4b811256562&k=94910

[laundry_queen]

2. I was just going to go pull up the Edmonton Journal article

Read it the other day and it had a few lines about the water demands of the oil industry. Why CBC wouldn't mention that also is beyond me.