I hadn’t planned on doing another environmental post so soon after Blog Action Day, but a few environmental links hit my email inbox, and those led me to others and before I knew it, I was sitting in front of my computer hearing the tickety-tick of the keys.

In Global warming, deforestation and bark beetles, I talked about how decreased precipitation and warmer temperatures over the past couple decades were wreaking havoc on the forests in the Rocky Mountains, allowing bark beetle to gain the upper hand and kill pine trees at an alarming rate. Fewer living trees means the earth’s natural ability to cleanse the air is compromised, and as the trees die, they shift from consuming CO2 to producing it as they decay.

Reduced precipitation has another effect; there is less water available for personal, commercial, industrial and agricultural use, and it’s not just in the Rocky Mountain region. Many areas of this country – and the world – are facing this problem, some due to reduced precipitation and warmer temperatures, some due to population growth, and some a combination of the two.

• Snow pack in the Sierra Nevada range this last summer had fallen to the lowest level in 20 years. In the second half of this century even optimistic computer models show 30-70% of the Sierra snowpack will disappear.
• The flow of the Colorado river which relies mainly on snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains was dramatically lower this past summer. At Lee’s Ferry in northern Arizona, one of the main points where the flow of the Colorado river is measured, flow was at the lowest point since measurements began 85 years ago.
• Lake Mead, which is fed by the Colorado River and supplies nearly all of the water needs for Las Vegas, is half-empty and statistical models say it will never be full again.
• Lake Powell, which borders Arizona and Utah and feeds Lake Mead, is also half-empty and it would take 20 years of average flow to fill it.
• In 1995 it was reported that less than 10% of US electrical power came from hydroelectric plants, but reduced river flows will decrease power output at hydroelectric plants and increase our reliance on coal and natural gas-fired power plants, which in turn will release more CO2 into the atmosphere. And until there is some real solution for nuclear waste, I won’t even entertain nuclear plants as a possible solution. Burying the waste in drums below ground for future generations to deal with is the height of stupidity.
• On October 23, 2007, it was estimated that Georgia’s Lake Lanier, which provides water for five million people, will not last more than 79 days at the current rate of consumption, and to bring it back to a normal level would require four months worth of rain.
• The US used more than 148 trillion gallons of water in 2000 (the latest year such figures are available from the USGS), and that number includes all water use. That is almost 500,000 gallons per person. That’s enough to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools (Olympic-sized pool: 164 ft x 82 ft x 6.5 ft deep).
• Over the past 100 years, much of Florida’s natural freshwater storage areas (swamplands, etc.) have succumbed to urban sprawl so they are now facing water shortages as well. In addition, each year Florida dumps hundreds of billions of gallons of treated wastewater into the Atlantic – water that could otherwise be used for irrigation.
• In Australia, they are experiencing their worst drought in 1000 years, and there is a good chance that they are going to have to stop irrigation of crops in some areas of the country.
• This country’s big rush to ethanol, vaunted as a knight in shining armor, is anything but in more ways than one. As an example strictly from a water requirement standpoint, in Oklahoma it takes 2900 gallons of irrigated water to produce just one bushel of corn, and it takes four times that amount to turn it into ethanol. Where is all this water to grow the corn and produce the ethanol going to come from? The “breadbasket” of the US is running on water vapor as it is.

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