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Groundwater Not as Renewable as Thought, Study Finds

Groundwater Not as Renewable as Thought, Study Finds 

Findings ‘a call to better manage and protect the resource,’ says UVic researcher.

Tap-Groundwater

Just over 40 per cent of Canada’s agricultural productivity depends on groundwater. Irrigation photo via Shutterstock.

Groundwater, the globe’s most dependable water insurance system, is not as renewable as researchers once thought and its availability varies greatly around the world.

A new study published in the science journal Nature GeoScience found that just six per cent of the groundwater in the upper two kilometres of the Earth’s crust is actually renewed over a human lifetime.

As a consequence, the vast majority of groundwater now being consumed at a rapid rate by agriculture, human communities and the oil and gas industry took hundreds, thousands or even millions of years to collect in the earth. (Some groundwater in Canada is more than a billion years old.)

”It begs the question of what is renewable in terms of groundwater,” said hydrologist Tom Gleeson at the University of Victoria and one of the paper’s authors. ”When we talk about groundwater, it can be 100, 1,000 or 10,000 years old and it was all at some time precipitation. But it all comes down to timescale.”

Scientists classify groundwater, the water that supplies aquifers and wells, as ”young” or ”modern” if it has seeped and pooled in the earth for only 25 to 100 years. It is generally more readily available and of better quality than old or ancient groundwater and is more vulnerable to contamination.

The study, which used extensive computer modelling, mapped the extent of young groundwater around the world by tracking tritium, a radioactive tracer, in thousands of groundwater samples from around the world.

Tritium is a byproduct of atmospheric nuclear testing during the 1950s and 1960s. The element fell to the ground in rainwater and is now a standard measurement for mapping young groundwater.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Don’t Tell These Ranchers Climate Change Isn’t Real

Don’t Tell These Ranchers Climate Change Isn’t Real

The push to make Alberta’s cattle ranges drought resistant.

Alberta cattle ranchers

Mac Blades (middle) fellow ranchers Frances Gardner and Gordon Cartwright recently won a long battle to have their drought-resistant heritage rangelands protected from coal bed methane and other energy developments. Photo by Ed Struzik.

Among the many pictures on the walls of the Rocking P ranch house is one of owner Mac Blades with singer Ian Tyson and other local ranchers riding their horses across a snowy hillside in the Livingstone Mountain range of southwestern Alberta. The photo made the front pages of both national newspapers in the fall of 2002, when Tyson, Blades and the Pekisko group of ranchers went public with their call for a moratorium on oil and gas development in the region.

Their call came on the heels of the worst prairie drought in more than 70 years.

Thirteen years later, Blades and his family are still ranching, running about 800 cows on 10,000 acres of land they own or lease. Drought slammed the region again this summer, but the Rocking P fared quite well this time. Part of it had to do with the relatively good spring moisture that carried them through the dry weeks. Most of it had to do with the grasslands Blades and others have been trying to protect.

“Even in years of drought, we do better than most because our native grasslands capture and filter water, build and protect soil, and protect us from drought,” says Blades. “And because the weather is warming, it’s got to the point where we can let our animals out to graze in winter rather than spend money on fuel and feed to get them through the cold months. We just don’t have the cold winters we used to have.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part VI

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part VI

Suppose your situation is such that you need to effect a swift change of venue. The circumstances that prompt this relocation can be quite varied, but the common and foreseeable ones are:

1. There is no fresh water where you are. The reservoirs are dry and dusty, the artesian wells are either no longer producing or are producing water laced with arsenic and heavy metals, and the few desalination plants bottle their water and sell it at prices you cannot afford. What was once fields and pasture is reverting to sand dunes. Forests have dried out, burned down, and are now a lunar landscape criscrossed by deep ravines eroded by sporadic torrential downpours—too sporadic and too torrential to be of benefit.

2. The place where you live is under a few feet of ocean water mixed with raw sewage—not all the time, but often enough that staying there has become a very bad idea. An onshore wind combined with a high tide and a bit of rain are enough to make contaminated, brackish water spew out of every storm drain. With each passing year and more and more basements are flooded, more and more foundations undermined, more and more buildings condemned. Places further inland flood more rarely but are already too crowded, and will be subject to the same conditions after a slight delay.

3. Your country has been overrun by “refugees” who have looted the shops, occupied many of the public buildings and are busy beating up the men and raping the women (like they are doing in Sweden, which is now the second-rapiest country in the world, Lesotho in South Africa is the rapiest). There are large sections of your city where even the military, never mind the police, fear to venture.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Global warming drains the water of life

Global warming drains the water of life

CROP -- snowpack

Melting snowpack in Turkey’s Lesser Caucasus mountains. Image: Dario Martin-Benito

New research warns that rising temperatures are reducing the mountain snow on which billions of people in lowland areas depend for their water supply.

LONDON, 13 November, 2015 – Up to two billion people who depend on winter snow to deliver their summer water could see shortages by 2060 as upland and mountain snowpacks continue to dwindle.

An estimated 300 million people could find, 45 years on, that they simply won’t have enough water for all their needs, according to new research.

Climate change driven by rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide – in turn, fed by human combustion of fossil fuels – may already be affecting global precipitation. Researchers have consistently found that much of the world’s drylands will increase as global average temperatures rise.

But warmer temperatures increasingly also mean the water that once fell as snow, to be preserved until the summer, now falls as winter rain, and runs off directly. The snow that does fall is settling at ever higher altitudes and melting ever earlier.

Reliable flow 

This is bad news for agricultural communities that depend on a reliable flow of meltwater every summer.

California is already in the grip of a sustained drought, made worse by lower falls of snow. Great tracts of Asia depend on summer meltwater from the Himalayan massif and the Tibetan plateau.

Justin Mankin, an environmental scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in the US, and colleagues report in Environmental Research Lettersjournal that they studied 421 drainage basins across the northern hemisphere

They took account of the water used now and the patterns of population growth, and tested the impact of global warming, using computer simulations of a range of possible future patterns.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Quick-Start Guide for New Preppers Who Want to be Ready RIGHT NOW

A Quick-Start Guide for New Preppers Who Want to be Ready RIGHT NOW

When you first start prepping you want everything RIGHT NOW. You look around your home and see nothing but shortcomings. You don’t have enough food, you don’t have a woodstove, you have no secondary water source…that’s it. You and your family are doomed.

You feel a panicked urgency because you’ve learned just enough to know that you are NOT prepared.You know that there are all sorts of supplies that you need, but if you’re like most of us, you’re on a budget. Very few of us can afford to buy everything we need all at once.

Here’s a guide

Stop panicking. Take a deep breath. You can devote yourself to getting prepared without breaking the bank.

So if you have to split up your purchases, how do you prioritize your supplies? How can you create a sensible supply quickly before an impending crisis occurs?

The recommendations in this guide for new preppers will help speed you through the preparedness process. Wherever possible, use items that you already have. Consider this a checklist of what you need and fulfill it as you can. In each category there will be a range of options, including some freebies whenever possible, as well as reading material on the subject.

Please keep in mind, the following doesn’t provide you with a year’s supply of anything. It will get you through most short-term disasters with aplomb, though. Once you have this foundation in place, you can spend time and money building upon it.

Water

Water is near and dear to my heart, so much so that I wrote a book on the topic. (You can find The Prepper’s Water Survival Guide HERE.) I always put water at the top of the list, because without it, you’ll be dead in 3 short days. The need for an emergency water supply isn’t always the result of a down grid disaster. Recently, we tapped into our emergency water when the well pump broke.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Water Storage Tips And Advice 101

Water Storage Tips And Advice 101

Greetings to all. I would like to write about my experience with water storage over the years. First and foremost, water is hands down the most important tangible item in a survival scenario. There are countless articles written on food storagegunsbug out thisbug in that and multiple other survival gear and items.

The fact is, without water….your dead. The human body can only survive a few days without water, but can go a few weeks without food. Sure you can “bug out” and snare game, or kill a deer for food, but how are you going to wash your hands after you dress an animal, clean your cookware or wash down that game flavored goodness that you are probably not used to? So here is a short article on water basics covering procurement, storage, filtration and usage.

Procurement – There are many ways to find water and here are a few that are available in my area. First, the well. If you don’t have one, you should look getting one. We live in FL and have a high water table so running dry is not an issue. I have an antique cast iron hand pump for dispensing with spare leather cups on hand. The second source you can use is a nearby lake, stream or river. Note, these may be contaminated even more than already when SHTF so use care when filling containers.

Also a cheap way to find water is to use a rain water containment system from your roof. You may have shingles instead of a tin roof, but with filtration, this can be turned into potable water if needed. Finally, there are multiple other places to look, too many to list in fact. There should be good water in your hot water tank for a few days.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wisconsin Groundwater Dispute Is a Warning Signal for the Eastern United States

Wisconsin Groundwater Dispute Is a Warning Signal for the Eastern United States

Wisconsin Caroline Lake Ashland County

Photo © Codi Kozacek / Circle of Blue
Caroline Lake sits near the Lake Superior shore in northern Wisconsin. The state is one of many east of the Mississippi River confronting unsustainable groundwater use. Click image to enlarge.

When it pulled back from the North American mid-continent roughly 10,000 years ago, the Laurentide Ice Sheet left the state of Wisconsin a lovely basket of geological parting gifts: rich soils, sculpted terrain, and a dimpled landscape.

The glacial retreat laid the foundation for Antigo silt loam, the official state soil and an asset still drawn upon by farmers in north-central Wisconsin. Glacial floods sliced open the cliffs of the Dells, a popular mid-state tourist attraction. Soon after the glaciers receded, the dimples filled with water and formed many of Wisconsin’s 15,000 lakes.

Today, a hydrological reversal is taking place. Some of the lakes are shrinking, victims of high-capacity groundwater wells that pump more than 378,000 liters (100,000 gallons) per day and are used by big farms, dairies, and companies mining silica sand for use in the fracking industry. The state Legislature is discussing the matter. Lawmakers introduced three bills this session that seek, in various ways, to preserve Wisconsin’s waterscape.

“We have to accept that navigable waters have been impacted and we have to act,” said Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican who co-sponsored one of the bills, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.

It is unfamiliar territory for the damp state, but Wisconsin has plenty of company in that regard. Depleted groundwater tables, shrinking lakes, and faltering rivers — problems most commonly associated with the dry American West — are spreading eastward.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Worries Build Among Investors Over Oil and Gas Industry’s Exposure to Water and Climate Risks

Worries Build Among Investors Over Oil and Gas Industry’s Exposure to Water and Climate Risks

When it comes to financial risks surrounding water, there is one industry that, according to a new report, is both among the most exposed to these risks and the least transparent to investors about them: the oil and gas industry.

This year, 1,073 of the world’s largest publicly listed companies faced requests from institutional investors concerned about the companies’ vulnerability to water-related risks that they disclose their plans for adapting and responding to issues like drought or water shortages.

Many of those companies responded by reporting their information to a group called CDP, which works with over 800 institutional investors with assets of US$95 trillion to push for corporate transparency. But in the oil and gas industry, the compliance rate was just over half the average, with only 22% of companies providing information, CDP reported.

That’s a concern for investors, CDP wrote, because their data showed that roughly two thirds of oil and gas companies say they are vulnerable to water risks — and those risks are not just speculative risks to keep an eye on for some future time.

Nearly half of the oil and gas companies who responded report that their bottom line has already suffered due to “water-related challenges” over the past year, placing the industry in the ranks of the most vulnerable, the CDP reported.

Just as oil was to the 20th century, water is fast becoming the defining resource of the 21st century,” said Cate Lamb, head of water at CDP. “Unfortunately however, unlike oil, there is no replacement for water.”

The growing risks of unaddressed climate change are beginning to draw the attention of the financial community, with investors, central bankers and global economic institutions increasingly questioning what impacts shifting weather patterns might have on business as we know it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2% Solutions for the Planet

2% Solutions for the Planet

Since we live in an era of big problems, we tend to spend our time thinking of big solutions. Thinking big, however, can have a paralyzing effect on taking action.

In my new book Two Percent Solutions for the Planet, I take readers on a journey around the world where low-cost, easy-to-implement solutions are regenerating the planet now, rather than in some distant future.

Two Percent Solutions for the Planet profiles fifty innovative practices that soak up carbon dioxide in soils, reduce energy use, sustainably intensify food production, and increase both water quality and quantity. Why “two percent? It is an illustrative number meant to stimulate our imaginations. It refers to: the amount of new carbon in the soil needed to reap a wide variety of ecological and economic benefits; the percentage of the nation’s population who are farmers and ranchers; and the low financial cost (in terms of GDP) needed to get this work done.

Big solutions, in other words, can be accomplished for small costs. They are solutions that are regenerative over the long haul, meaning they replete rather than deplete people, animals, plants, soil and other natural resources. See: http://www.chelseagreen.com/two-percent-solutions-for-the-planet

From the Prologue:

We live in an era of seemingly intractable challenges: increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, rising food demands from a human population that is projected to expand from seven to nine billion people by 2050, and dwindling supplies of fresh water, to name just three. What to do? So far, our response to these big problems has been to consider “big” solutions, including complex technologies, arm-twisting treaties, untested geoengineering strategies, and new layers of regulation, all of which have the net effect of increasing complexity (and anxiety) in our lives. And most of these big solutions come with big costs, both financial and social, especially for those least able to bear them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Four Ticking Global Time-Bombs Few Even Hear

Four Ticking Global Time-Bombs Few Even Hear

A few charts help us grasp the magnitude of the four global time-bombs.

The geopolitical and financial risks facing the global economy are well-known.Hot wars and currency meltdowns garner headlines around the world.

But few even hear, much less discuss, four ticking global time-bombs:

1. The demographic time-bomb.

2. The public health time-bomb.

3. The food/water/soil time-bomb.

4. The oil-export time-bomb.

Each is largely self-explanatory:

1. The demographic time-bomb: as the global economy melts down, the realization that the pensions and healthcare promised to hundreds of millions of elderly cannot be funded out of tax revenues will upend the social contract in countries rich and poor.

As the chart below depicts, as the population of elderly rise, so do the non-communicable lifestyle diseases of aging. The costs of treating these lifestyle diseases (metabolic syndrome, heart disease, high blood pressure, etc.) soar as the population and incidence of these diseases both rise.

Global Aging 2010: An Irreversible Truth:

This Standard & Poor’s study warns that “no other force is likely to shape the future of national economic health, public finances, and policymaking as the irreversible rate at which the world’s population is aging… The cost of caring for [the elderly] will profoundly affect growth prospects and dominate public finance policy debates worldwide.”

2. The public health time-bomb: 100 million diabetics and 500 million pre-diabetics in China, 80 million diabetics and hundreds of millions more pre-diabetics in India, and another 100 million diabetics in the developed world will overwhelm a global healthcare system that is already struggling to provide care for an aging population.

Diabetes Is a Major Public-Health Crisis in China

No Answers in Sight for India’s Diabetes Crisis

The Global Diabetes Epidemic (New York Times)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

River Supplying Water To Alberta Oil Sands Operations At Risk From Drought

A new study casts doubt on the long-term ability of the Athabasca River to supply the water Alberta’s oil sands industry relies on.

Water is allocated to oil sands operations based on river flow data collected since the 1950s, but that doesn’t necessarily represent an accurate assessment of the Athabasca River’s flow variability over the longer term, according to a report published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Development of Alberta’s oil sands, the world’s third-largest crude oil reserve at an estimated 168 billion barrels, uses a lot of fresh water — more than 3 barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced. Currently, the oil sands industry is allocated 4.4% of the mean annual flow of the Athabasca River to meet that demand. In 2010, the oil and gas industry accounted for 74.5 percent of total surface water allocations in the Athabasca River Basin, the report says.

That allocation takes into account seasonal fluctuation, but not long-term climatic variability and change, the authors of the report write — even though the region has a history of droughts and future droughts are likely, suggesting the industry’s water use might be unsustainable.

Syncrude_mildred_lake_plant
Syncrude’s Mildred Lake oil sands operation in Alberta, Canada. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Researchers from the University of Regina and the University of Western Ontario, both in Canada, analyzed the measured river flow record for the Athabasca River Basin while accounting for the effects of climate oscillations that can confound attempts to spot long-term trends, like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Pacific North American mode and El Niño.

Their analysis revealed declining flows throughout the river basin, which is consistent with the record of regional warming and the resulting loss of glacier ice and snowpack at high elevations in the Rocky Mountains, the origin of much of the Athabasca’s water.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Healthy Soils Reduce Water Pollution

Healthy Soils Reduce Water Pollution

 

rainfall simulator soil runoff agriculture water pollution SEJ Norman Oklahoma circle of blue

Photo © Brett Walton / Circle of Blue
The rainfall simulator demonstrates the soil’s capacity to store and filter water. When heavy rain strikes bare fields and construction sites, the two soil samples in the middle, dirty water flows into rivers and streams. Click image to enlarge.

On a bright October morning in a hotel parking lot, Greg Scott turns on the rainfall simulator.

The machine’s swiveling nozzle sprays fat drops on five soil samples held in trays a few feet below. Some soil is bare; other samples are planted with prairie grass, wheat, and other field crops. Within minutes dirty, sediment-saturated water begins flowing off the plots that are not anchored by vegetation. In the other trays, the drops soak into the ground. The little water that does run off the planted trays is much cleaner, the color of green tea. The lesson of the artificial cloudburst is clear: neglect the soil and water will suffer.

A soil scientist with the Oklahoma Conservation Commission and a cattle rancher, Scott uses the contraption, hauled like a magician’s prop out of a trailer and onto the asphalt lot, to demonstrate how biologically diverse, untilled soils that are rich in organic matter can help solve agriculture’s twin challenges of water pollution and water scarcity.


“We have accepted for years that the dirty water was normal, and we’ve been putting up with that loss.”
–Greg Scott, soil scientist
Oklahoma Conservation Commission


Soil is having a moment. Several books in recent years — including Dirt by David Montgomery and The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlson — have cast the Earth’s skin in a starring role in the story of human progress and decline.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More Evidence We’ve Reached a “Peak Water” Tipping Point in California

More Evidence We’ve Reached a “Peak Water” Tipping Point in California

March in Yosemite, four years running (source; click to enlarge)

It may be a see-saw course, but it’s riding an uphill train.

A bit ago I wrote, regarding climate and tipping points:

The concept of “tipping point” — a change beyond which there’s no turning back — comes up a lot in climate discussions. An obvious tipping point involves polar ice. If the earth keeps warming — both in the atmosphere and in the ocean — at some point a full and permanent melt of Arctic and Antarctic ice is inevitable. Permanent ice first started forming in the Antarctic about 35 million years ago, thanks to global cooling which crossed a tipping point for ice formation. That’s not very long ago. During the 200 million years before that, the earth was too warm for permanent ice to form, at least as far as we know.

We’re now going the other direction, rewarming the earth, and permanent ice is increasingly disappearing, as you’d expect. At some point, permanent ice will be gone. At some point before that, its loss will be inevitable. Like the passengers in the car above, its end may not have come — yet — but there’s no turning back….

I think the American Southwest is beyond a tipping point for available fresh water. I’ve written several times — for example, here — that California and the Southwest have passed “peak water,” that the most water available to the region is what’s available now. We can mitigate the severity of decline in supply (i.e., arrest the decline at a less-bad place by arresting its cause), and we can adapt to whatever consequences can’t be mitigated.

But we can no longer go back to plentiful fresh water from the Colorado River watershed. That day is gone, and in fact, I suspect most in the region know it, even though it’s not yet reflected in real estate prices.

– See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/more-evidence-weve-reached-peak-water.html#sthash.Ou6zIx2b.dpuf

 

Corporation vs. Nation: The Ultimate Showdown

Corporation vs. Nation: The Ultimate Showdown

A secluded private courthouse in Washington DC is currently the scene of a gargantuan legal battle that could have serious ramifications for all of us. Yet virtually nobody knows about it.

On one side of the battle is the tiny, poverty-crippled Central American nation of El Salvador; on the other is Pacific Rim, a Canadian mining company that was acquired by the Australian corporation Oceana Gold in 2013. At stake is the basic issue of who owns what in tomorrow’s world.

Putting Gold Before Water

In 2009, Pacific Rim filed a private lawsuit – what is referred to in the impenetrable jargon of modern globalism as an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) – against the government of El Salvador for $301 million, equivalent to just over 2% of the country’s $24 billion GDP. As BBC World reports (in Spanish), the amount is equivalent to three years’ combined public spending on health, education and security.

The company argues that El Salvador unfairly denied its mining permit after it began an exploration process for gold mining, costing it hundreds of millions of dollars of “potential future profits.”

ISDS was originally intended to insulate investors from the costly consequences of expropriation, but it is now increasingly being used by companies to claim future profits foregone as a result of government legislation aimed at protecting the public, as well as to intimidate governments into changing or abandoning such legislation.

In the case of El Salvador, the government changed its mining legislation in order to safeguard the nation’s water supply. As Ciara Nugent writes in the Argentina Independent, a startling 97% of its water is currently unsuitable for human consumption, primarily as a result of the mining activities of companies like Pacific Rim. The miner’s proposed new project, due to take place in the northern San Isidro de Cabañas region, would have implied risks of contamination to the little water that remains:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Fukushima police sends nuclear contamination case against TEPCO execs to prosecutors

Fukushima police sends nuclear contamination case against TEPCO execs to prosecutors

Water tanks storing radiation contaminated water are seen at Tokyo Electric Power Co's (TEPCO) tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima prefecture. © Shizuo Kambayashi
Fukushima police have finally reacted to a criminal complaint filed against TEPCO and 32 of its top officials two years ago over the contamination caused by the 2011 nuclear disaster. They have referred the case to prosecutors.
The Fukushima District Prosecutors’ Office will now determine whether to pursue criminal charges against the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and its top management over the leaks of highly radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea.

The criminal complaint alleges that the company and its executives failed to manage storage tanks of contaminated water or build underground walls to block the flow of radioactive material into the sea at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Notable people on the list include TEPCO’s President Naomi Hirose, former Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata and former President Masataka Shimizu.

Police have reviewed claims filed by local residents after 300 tons of highly radioactive water had leaked from TEPCO tanks.

Investigators say that since the complaint was launched in 2013, they have conducted interviews with TEPCO officials and analyzed other relevant information on suspicion of environmental pollution offense law violations. The police will document their observations and present the case to the Prosecutors’ Office.

TEPCO has not made any public comments on the matter, but has said that company officials were in contact with investigators, according to NHK.

The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is considered to be the world’s worst environmental catastrophe since Chernobyl. As of March, about 600,000 tons of contaminated water are still contained within TEPCO tanks. According to preliminary estimates, site cleanup may take up to 40 years.

Olduvai IV: Courage
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