California Water #Crisis May Be Impossible To Fix

A guide to California's water crisis — and why it's so hard to fix

California saw this drought coming. Even if people in the state didn't know it would be this bad — now the worst in recorded history — they've known that dry years are inevitable and had all sorts of ideas for how to deal with them.

But for all that planning, California's current drought has been a disaster. Reservoirs are drying up. Crops are wilting in the fields. For the first time ever, towns and cities will face a mandatory 25 percent cut in their water use.

The problem isn't that no one foresaw the drought. The problem is that no one has been able to solve an underlying issue that is simultaneously less scary and also much harder than a dry spell: California's convoluted water system and intractable water politics. Read More

More Facts And Figures

Dr. Kinesa's - Global Edge

California is fast becoming the stage for one of the biggest climate related disasters; begging the obvious question - who in their right minds would be thinking about growing the state further in any economic  or physical way. The by-product consequences will also drive food costs everywhere to unprecedented heights.

Is this what happens when you put bone-head celebrities in key leadership positions? For sure, this  is not the only reason for the years of short -sightedness.

International Offices
April 28, 2015

Fresh Water - Adds to METHANE BOMB!

Deadly Beautiful?

Global Warming Speeds Up Methane Emissions From Freshwater

By Tim Radford

(Climate News Network) – Methane or natural gas is a greenhouse gas. Weight for weight, it is more than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a century, and researchers have repeatedly examined the contribution of natural gas emitted by ruminant cattle to global warming. But Gabriel Yvon-Durocher of the University of Exeter and colleagues considered something wider: the pattern of response to temperature in those natural ecosystems that are home to microbes that release methane. 

They report in Nature that they looked at data from hundreds of field surveys and laboratory experiments to explore the speed at which the flow of methane increased with temperature.

How it Works

Microbes, algae, freshwater plants, and animals are all part of an active ecosystem and take their nourishment from and return waste to the atmosphere. Healthy plants take CO2 from the atmosphere with photosynthesis. Most of the methane in freshwater systems is produced by an important group of microbes called Archaea that live in waterlogged, oxygen-free sediments and play an important role in decay.

Plant uptake of CO2 is affected by temperature, and so is microbial methane production. Respiration also releases CO2. The questions the researchers set out to answer were: which gas is more likely to be released in greater quantities as temperatures rise? And is the outcome the same whether they examine the Archaea only, or all the microbes in an ecosystem, or the entire package of submerged freshwater life?

Possible Outcomes

  The answer is, the scientists say, that methane emissions go up with the mercury, and that the ratio of methane to CO2 also goes up in step with temperature. And the result is the same whether you consider the microbes or the whole ecosystem.

    Read More