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The world is rapidly running out of clean water. Some of the
largest lakes and rivers on the globe are being depleted at a very frightening
pace, and many of the most important underground aquifers that we depend on to
irrigate our crops will soon be gone. At this point, approximately 40 percent
of the entire population of the planet has little or no access to clean water,
and it is being projected that by 2025 two-thirds of humanity will live in
"water-stressed" areas. But most Americans are not too concerned
about all of this because they assume that North America
has more fresh water than anyone else does. And actually they would be right
about that, but the truth is that even North America
is rapidly running out of water and it is going to change all of our lives.
Today, the most important underground water source in America, the
Ogallala Aquifer, is rapidly running dry. The most important lake in the
western United States, Lake Mead, is rapidly running dry. The most important
river in the western United States,
the Colorado River, is rapidly running dry.
Putting our heads in the sand and pretending that we are not on the verge of an
absolutely horrific water crisis is not going to make it go away. Without
water, you cannot grow crops, you cannot raise livestock and you cannot support
modern cities. As this global water crisis gets worse, it is going to affect
every single man, woman and child on the planet. I encourage you to keep
reading and learn more.
The U.S. intelligence community
understands what is happening. According to one shocking government report that
was released last year, the global need for water will exceed the global supply
of water by 40
percent by the
year 2030...
This sobering message emerges from the first U.S. Intelligence
Community Assessment of Global Water
Security. The document predicts that by 2030
humanity's "annual global water requirements" will exceed
"current sustainable water supplies" by forty percent.
Oh, but our scientists will find a solution to
our problems long before then, won't they?
But what if they don't?
Most Americans tend to think of a "water
crisis" as something that happens in very dry places such as Africa or the
Middle East, but the truth is that almost the entire western half of the United States
is historically a very dry place. The western U.S. has been hit very hard by
drought in recent years, and many communities are on the verge of having to
make some very hard decisions. For example, just look at what is happening to Lake Mead. Scientists are projecting that Lake Mead has a 50 percent chance of running dry by the
year 2025. If that happens, it will mean the end of Las Vegas as we know it. But the problems
will not be limited just to Las Vegas.
The truth is that if Lake Mead runs dry, it
will be a major disaster for that entire region of the country. This was
explained in a recent article by Alex Daley...
Way before people run out of drinking water, something else
happens: When Lake Mead falls below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam's turbines shut
down – less than four years from now, if the current trend holds – and in Vegas
the lights start going out.
Ominously, these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts signed by
President Obama in December 2011, Nevada
gets only 23.37% of the electricity generated by the Hoover Dam. The other top
recipients: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (28.53%); state
of Arizona (18.95%); city of Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California
Edison (5.54%).
You can always build more power plants, but you can't build more
rivers, and the mighty Colorado
carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the water needs of an area
the size of France,
in which live 40 million people. In its natural state, the river poured 15.7
million acre-feet of water into the Gulf of California
each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced the flow to about 12
million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it; at its mouth,
the riverbed is nothing but dust.
Nor is the decline in the water supply important only to the
citizens of Las Vegas, Phoenix,
and Los Angeles.
It's critical to the whole country. The Colorado
is the sole source of water for southeastern California's
Imperial Valley, which has been made into one of the most productive
agricultural areas in the US
despite receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.
Are you starting to get an idea of just how
serious this all is?
But it is not just our lakes and our rivers
that are going dry.
We are also depleting our groundwater at a very
frightening pace as a recent Science
Daily article discussed...
Three results of the new study are particularly striking: First,
during the most recent drought in California's Central Valley, from 2006 to
2009, farmers in the south depleted enough groundwater to fill the nation's
largest human-made reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas -- a level of
groundwater depletion that is unsustainable at current recharge rates.
Second, a third of the groundwater depletion in the High Plains
occurs in just 4% of the land area. And third, the researchers project that if
current trends continue some parts of the southern High Plains that currently
support irrigated agriculture, mostly in the Texas Panhandle and western Kansas, will be unable
to do so within a few decades.
In the United States we have massive
underground aquifers that have allowed our nation to be the breadbasket of the
world. But once the water from those aquifers is gone, it is gone for good.
That is why what is happening to the Ogallala Aquifer is so alarming. The
Ogallala Aquifer is one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world, and
U.S.
farmers use water from it to irrigate more than 15 million acres of crops each
year. The Ogallala Aquifer covers more than 100,000 square miles and it sits
underneath the states of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota. Most
Americans have never even heard of it, but it is absolutely crucial to our way
of life. Sadly, it is being drained at a rate that is almost unimaginable.
The following are some facts about the Ogallala
Aquifer and the growing water crisis that we are facing in the United States.
A number of these facts were taken from
one of my previous articles. I think that you will agree that
many of these facts are quite alarming...
2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, "a volume equivalent to two-thirds of the water in Lake
Erie" has been permanently drained from the Ogallala
Aquifer since 1940.
3. Decades ago, the Ogallala Aquifer had an average depth of
approximately 240 feet, but today the average depth is just 80
feet. In some areas of Texas,
the water is gone completely.
4. Scientists are warning that nothing can be done to stop the
depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. The ominous words of David
Brauer of the
Ogallala Research Service should alarm us all...
"Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That's all we
can do."
5. According to a recent National
Geographic article, the average depletion rate of the Ogallala
Aquifer is picking up speed....
Even more worrisome, the draining of the High Plains water
account has picked up speed. The average annual depletion rate between 2000 and
2007 was more than twice that during the previous fifty years. The depletion is
most severe in the southern portion of the aquifer, especially in Texas, where the water
table beneath sizeable areas has dropped 100-150 feet; in smaller pockets, it
has dropped more than 150 feet.
6. According to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. interior
west is now the driest that it has been in 500
years.
7. Wildfires have burned millions of acres of vegetation in the
central part of the United
States in recent years. For example,
wildfires burned an astounding 3.6
million acres in
the state of Texas
alone during 2011. This helps set the stage for huge dust storms in the future.
8. Unfortunately, scientists tell us that it would be normal for
extremely dry conditions to persist in parts of western North
America for decades. The following is from an article in
the Vancouver Sun...
But University
of Regina paleoclimatologist
Jeannine-Marie St. Jacques says that decade-long drought is nowhere near as bad
as it can get.
St. Jacques and her colleagues have been studying tree ring data
and, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in
Vancouver over the weekend, she explained the reality of droughts.
"What we're seeing in the climate records is these
megadroughts, and they don't last a decade—they last 20 years, 30 years, maybe
60 years, and they'll be semi-continental in expanse," she told the Regina
Leader-Post by phone from Vancouver.
"So it's like what we saw in the Dirty Thirties, but
imagine the Dirty Thirties going on for 30 years. That's what scares those of
us who are in the community studying this data pool."
9. Experts tell us that U.S. water bills are likely to soar
in the coming years. It is being projected that repairing and expanding our
decaying drinking water infrastructure will cost more than one trillion dollars
over the next 25 years, and as a result our water bills will likelyapproximately
triple over that
time period.
10. Right now, the United
States uses approximately 148 trillion
gallons of fresh
water a year, and there is no way that is sustainable in the long run.
11. According to a U.S.
government report, 36 states are already facing water shortages or
will be facing water shortages within the next few years.
12. Lake Mead supplies about 85 percent of the water to Las Vegas, and since 1998 the level of water in Lake Mead has dropped by about 5.6 trillion gallons.
13. It has been estimated that the state of California only has a 20
year supply of
fresh water left.
14. It has been estimated that the state of New Mexico only has a 10
year supply of
fresh water left.
15. Approximately 40 percent of all rivers in the United States and
approximately 46 percent of all lakes in the United States have
become so polluted that they are are no longer fit for human use.
The 1,450 mile long Colorado
River is a good example of what we have done to our precious water
supplies. It is probably the most important body of water in the southwestern United States,
and it is rapidly dying.
The following is an excerpt from an outstanding
article by
Jonathan Waterman about
how the once mighty Colorado River is rapidly
drying up...
Fifty miles from the sea, 1.5 miles south of the Mexican border,
I saw a river evaporate into a scum of phosphates and discarded water bottles.
This dirty water sent me home with feet so badly infected that I couldn’t walk
for a week. And a delta once renowned for its wildlife and wetlands is now all
but part of the surrounding and parched Sonoran Desert.
According to Mexican scientists whom I met with, the river has not flowed to
the sea since 1998. If the Endangered Species Act had any teeth in Mexico, we might have a chance to save the giant
sea bass (totoaba), clams, the Sea
of Cortez shrimp fishery
that depends upon freshwater returns, and dozens of bird species.
So let this stand as an open invitation to the former Secretary of
the Interior and all water buffalos who insist upon telling us that there is no
scarcity of water here or in the Mexican Delta. Leave the sprinklered green
lawns outside the Aspen conferences, come with me, and I’ll show you a Colorado River running dry from its headwaters to the
sea. It is polluted and compromised by industry and agriculture. It is
overallocated, drought stricken, and soon to suffer greatly from population
growth. If other leaders in our administration continue the whitewash, the scarcity
of knowledge and lack of conservation measures will cripple a western
civilization built upon water.
But of course North
America is in far better shape when it comes to fresh water than
the rest of the world is.
In fact, in many areas of the world today water
has already become the most important issue.
The following are some incredible facts about
the global water crisis that is getting even worse with each passing day...
1. Total global water use has
quadrupled over
the past 100 years, and it is now increasing faster than it ever has been
before.
2. Today, there are 1.6 billion people that live in areas of the globe that
are considered to be "water-stressed", and it is being projected that
two-thirds of the entire population of the globe will be experiencing
"water-stressed" conditions by the year 2025.
3. According to USAID, one-third
of the people on earth will
be facing "severe" or "chronic" water shortages by the year
2025.
4. Once upon a time, the Aral Sea
was the 4th largest freshwater lake in the entire world. At this point, it less
than 10 percent the
size that it used to be, and it is being projected that it will dry up
completely by the year 2020.
5. If you can believe it, the flow of water along the Jordan River is down to only 2 percent of its historic rate.
6. It is being projected that the demand for water in China will
exceed the supply by 25
percent by the
year 2030.
7. According to the United Nations, the world is going to need at
least 30 percent more fresh water by the year 2030.
8. Sadly, it is estimated that approximately 40 percent of the children living in Africa and India have had
their growth stunted due to unclean water and malnutrition.
9. Of the 60 million people added to the cities of the world each
year, the vast majority of them live in deeply impoverished areas that have
no sanitation facilities whatsoever.
10. It has been estimated that 75 percent of all surface water in India has been
heavily contaminated by human or agricultural waste.
11. Sadly, according to one UN study on sanitation,
far more people in India
have access to a cell phone than to a toilet.
13. Due to a lack of water, Saudi Arabia has given up on trying
to grow wheat and will be 100 percent dependent on wheat imports by the
year 2016.
14. Each year in northern China,
the water table drops by an average ofabout one meter due to severe drought and overpumping,
and the size of the desert increases by an area equivalent to the state of Rhode Island.
15. In China, 80 percent of the major rivers have become so
horribly polluted that they do not support any aquatic life at all at this
point.
So is there any hope that the coming global water crisis can be averted?
If not, what can we do to prepare?
Please feel free to post a comment with your
thoughts below...
Sign up before Midnight to watch our video,
“Biggest Ponzi Scheme in U.S. History to Crash,”
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That’s a promise! And you can opt out at any time.