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NASA Says Humans Are Causing Massive Changes In Location of Water Around the World (desertsun.com)
Using measurements from Earth-observing satellites, NASA scientists have found that humans have dramatically altered the location of water around the world. "The team of researchers analyzed 14 years of data from NASA's twin GRACE satellites and studied regions that have seen large increases or decreases in the total amount of freshwater, including water in lakes and rivers and water stored in underground aquifers, soil, snow and ice," reports The Desert Sun. From the report: The scientists examined precipitation trends and other data to determine the most likely causes of these huge losses and gains of water around the world. Their findings in a new study reveal that of the 34 "hotspots" of water change in places from California to China, the trends in about two-thirds of those areas may be linked to climate change or human activities, such as excessive groundwater pumping in farming regions. In eight of the 34 regions, the researchers said the trends reflect "possible" or "probable" impacts of climate change, including losses of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, precipitation increases in the high latitudes of Eurasia and North America, the retreat of Alaska's glaciers and melting ice fields in Patagonia.
They ascribed changes in 12 regions to natural variability, including a progression from a dry period to a wet period in the northern Great Plains, a drought in eastern Brazil and wetter periods in the Amazon and tropical West Africa. In 14 of the areas -- more than 40 percent of the hotspots -- the scientists associated the water shifts partially or largely with human activity. That included groundwater depletion combined with drought in Southern California and the southern High Plains from Kansas to the Texas Panhandle, as well as in the northern Middle East, northern Africa, southern Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The first-of-its-kind study has been published in the journal Nature.
They ascribed changes in 12 regions to natural variability, including a progression from a dry period to a wet period in the northern Great Plains, a drought in eastern Brazil and wetter periods in the Amazon and tropical West Africa. In 14 of the areas -- more than 40 percent of the hotspots -- the scientists associated the water shifts partially or largely with human activity. That included groundwater depletion combined with drought in Southern California and the southern High Plains from Kansas to the Texas Panhandle, as well as in the northern Middle East, northern Africa, southern Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The first-of-its-kind study has been published in the journal Nature.
Intensive agriculture, water reservoirs, flood protection walls, hydroelectric plants, Three Gorges Dam, Aral Sea, etc. We are massively changing our environment since the dawn of civilisation, this is not surprising at all. A more interesting study would look into the impact these changes have on biodiversity and (micro-) climate.
Where all the problems originate from.
He can get one of his bodyguards to get him a bottle from the 1st class galley. No problemo.
NASA needs to justify it's existence. I really have major doubts about any of the shit they toss out as fact.
I say blame the dinosaurs; all that stomping around, and yuuuge appetites, tearing trees limb from limb. Now we're feeling their impact, and taking the blame?
Who the hell mods this garbage up? It's offtopic and there are far more useful things to discuss. For example, I live in Nebraska and these issues are relevant here. A lot of the state's water comes from the Ogallala Aquifer, and we are using it too rapidly. The groundwater is essential for agriculture from the Sandhills to the caprock in west Texas. Depleting the groundwater is causing subsidence of the land and surface streams are also drying up. With the exception of the Sandhills, it's very hard for precipitation to infiltrate all the way to the aquifer. Recharge is difficult, and we are using groundwater faster than it can be recharged. A lot of it is for irrigation and growing crops where they shouldn't be grown. I know that Nebraska is the Cornhusker State, but we just don't get enough rain to support growing corn in most of the state.
It's quite an important issue, and if you really must discuss politics, you can discuss water rights agreements and who really owns the water on your property. Kansas sued Nebraska over the streamflow in the Republican River. I believe it has changed, but at one point, it was illegal in Colorado to retain the rainwater that falls on your property, and that you don't really own the water. It's far more interesting than these rubbish posts about Trump and Hillary, and you can even still argue about politics if you want.
Just look at California, there was never much water and what is there gets mainly exported as vegetables, fruits, nuts, and wine. The rest is wasted on an insane number of golf courses.
Every time I read such an article, I find something glaringly missing. The elephant in the room. These kinds of stories always fail to mention what exactly do these environmentalist whackos offer, as a solution?
For all humans to kill themselves? Just to protect Mother Nature?
and the southern High Plains from Kansas to the Texas Panhandle
Q) Why is Kansas so windy?
A) Because Oklahoma sucks and Nebraska blows.
We have a shortage of available energy. Desalinating seawater is proven technology.
To quote a great woman - Mother nature is out of her league. We'll decide where the water goes thank you very much.
El Nino - hello?
Droughts and rainy stretches come and go. 14 years is a tick of the clock.
How can we move to the water crisis if we haven't even solved global warming?
Must be just for the votes.
The ingenuity of the free market will surely come up with an abundant alternative to water.
Take a look at an atlas. See how much we love to live near the sea? Those large cities radiate political force that draws in water from lakes and rivers thousands of miles inland, forcing inland populations to pump local groundwater.
If coastal cities would desalinate their own local water supplies, the lakes and rivers would now be available for use by those living inland.
What can we do about it?
You're gonna need alot more money to keep buying Canada's water.
Dam everywhere.... ;-P
It's an emergency! Quick, defund NASA!!
-Dave
It's amazing to see how often different environmental chicken littles clash.
How exactly does any of this affect the central Plains? There aren't large bodies of water near Kansas and Nebraska to make desalination viable. Waste water treatment works for population centers but won't help with agriculture. A lot of water is lost to evapotranspiration, which neither desalination nor waste water treatment will help with. One option is to reduce evapotranspiration by limiting irrigation, growing crops that require less water, and growing crops with lower transpiration rates. The issue with corn is that it requires a lot of water and has a high transpiration rate.
It is reasonable for the government to regulate a shared and limited resource like the Ogallala Aquifer. That's why states regulate the drilling of wells into ta the aquifer, to ensure it's used in a way that's beneficial to the public. Government regulation isn't inherently good or bad. The Colorado restrictions on rainwater collection seem absurd to me. Some of the issues we face are because water is allocated inefficiently. Government has a role, but regulations need to be thoughtful in order for them to be effective.
Regarding new technologies, water is somewhat scarce in the central Plains because it's a semi-arid region. A lot of the water comes from precipitation from overnight thunderstorms during the summer, snowmelt from the Rockies, and groundwater. The snowmelt is highly seasonal, which is why there is a dam on the Platte River and why Lake McConaughy exists as a reservoir.
We do have a lot of wind that can be used to generate electricity. I can envision using wind power to drive atmospheric water generators and pull the water out of the air during the summer. However, even this has potential consequences for water law. If done at a sufficiently large scale, areas downwind may experience lower humidity, which could affect the precipitation they receive, cause climate change, and limit the potential for those areas to also use atmospheric water generators. If Kansas implemented atmospheric water generators on a large scale, it could draw some water out of the air before reaching Nebraska. I could envision Nebraska suing Kansas over this, much the same way Kansas sued Nebraska over stream flow in the Republican River.
These are complex issues and cannot be addressed with the simple idea that the government is bad and the free market is good.
Dam it! Dam it! Dam it!
what do you think Mueller is working on?
California, for example, is likely fucking itself out of an agricultural future, if it keeps going the way it has been. Nobody wants to give them more water.
If nobody wants to eat fresh vegetables, that's fine, but this is where they are produced for a reason. Over 50% of the food we eat in the USA is produced in California. Those vast fields in the midwest mostly produce export crops, and corn for fuel ethanol which is grown continuously and with synthetic fertilizers that literally destroy topsoil and turn it into an inert hydroponic growth medium. California is the best place in the USA to produce vegetables, period, the end. Mexico is the next-best place nearby (it's actually too hot to grow a lot of things there) but then you have to pay more for shipping, and produce is picked even less ripe and gassed even more to ripen because it has to travel further. It also further restricts varieties, because some travel better than others.
But by all means, don't give California water. We'll give you back fifty dollar tomatoes.
That is only half the story, the other half of it is the stupidity of growing water intensive crops in places that get less then 5 inches of rain every year and irrigating these crops with ground water. Ground water is not an infinite resource, especially in relatively arid places like much of California is. There is a well known photo of Joseph Poland of the U.S. Geological Survey who used a telephone pole to demonstrate where a farmer would have been standing in 1925, 1955 and where Poland was then standing. By then the land in the San Joaquin Valley had sunk nearly 30 feet and this was in 1977. Since then much more water has been pumped out of the ground, apparently on the assumption that there is an infinite supply since California does not regulate ground water like surface water. All over the state people are finding themselves drilling hundreds and even thousands of feet for ground water and when they find it what they pump up are ground water deposits laid down 20.000 year ago when mastodons and sabre toothed cats still roamed the landscape. Land subsidence due to ground water depletion has caused sinking bridges, cracking canals and buckling highways, torn runways to name but a few problems and repairing them has cost the California taxpayer billions of dollars. This whole issue is about stupid water management and waste which is something that should be of particular interest to California farmers and it should be very much in their interest to support water management reform seeing as how their entire existence stands and falls with proper water management.
One of the ironies when people say "CO2 is plant food" is that this isn't particularly true for grass-derived staples (wheat, millet, barley, etc.) that are often relatively drought resistant, but is true of maize, which is not very drought resistant. Hence, there is a lot of work ongoing to splice maize genes into wheat to boost productivity on this side, and wheat genes into maize. There is often a weed to outcompete either, though, partly because crops are optimised for tasty bits, not overall growth.
Your fuckup is that you think people shouldn't share information unless they know everything. (And by everything, I don't even just mean objective facts, but they also have to know everyone's values and make the decision about how to weight different peoples' subjective opinions against each other.)
Let's say you suddenly noticed a new, big, weird-shaped mole on your arm. The next day, it's even bigger. The next day, even bigger.
A sane person would go see a doctor, the doctor would do a biopsy, and maybe the doctor would recommend a treatment. And a different doctor might recommend a different one.
But you would say "damn, I don't know how to treat it" and then maybe you would start researching how melanoma works, what to do about it, etc and after a decade or two of educating yourself, you would decide, "Ok, I'm going to cut it off. That's the solution." Keep it a secret until you've figured out how to solve it. (Spoiler: you're dead before you complete your plan.)
See the problem here? The information has value by itself, even without a solution. Someone else might be able to solve it. Anyone can try to solve it. Even the people who observed the information can later try to think up some solutions. But they do it in parallel with everyone else who now has the info. Sometimes the best "solution" is to share the information so that lots of people can work on a solution.
That's what you're missing. YOU obviously didn't know about the water problem, and yet you're able to think about what might you do about it, even though the researchers didn't already tell you what to do. You aren't required to be an obedient sheep.
Them not giving you a whole answer isn't the elephant in the room. Your bizarre expectation that people shouldn't share information without already knowing the best thing to do with the information, is the elephant in the room.
"Oh no, a bank robbery is happening. Quick, I need to run home and get my gun. WTF is that stupid person doing, calling the cops? They should have already told the robbers 'wait here', gone home, got their gun, come back, shot the robbers, and then called the cops."
In addition to that, you have an extra layer of elephant-sized stupidity. You really only want solutions from environmental wackos? Didn't you realize that you called them wackos in the same breath? Are you sure you wouldn't want a solution thought up by a non-wacko?
Anyway, my little snowflake, instead of demanding that someone else give you a solution on the very same day that you learned about a problem, like a freeloading hippie, maybe take some responsibility for yourself and your destiny. Get a job? Think? Put in some effort instead of just crying and whining that you want your parents to make the bad thing go away?
That's because everyone seems to be carrying around a bottle of water resulting in changes to the location of large amounts of water.
what do you think Mueller is working on?
Resume
Dark Reflection
We have a shortage of available energy. Desalinating seawater is proven technology.
But as the plume from Fukishima arrives on the west coast of North America, it will have to be RE proven - to show it can also adequately remove radioactive particles.
Especially long-lived isotopes and/or those that embed themselves in sensitive areas and processes (such as long-lived Strontium 90, which substitutes for calcium, embeds in bones, and irradiates the blood-making tissue that is normally protected by its surroundings, or short-lived radio iodine, which both produces birth defects and concentrates in the thyroid and provokes things like the auto-immune diseases Hashimoto's (where the gland is destroyed) or Graves (where the antibody triggers a receptor, turning thyroid hormone output full-on and provoking the thyroid to grow and produce still more).
Desalinazation probably can also remove such stuff. But it might require tweaks, and additional expense, to go to very low levels on these extra, problem, "salts".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The rest is wasted on an insane number of golf courses.
Actually, golf courses are going out of fashion and out of business (or just "closed" in the case of government-owned ones) in California.
Newer generations mostly aren't taking up golf and older ones are finding other things to do or just getting too old to enjoy it. Meanwhile the cost of water (for the horribly thirsty institutions) has skyrocketed and regulatory bodies are rejecting applications when misguided city councils or developers try to install one, rather than, say, parks with low-water landscaping) to fill their "open space" requirements.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm shocked that the issue of Global Wobbling hasn't been addressed!
If you move too much water from one spot to another, the earth will start wobbling. And anyone who's ridden a motorcycle knows that when you start wobbling, only bad things happen.
Stop Global Wobbling.
Tax Water!
Today: NASA scientists have found that humans have dramatically altered the location of water around the world.
Tomorrow: Trump removes NASA funding for the study of water location around the world.
Liet Kynes would be proud.
And yet, 100% of republican'ts declare Clinton guilty after being impeached.
Which only MEANS accused.
trump promised you cornhuskers the fucking moon and now he's fucking you over. How is that not more important? Do you live in those Sandhills cause that's where your head seems to be.