Last week I had an offline discussion with "movie guy" who is a frequent commenter on economics blogs and sought me out for some one-on-one idea exchanges. He has a background in water resource management and has experience in working through disputes among states for water rights.
I followed up our conversation with this email:
Thought you might be interested in this article after our conversation the other day.What's the point? Very simple and very obvious: CO2 is not the problem; H2O is the problem. The growing human population is creating cities where desert or scrub land used to be. Rainfall always has been and always will be in short supply. Only so much water can be diverted from rivers to satisfy the water needs of these desert dwellers. The aquifers are being drained. Soon there will be demands to divert water from large inland lakes like the Great Lakes which would put those bodies of water in peril.
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070407 /METRO/704070370
You don't have to attribute changes to global warming to know that there are issues.
CO2 is a red herring for all sorts of causes. But just as CO2 is a small constituent of greenhouse gases compared with water vapor, CO2 is a small problem facing humanity when compared with clean, available water issues.
Yet governments around the world are preparing to spend billions... trillions... of dollars to contain CO2 and hardly anything to address the looming water problems facing this planet. The next time you travel to Las Vegas or Phoenix, ask yourself, "Where is the water coming from for this place?" Yup, that's the problem...
What can happen when water is mismanaged.
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