From HuffPo yesterday:
NUKUS, Uzbekistan -- The drying up of the Aral Sea is one of the planet's most shocking disasters, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday, as he urged Central Asian leaders to step up efforts to solve the problem.
(snip)
The shrunken sea has ruined the once-robust fishing economy and left fishing trawlers stranded in sandy wastelands, leaning over as if they dropped from the air. The sea's evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles.
We forgive the editors as HuffPo for this unfortunate yet hopefully intended pun:
Competition for water could become increasingly heated as global warming and rising populations further reduce the amount of water available per capita.
The Aral Sea:
Once the world's fourth-largest inland saline body of water, with an area of 68,000 km2, the Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet Union irrigation projects. By 2007 it had declined to 10% of its original size
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The first video gives a concise graphic depiction of the reality, rendering the rest of the diary superfluous to a degree:
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This video by Simon Reeve, titled "Camels and rusting ships on the bed of the Aral Sea", was voted the best by HuffPo readers. It shows the surreal scapes of abandoned ocean liners suddenly land-locked by the unforeseen effects of human hubris. Is this a modern-day Easter Island?
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The final video, from Live Earth, goes into greater detail, causing the viewer to shake his head in disgust, at very least. The are behind an event called The Run for Water that takes place in 2 weeks.
... a series of 6 km run/walks (the average distance many women and children walk every day to secure water) taking place over the course of 24 hours in countries around the world, featuring concerts and water education activities aimed at igniting a tipping point to help solve the water crisis.
The superlatively hot Jessica Biel at Dow Live Earth Run for Water Announcement. She is the cause of a global warming of a totally different kind, if you know what I mean.
Dust from the Aral Sea has been found as far away as the South Pole, in the blood of penguins.
Respiratory disease account for almost 1/2 of all child deaths.
This is regional climate change. Waters from the Aral used to warm icy winds from Siberia and reduce the summer heat. Now, summers are hotter, drier, and shorter. Winters are longer and colder.
Note:
The remainder below is a re-post from a recommended diary posted on X-mas day that also mentioned the Aral Sea disaster. More than one person requested I re-publish in the future when people aren't distracted by a comically-dressed fat man.
Where nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow.
The only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears.
- Do they know it's Christmas?
Warming sounds nice.
Ya know, warm & fuzzy, a glass of warm milk, a warm-hearted person, etc.
But the gruesome truth of climate change is this: Our planet's supply of fresh water is disappearing.
Weather patterns differ from region to region. But what lies beneath is the terrifying reality that more often than not, erratic weather cycles are causing weaker rainfall & hotter heatwaves that sap the moisture from the earth.
Globally, desertification claims a Nebraska-sized area of productive capacity each year.
Desertification is the extreme deterioration of land in arid and dry sub-humid areas due to loss of vegetation and soil moisture; desertification results chiefly from man-made activities and influenced by climatic variations. It is principally caused by overgrazing, overdrafting of groundwater and diversion of water from rivers for human consumption and industrial use, all of these processes fundamentally driven by overpopulation.
The United Nations has of course known this was a huge problem for decades. But have they made headway in addressing the cause? Not so much:
Unfortunately, despite this and other efforts, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) concluded in 1991 that the problem of land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas had intensified, although there were "local examples of success ".
As a result, the question of how to tackle desertification was still a major concern for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), which was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
We have already seen 600 Mongolian rivers & 700 lakes disappear due to erratic rainfall.
That's just in Mongolia.
In India, even the wettest place on Earth is drying up. Quickly.
Once the world's wettest places, Cherrapunji is getting up to 20% less rain every year - and is suffering water shortages.
Residents say their heavenly abode in the clouds is hotter and drier than ever before - and they blame it on global warming.
(snip)
"We never cut a branch in these sacred forests. So you cannot say this adverse weather change is our creation. We are affected by what's happening all over the world," he told the BBC.
"This hot weather and less rain here is not due to huge deforestation or massive industrialisation"
Lake Chad
In the 1960s it had an area of more than 26,000 km², making it the fourth largest lake in Africa. By 2000 its extent had fallen to less than 1,500 km². This is due to reduced rainfall combined with greatly increased amounts of irrigation water being drawn from the lake and the rivers which feed it, the largest being the Chari/Logone system, which originates in the mountains of the Central African Republic. It seems likely that the lake will shrink further and perhaps even disappear altogether in the course of the 21st century
In addition to humanity's unquenchable desire for fossil fuels is another thirst for a limited, vanishing resource, fossil water, "sometimes referred to as water mining because it is a non-renewable resource." The ever-growing populations worldwide have led to agricultural projects in places never before imagined like this one in Saudi Arabia.
The light areas represent previous crop circles which have had to be abandoned because the groundwater once used to irrigate them had literally dried up.
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And is this growing and rapidly increasing threat merely an issue in poor and developing countries? Hardly:
April 1, 2008 - March 31, 2009 precipitation anomalies (click for larger image)
Southern California is rapidly turning into a desert that will lack the water to support most of the birds and people that live there now.
In one fell swoop, the changes in bird habitats and behavior between now and 2070 will equal the evolutionary and adaptive shifts that normally occur over tens of thousands of years, according to researchers with PRBO, also known as the Point Reyes Bird Observatory.
h/t FishOutofWater
Exurban sprawl into the warmest, driest places in the country has exacerbated the problem.
This overhead view of a typical 21st century Las Vegas McMansion tract home neighborhood says it all.
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There is no known cure for this kind of tract infection.
Pavement is forever.
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The recent COP15 accord is woefully inadequate to reverse the scorching of the planet that is causing record droughts everywhere you look.
President Obama's presence in Copenhagen definitely helped to get a deal done. We can at least be proud of the fact the there has been a modicum of progress. What are the odds President Bush would have signed this agreement? Not a snowball's chance in Vegas.
Less yakking, more hacking |
INTO ACTION:
Action is required to continue this momentum. There are Republicans who believethat global warming is a real threat and want "to do something about it." Who knew? Bringing them into the fold to support bipartisan (shudder) efforts would be a shrewd move. Heck, when was the last time any of us actually tried constructively engaging a member of the GOP? Maybe we'll end up getting another Specter-esque conversion for out efforts!
Every day is Earth Arbor Day
Who here has heard of The Green Wall of China?
The country's top legislative body, the National People's Congress (NPC), passed a resolution in 1981 to make it the duty of all citizens above the age of 11 to plant trees annually. China claims to have planted 2.31 billion trees in 2008 alone.
China has seen 1,390 miles2 of grassland overtaken every year by the Gobi Desert. Each year dust storms blow off as much as 900 square miles of topsoil and are increasing in severity each year. The storms destroy agriculture fields and cause massive problems to the cities, even other countries (Japan, North Korea, and South Korea). The Green Wall started in 1978 with the proposed end result of raising northern China’s forest cover from 5 to 15 percent and thereby reducing deserts.
But will such efforts be enough?
We do need to plant trees, to stabilise land and to provide timber and pulp. But this needs to be done as a complimentary measure to the clear priority of retaining the last natural forests.
Tree-planting, even on the grand scale of the Chinese approach, cannot get us out of the climate crunch, not least because we can never plant enough to offset industrial and transport emissions, and because we need the best land in any event to grow food.
The message is simple and clear: save the rainforests, and cut out fossil fuels. In both respects it is the rich industrialised countries that must take the lead.
Planting trees, lots of trees, is a very positive action you can take. But we all must do everything we can on every level possible to combat this accelerating drying of the most precious resource in the universe.
For the differently-abled and/or otherwise restricted:
Action websites:
International Year of Sanitation
Population Connection
Natural Resources Defense Council
Causes on Facebook to join.
Stop Global Warming
Plant With Purpose
Greenpeace International
Please add additional links to other websites/groups/causes in the comments.
Let's see if we can't make 2010 the year we finally turn things around for our children. Last time I checked, there is still no planet B.
Note:
Two of the above images are from the movie "Home", a powerful and wonderfully-shot film that is worthy of 90 minutes of your time.