Peak Oil News and Message Boards

Yep. This puts the nail in the coffin on the idea that doom doesn't percolate up to the MSM. It does, but articles like these, as out front as they are, don't really move people. Even the rancher you're talking about, they just passively mutter about the situation and go right on doing what they've been doing.

The absence of clean abundant water is going to strike first in the countries that have long suffered from lack of good supply. 17% of the global population is Indian and it's here, once again, where we will see some of the worst impacts of depletion.

eugene wrote: we are facing the end and it's not some sin caused thing like the religious fanatics believe.

The 11th commandment: Thou shalt not breed and consume beyond the carrying capacity of your environment.

Will we one day call them fanatics if they claim this to be a sin?

It wont happen all at once. Aquifers will dry out at different rates and populations will contract through decades. Conservation will be ramped up. Heroic efforts to pipe in water from far distant places. There will be abandonment of vast geographic areas in the decades as populations die off or migrate away. These areas will lose their riparian habitat, areas where ground water is close to the surface. An arid ecosystem will dominate in the several hundred or thousands or in some cases hundreds of thousands of years that it will take these aquifers to recharge.

These ecosystems will cope with water as the limiting factor. Humans at current population numbers will recede.

As in climate change drying aquifers is another "solution" to human overshoot.

The one way we are demonstrating active mitigation and problem solving to our over population is in the way we continue to blindly proceed to suck hard on the straw of liquid resources, be it oil or water.

We suck real good.

This a regions set to boil over, pun intended. I imagine a new set of conflicts arising from here in the next few years.

India is already facing a water crisis—and it is only going to get worse

Water scarcity has begun early in India. Corporations and farmers have been guzzling surface water, groundwater levels have been reducing, and the amount of pollutants in water is increasingly rapidly, according to a new report by the World Resources Institute.
http://qz.com/353707/india-is-already-f ... get-worse/

According to "Market Forces Theory", if we run out of water, we can substitute Brawndo, the thirst mutilator.

pstarr wrote:Let's be very clear with our hysteria. It is not our numbers that will be culled by the coming apocalypse. We comfortable Americans are safe in the New World with water, arable land, and entire ecosystems that will adjust to peak oil and AGW. We will be inconvenienced but not disseminated like those in Asia, Africa and Europe.

Time to bring the troops back home then. No need to plunder other nations thousands of miles away anymore. Station all of that multi-trillion dollar hardware on US borders, and keep the disseminated out. Cause we all know they're just itching to get at all of those untapped resources.

pstarr wrote:That's a plan Greg. The ME lacks arable land, water but has oil. Europe has arable land, water but no oil. Maybe they can work out an arrangement. Without the US.

Sadly pstarr,

The more oil that we burn, the less water and arable land will be available, and the larger our populations will grow. Seems to me that the real problem lies in the very thing that the US has been invading other nations for. But of course the US doesn't rely on oil for either food production or water security, and has plenty of natural, arable land.

So why not stop spending trillions of dollars on wars, and further un-repayable debt?

Tanada,

"...the Hopi civilization of the Southwest USA..."

You're referring to either the Hohokam or the Anasazi. The Hohokam are the ones who depended on irrigation as well as controlled slope runoff.

The Hopi are doing fine.

Synapsid wrote:Tanada,

"...the Hopi civilization of the Southwest USA..."

You're referring to either the Hohokam or the Anasazi. The Hohokam are the ones who depended on irrigation as well as controlled slope runoff.

The Hopi are doing fine.

Actually it was the Anasazi, back in 2005 I toured Longhouse Valley ruins in Arizona with a US Park Ranger giving the lecture as we wandered around the site. I didn't look up the name before my earlier message and my memory was mixed up, but the point I was attempting to make remains the same.

I think people mean 'decimated' where they are using 'disseminated,' but perhaps I'm missing something.

This is a crucial crisis that is right up there with nuclear war, GW and peak oil as threats to humans and to human civilization. Arguably worse than PO, since people have lived without oil through the vast majority of our time here on the planet, but no human has ever lived very long without water.

One thing that this points to is the need to not waste water on luxuries and stupidities.

Of course, different people will have different ideas of what these are. The first that comes to my mind is corn-based ethanol--a huge water suck.

Those of you who have been on these threads for more than a couple minutes will not be surprised that I would say that this is also another reason to avoid a high-meat diet--corn-finished beef is arguably the worst culprit in this area, but even grass feed require vast amounts of water per pound of steak or hamburger.

But I'm open to other peoples insights on how we waste water. I'll just kick in also that pretty much any kind of lawn or non-native grass is stupid and wasteful, as is using potable water to flush sh!t down the toilet.

Tanada,

That's my favorite part of the country, the northern Navajo lands.

eugene wrote: And the energy to run their equipment. Name of the game, we are facing the end and it's not some sin caused thing like the religious fanatics believe.

So you think it's some kind of mistake on a chessboard, or a slip up on a banana peel ?

dohboi wrote:
But I'm open to other peoples insights on how we waste water. I'll just kick in also that pretty much any kind of lawn or non-native grass is stupid and wasteful, as is using potable water to flush sh!t down the toilet.

We have guests from California. They take fast showers and wash the dishes with minimal water. All of their landscaping back at home is now xero scaping. Here we have abundant water and we do not need to practice this level of discipline. These folks are so conditioned that they keep right on treating water here like a precious valuable resource.

It didn't take that many drought years to instill this kind of discipline. It can be just as quickly unwound if abundant rains return even if abundant rains do not recharge an aquifer that took hundreds of thousands of years to form.

It is however encouraging to see conservation really practiced as these Californians demonstrate here.

It will take much more precious water from aquifers to irrigate crops in the future, then it has before, as evaporation also increases.

Ibon wrote:

dohboi wrote:
But I'm open to other peoples insights on how we waste water. I'll just kick in also that pretty much any kind of lawn or non-native grass is stupid and wasteful, as is using potable water to flush sh!t down the toilet.

We have guests from California. They take fast showers and wash the dishes with minimal water. All of their landscaping back at home is now xero scaping. Here we have abundant water and we do not need to practice this level of discipline. These folks are so conditioned that they keep right on treating water here like a precious valuable resource.

It didn't take that many drought years to instill this kind of discipline. It can be just as quickly unwound if abundant rains return even if abundant rains do not recharge an aquifer that took hundreds of thousands of years to form.

It is however encouraging to see conservation really practiced as these Californians demonstrate here.

Although I grew up in NJ we were on a well and poor. We could not afford a new well. Even back in the late 50’S there was the occasional drought, and we had aquifer depletion. Even then. Dad would tell me about the folks living on the barrier islands who, in his childhood, drew fresh water from the lens under the island, which was now gone, and they drew municipal water from deep wells. So I grew up aware.

Now on the boat, full tanks are 187 gallons, quite a lot really. We have a pressure shower head but seldom use it. Our water is drawn from the tanks with a foot pump. About an ounce a squirt.

I think growing up aware is one of the reasons I feel more comfortable on the boat. We are used to conservation. My Wife has her own stories of growing up in post WWII Germany. But also that I feel very uncomfortable in California or desert areas.