Climate change & Water in the US

[awakening2lite]

Water, Water Sometimes, and It's Dirty: Climate Change and the U.S. Drinking Supply

EXCERPT

In all regions, rains will fall less frequently and more intensely. Reservoirs will stagnate and evaporate between storms; then, when it rains, floods will produce sewage overflows that overwhelm treatment centers and lead to widespread water contamination by disease-causing bacteria.


More at source: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/water-water-som.html

[awakening2lite]

EXCERPT

Gray water is water that has been captured from the shower, the tub, the bathroom sink or the laundry — not the toilet.

Those facilities account for more than half the water used inside the home, and, in these thirsty times, homeowners and civic leaders have been eyeing gray water as an untapped resource.

More at source: http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2007/12/18/graywater_1218.html

http://img.coxnewsweb.com/B/04/97/39/image_6339974.jpg

===
although the article reports this is not a weekend project, it is a big way of being a part of the solution.

[awakening2lite]

Climate change may dry up US water source

2/14/08\

LOS ANGELES: Man-made factors, including climate change, could dry up a key source of water for millions of Americans living in southwestern United States.

Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, have predicted that there is a 50 per cent chance that Lake Mead, a key source of water for millions of people in the southwestern United States, will be dry by 2021 if climate changes as expected and future water usage is not curtailed.

Aqueducts carry the water to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other communities in the Southwest United States.

Without Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the Colorado river system has no buffer to sustain the population of the Southwest United States through an unusually dry year.

In such an event, water deliveries would become highly unstable and variable, said research marine physicist Tim Barnett and climate scientist David Pierce.

Analysis by Barnett and Pierce concluded that the Colorado River system could run dry even if mitigation measures now being proposed are implemented.

"Make no mistake, this water problem is not a scientific abstraction, but rather one that will impact each and every one of us that live in the Southwest, said Barnett.

"It is likely to mean real changes to how we live and do business in this region," Pierce added.

Currently the system is only at half capacity because of a recent string of dry years, and the team estimates that the system has already entered an era of deficit.

The researchers estimated that there is a 50 per cent chance that reservoir levels will drop too low to allow hydroelectric power generation by 2017, the ScienceDaily online reported.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Climate_change_may_dry_up_US_water_source/articleshow/2782192.cms

[awakening2lite]

Will dams again rise across the West?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23437167

Environmentalists urge conservation instead, but some officials weigh idea

http://msnbcmedia4.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photo_StoryLevel/080303/080303-dams-hmed10a.hmedium.jpg
The Grand Coulee Dam, about 70 miles west of Spokane, Wash., was one of the huge dams built by the federal government during the dam-building binge from the 1920s to the 1960s.

SPOKANE, Wash. - The Western states’ era of massive dam construction — which tamed rivers, swallowed towns, and created irrigated agriculture, cheap hydropower and environmental problems — effectively ended in 1966 with the completion of Glen Canyon Dam.

But the region’s booming population and growing fears about climate change have governments once again studying construction of dams to capture more winter rain and spring snowmelt for use in dry summer months.

“The West and the Northwest are increasing in population growth like never before,” said John Redding, regional spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in Boise. “How do you quench the thirst of the hungry masses?”

The population of the Western states grew nearly 20 percent in the 1990s, to more than 64 million, and continues to swell even as climate change poses new threats to the water supply.

Ironically, consideration of new dams comes even as older ones are being torn down across the country because of environmental concerns — worries that will likely pose big obstacles to new construction. In Oregon, a deal has been struck to remove four dams on the Klamath River to restore struggling salmon runs.

There are lots of other ideas for increasing water supplies in the West. They include conservation, storing water in natural underground aquifers, pipelines to carry water from the mountains, desalination plants to make drinking water from the ocean, small dams to serve local areas.

Most of those ideas are much more popular than big new dams.

Washington’s Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire put together a coalition of business, government and environmental groups to create the Columbia River Management Plan, which calls for spending $200 million to study various proposals for finding more water for arid eastern Washington.

Smaller dams on tributaries?
Jay Manning, director of the Washington state Department of Ecology, believes that huge new dams on the main stems of rivers are unlikely. But it is quite possible that tributaries will be dammed.

“It is inevitable we will take steps to increase water supply,” Manning said. “Storage is part of that solution.”

With demand for water already high, pressure is being increased by fears that climate change will produce rain instead of snow in winter, reducing the slow-melting snowpack that provides water in dry summer months.

Gregoire’s plan drew the support of many environmentalists by including many ideas they prefer, including conservation measures and metering more uses of water.

But the state also is studying dams, drawing opposition from some environmentalists, particularly a group called the Center for Environmental Law and Policy.

“Our water future doesn’t lie with new dams,” said Dr. John Osborn, a Spokane physician and chairman of the Sierra Club chapter in Spokane. “It’s water conservation.”

Osborn contends dam boosters are pushing for new dams to benefit business, underplaying the costs and environmental destruction and ignoring the benefits of improving conservation.

In other states:

Four major water storage projects are being studied in California, including a proposal for a new dam on the San Joaquin River, said Sue McClurg, of the Water Education Foundation in Sacramento. Republicans in the California Assembly say they will block any plan to improve water supplies that doesn’t include new dams.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which serves Las Vegas, is considering a reservoir to capture more Colorado River water before it flows into Mexico.
In Colorado, there is a proposal to create two new reservoirs on the Yampa River.
Some in Idaho still hope to rebuild the Teton Dam, which collapsed in 1976, killing 11 people.
A major barrier to new dams is cost, which runs into the billions, Manning said. It’s uncertain how much the federal government would be willing to pay.

$6.7 billion estimate for one dam
A recent study of the Black Rock dam proposal in the Yakima River basin concludes the 600-foot-high dam would cost $6.7 billion to build and operate, and would return just 16 cents for every dollar spent.

The explosive growth of the West is in part a product of a binge in dam construction that provided plentiful water and cheap electricity. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built more than 472 dams, including Shasta in California, Bonneville on the Oregon-Washington state line, Fort Peck Dam in Montana and Grand Coulee Dam in Washington.

But the era of giant dams essentially ended with the Glen Canyon Dam, just upstream from the Grand Canyon on the Arizona-Utah state line, which galvanized the environmental movement because its Lake Powell inundated a huge swath of scenic land, archaeological sites and places important to native Americans.

Lake Powell and its downstream cousin, Lake Mead — two of the nation’s largest manmade reservoirs — provide water for millions of people in Nevada, Arizona and California.

However, both lakes are only half full after years of drought, and researchers at San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography figure climate change and growing demand could drain them within just 13 years.

[Ross]

Close Las Vegas & see how much water would be saved.

[awakening2lite]

Study: Global Warming Could Change Lake Tahoe Within 10 Years
March 26, 2008 8:44 a.m. EST



Cecilia Arceo - AHN

Reno, NV (AHN) - The clear water of popular California tourist spot Lake Tahoe could turn green in a decade as global warming increases algae growth, a study predicts. Phosphorous that is now currently locked in the sediment on the bottom of the lake, could spur the algae.

The new findings were revealed March 18 at a Tahoe scientific conference by three lake experts from the Tahoe Environmental Research Center at UC Davis -- Director Geoffrey Schladow, Associate Director John Reuter and postdoctoral researcher Goloka Sahoo.

At present, the Lake Tahoe water at 1,644 feet deep mixes every four years. Deep mixing produces nutrients from the bottom of the lake to the surface where the production of algae takes place. And it takes oxygen from the surface and spread it throughout the lake that supports aquatic life.

The study showed that if the global greenhouse-gas emissions continue, mixing could become less frequent and less deep, it may even stop as soon as 2019.

source: http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7010444158

[awakening2lite]

ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2002) — Large riverside cities like Portland, St. Louis, Nashville and New Orleans should look beyond road traffic to an important but usually overlooked source of air pollution — river traffic.

Commercial marine traffic on rivers emits substantial pollution, according to a study reported in the March 15 issue of Environmental Science and Technology, a peer-reviewed publication of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society. The pollutants include nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter and sulfur oxides.
Around riverside cities, nitrogen oxide pollution from shipping can equal that from a major freeway full of traffic, according to James J. Corbett, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Delaware's College of Marine Studies, Newark, who conducted the study.
Corbett’s findings are based on a detailed inventory of air emissions from commercial vessels — such as ships, tugs and towboats — in the Northwest United States. The results suggest the importance of boat and ship emissions in many regions of the country, he says.
The inventory is the first to detail the type of geographically detailed estimates that modelers need to determine how boat and ship emissions affect regional air quality, according to Corbett.
Corbett, a former U.S. Merchant Marine engineering officer, combined analyses of engine operations with trade data about the tons of cargo and vessel movements over specific segments of the major rivers in the Pacific Northwest to come up with his estimates.
The study was commissioned to find out if ship and boat emissions contribute to haze that occurs in the federally designated Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area in Washington and Oregon states, says Michael Boyer, an environmental scientist with the Washington Department of Ecology in Olympia, Wash., which helped fund the study.
“In the past all we had were rough estimates of marine vessel emissions and we couldn’t specify where the pollution occurred,” Boyer says. “This study means that we will be able to pin down the effects of ship emissions.”
Two years ago, Corbett inventoried national emissions from commercial waterborne vessels and found emissions were double previous estimates. His research showed that, as a source of nitrogen oxides for the entire country, unregulated waterborne commerce ranks higher than many regulated industries, including metals processing, petroleum industries and chemical manufacturing.
Waterborne commerce transportation is an essential element of the U.S. transportation infrastructure that often seems invisible to the U.S. public, according to Corbett. Ships and boats that carry very large loads for very long distances move between 22 percent and 24 percent of U.S cargo, measured in ton miles — comparable to truck transportation, which accounts for 25 percent to 29 percent, he said. Waterborne transportation can also be one of the most energy-efficient ways to move cargo, using about one-tenth of the energy consumed by the U.S. trucking industry, Corbett added.



http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/03/020325081135.htm