The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [45]
Within days of the Iowa floods, heavy rains also struck eastern India and China, killing sixty-five people and displacing five hundred thousand in India. In China, floods in Guangdong and Guangxi Zhuang, Sansui City, and the Pearl River delta killed 176 and displaced 1.6 million. While America’s eyes were fixed on Sarah Palin, hydrologist Bob Brakenridge at Dartmouth was watching floods from space, using satellites to track them all over the world.195 In the ten months between Barack Obama’s winning the Iowa caucuses on January 3, and the general election on November 4, Brakenridge documented 145 major floods carving destruction around the planet. As Barack Obama took down first Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, those rivers took down lives and property from Taiwan to Togo. They killed almost five thousand people and washed seventeen million more from their homes.
Our Most Necessary Resource
It’s hard to imagine anything humans need more than freshwater. If it were to all somehow vanish, the human race would be extinct in a matter of days. If it stopped flowing to our animals and fields, we would starve. If it became unclean, we would become sick or even die. Our societies need water in proper quantity, quality, and timing to preserve civilization as we know it. Too little, or at the wrong time of year, and our food dies off and industries fail. Too much, and our fields dissolve and people drown. For the past ten thousand years the very existence of permanent human settlements has depended upon having a consistent, dependable supply of usable water.
What does the future hold? Are we running low on water, as we must ultimately run low on oil? In the past fifty years we’ve doubled our irrigated cropland and tripled our water consumption to meet global food demand. In the next fifty, we must double food production again.196 Is there really enough water to pull that off?
In his book When the Rivers Run Dry environmental journalist Fred Pearce describes in vivid, firsthand detail the stark reality of impending water crises in more than thirty countries around the globe. We now withdraw so much water that many of our mightiest and most historic rivers—like the Nile, the Colorado, the Yellow, the Indus—have barely a trickle left to meet the sea.
The good news is that, unlike oil, which is ultimately finite, water is endlessly returned to us by the hydrologic cycle. Except for fossil groundwater, there is no such thing as “Peak Water” in the same sense as “Peak Oil.” It always comes back—somewhere—as rain or snow. It may be too much, or too little, or come at the wrong time, but it does come back. The bad news is that in addition to the aforementioned problems of too much, too little, or bad timing, our water sources can also become polluted. Finally, while it’s true that there is plenty of water circulating out there someplace, nearly all of it is useless to us.
The Russian hydrologist Igor Alexander Shiklomanov estimates that almost 97% of the world’s water is salty ocean, unfit for drinking or irrigation; 1% is salty groundwater, again useless. Of the 2.5% or so that is fresh, most would be salty if not for the glaciers of Antarctica, Greenland, and mountains that hold it up on land in the form of ice, rather than letting it run off into the ocean. Fresh groundwater holds about three-quarters of 1%. The minuscule remainder—about eight one-thousandths of 1%—is held in all the world’s lakes, wetlands, and rivers combined. Our atmosphere’s clouds, vapor, and rain hold even less, just one ten-thousandth of 1% of all water on Earth. 197
There are three points to be taken from Shiklomanov’s numbers. The first is that the most important sources of water for people and terrestrial ecosystems—rivers, lakes, and rain—are actually fleetingly rare forms of H2O. If all the water in the world was a thousand-dollar bill, these sources would