Global Water Shortage: Study Says Third of Aquifers Running Dry

Global Water Shortage: Study Says Third of Aquifers Running Dry

by KEITH WAGSTAFF

California isn't the only place where water is in short supply. More than a third of the world's groundwater basins are distressed, according to a new study, and climate change and a growing population will only make things worse.

Researchers from NASA, the University of California, Irvine, and other institutions analyzed satellite data and found that eight out of 37 of Earth's largest aquifers were "overstressed" or "extremly or highly stressed," meaning they had no natural replenishment or very little, respectively.

The most overstressed groundwater supply in the world: the Arabian Aquifer System, which provides water for 60 million people. The second and third most-stressed aquifers were located in Pakistan and northern Africa.

The study was published Tuesday in the journal Water Resources Research.

Related: Global Drought Threatens Water, Food Supplies. Get Used to It.

"What happens when a highly stressed aquifer is located in a region with socioeconomic or political tensions that can't supplement declining water supplies fast enough?" asked Alexandra Richey, the UCI researcher who led the study. "We're trying to raise red flags now to pinpoint where active management today could protect future lives and livelihoods."

Richey led a companion study published in the same journal that found that while researchers could tell if aquifers were stressed, judging exactly how much water remains in them is extremely difficult, with estimates ranging from decades to thousands of years.

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/envir...stress-n376511

The Water Shortage Myth
by Benjamin Radford, Live Science Contributor |
June 23, 2008

The two main environmental news stories of the past year or so have been the twin impending disasters of global warming and water shortages. There is a scientific consensus that global warming is occurring, and many governments (including, belatedly, the Bush Administration) have taken steps to address the problem.
But the more pressing issue is water; people can live with global warming (and have been for some time), but people cannot live without water.
While drinking water is the most obvious need, everything around us takes water to produce, from food to telephones to tires. Not only is agriculture dependent on water [the U.S. Geological Survey estimates it takes about 1,300 gallons of water to grow a hamburger] but so is virtually every industry. Even energy production needs water, in hydroelectric dams and nuclear reactor cooling towers.
Demand soars
The barrage of news reports warn of a dire water shortage, and provide sobering statistics:

• The global demand for water has tripled over the last 50 years, while water tables are falling in many of the world's most populated countries, including the United States, China, and India.
• Many of the world's great rivers are a fraction of the size they once were, and some have dried up completely.
• Earth's lakes are vanishing at an alarming rate; the Aral Sea, for example, is less than a quarter its original size. Nevada's Lake Mead is half its original capacity; a recent study concluded that there is a 50/50 chance that the lake will be gone in less than fifteen years.

It's true that there is cause for alarm, but to understand the problem people need to read behind the headlines to understand one little fact: There is no water shortage.
Our planet is not running out of water, nor is it losing water. There's about 360 quintillion gallons of water on the planet, and it's not going anywhere except in a circle. Earth's hydrologic cycle is a closed system, and the process is as old as time: evaporation, condensation, precipitation, infiltration, and so on. In fact, there is probably more liquid water on Earth than there was just a few decades ago, due in part to global warming and melting polar ice caps.
The problems
No, there is plenty of water. The problem is that the vast majority of Earth's water is contained in the oceans as saltwater, and must bedesalinated before it can be used for drinking or farming.
Large-scale desalination can be done, but it is expensive.
But nor is the world running out of freshwater, either. There's plenty of freshwater on our blue globe; it is not raining any less these days than it did millennia ago. As with any other resource, there are of course regional shortages, and they are getting worse. But the real problems are availability and transport; moving the freshwater from where it is plentiful (such as Canada, South America, and Russia) to where it is scarce (such as the Middle East, India, and Africa). Water is heavy and costly to transport, and those who can afford it will always have water.
Water, not global warming, is likely to be the greatest environmental challenge facing the world in the coming decades and centuries.
To find solutions, it's important to understand the problem. Water is never really "wasted." It simply moves from one place to another. If you let your faucet drip all day, that's clean water going back into the system, the water isn't "lost." What is lost is usefulness, money, and energy, because it takes energy to purify and distribute the water.
Water conservation is very important, but not because there is a shortage of water; it is the ultimate renewable resource. As with any resource, the issue is getting it to those who need it.

http://www.livescience.com/2639-wate...tage-myth.html

WATER MEETING-Water Crisis HOAX Exposed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo3Xq_XYGoU

Published on Apr 25, 2015
WATER MEETING - Water Crisis HOAX - EXPOSED . . .
Water Meeting 04/06/2015
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Who’s profiting from the water crisis?

5 30
ISSUE 452
Big business sees water scarcity as a money making opportunity. Joyce Nelson uncovers the dodgy dealings of the Aqueduct Alliance.

In January 2010, investment banker Goldman Sachs, along with General Electric and a high-powered Washington thinktank called the World Resources Institute (WRI), announced the launch of a new index measuring water-related risks facing companies and their investors.

In the words of their corporate news release: ‘In many regions around the world, water scarcity from climate change and pollution is starting to impact a company’s performance, yet few analysts account for water-related risks.’

http://newint.org/features/2012/05/28/452_54_water.jpg
Thirsty work: a man pours water from a stream into his paddy field. Excessive irrigation has caused groundwater levels in north India to drop dramatically. Anupam Nath / AP / Press Association Images

This new water index would ‘draw on publicly available data regarding physical scarcity and water quality and overlay factors including the regulatory regime and social and reputational issues’ in various regions of the world.

Business jargon aside, if you think this will be a useful tool for corporations, you’d be right. In fact, the risk-index might more accurately be called an ‘opportunity-index’ for water speculators and investors.

Next year the water privatization market worldwide is expected to reach $1 trillion. As Goldman Sachs puts it, ‘There is no substitute for water. It is the only utility you ingest.’ According to Maude Barlow, a leading Canadian critic of water privatization, ‘The biggest water company of all is General Electric.’

By August 2011, Goldman Sachs, General Electric and WRI had not only found a name for their partnership – the Aqueduct Alliance – they had also developed the index into a water database and mapping tool, which can include the amount of infrastructure investment taking place in a given region.

‘If you play it right,’ says the advisor, ‘the results of this impending water crisis can be very good’

Moreover, they had put an ‘environmental’ spin on the project, claiming that it will help corporations, governments and stakeholders become more aware of their ‘water footprint’ and thus make more ‘sustainable’ decisions.
That same month the original threesome – Goldman Sachs, General Electric and WRI – invited into the Aqueduct Alliance some new corporate partners: Coca-Cola, Talisman Energy, Dow Chemical, United Technologies and the financial/news conglomerate, Bloomberg LP.

The WRI’s Kirsty Jenkinson told the Financial Times (FT): ‘Companies see the need to get better visibility about water if they are going to have to access it for their business.’ With the new water database, ‘they can see if they are at risk of not getting the water they need, or coming into conflict with other users of that water’.

Presumably, the potential for ‘conflict’ is what attracted United Technologies to join the Aqueduct Alliance. UT is the world’s 10th largest arms-producing company with sales of $11.1 billion in 2009.

Mired in controversy

Coca-Cola has handed over to the Alliance its own proprietary data on freshwater availability worldwide – data collected over years of research for its bottling enterprises. ‘Water is the lifeblood of our business,’ Coke spokesperson Joe Rozza told the FT. The Atlanta-based company has hundreds of bottling-franchises worldwide, many of them mired in controversy. In India and Latin America, Coca-Cola has regularly faced irate local communities who are losing their drinking and irrigation water to Coke’s local bottlers.

In January this year, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported that Coca-Cola is under fire for propping up Mswati III of Swaziland, one of Africa’s most notorious dictators. Poverty is endemic, political parties are banned and activists are regularly imprisoned and tortured in the country.

Another Aqueduct Alliance partner is Talisman Energy, a Canadian natural gas company based in Calgary, Alberta. ‘We are very excited to have been asked to become the oil and gas sector sponsor for the Aqueduct Alliance,’ Talisman spokesperson Sandy Stash told Marketwire. ‘Talisman aspires to a water management strategy that defines best practices for water withdrawal, reuse, disposal and conservation in our North American shale gas operations.’

Just weeks earlier, in July 2011, the government of British Columbia (BC) awarded Talisman a licence to divert up to 10,000 cubic metres of water per day from the province’s major hydroelectric reservoir for the next 20 years. Talisman uses the water to ‘frack’ for shale gas in northeastern BC. The company has also secured access to 6,200 square kilometres of shale gas deposits along Quebec’s St Lawrence River.

$1 trillion - The value that the global water privatization market is expected to reach next year.

The Aqueduct Alliance intends to generate databases and water-maps with ‘an unprecedented level of detail and resolution’, including advanced hydrological data and ‘geographically specific indicators that capture the social, economic and governance factors that affect companies and economies’. The databases will include up-to-date regional news coverage on water issues.
By September 2011, the Aqueduct Alliance had developed a prototype database/map covering the Yellow River Basin in northern China. Water shortages in China are already so severe that more than half its cities are facing restrictions on water use.

In 2013 the Alliance intends to release four additional database/maps on river basins of ‘high priority’, including the 2,300-kilometre long Colorado River in the US which has experienced years of drought; the Orange-Sengu River in Africa which extends across Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa; the Yangtze River in China, where 10 million people were displaced by the Three Gorges Dam; and the Murray Darling River in Australia.

All are regions where water scarcity is enticing speculators to secure water-rights in a ‘buy-and-hold’ strategy. Their model is based on recent events in Australia.

In a short-sighted cash grab, the Australian government in the 1990s introduced a water market for the Murray Darling River Basin – one of the longest river systems in the world and the heart of Australia’s agricultural production. But in 2001 a major drought struck the Basin and within a few years the federal government in Canberra was forced to start buying back water from private owners.

‘Water is the lifeblood of our business,’ Coke spokesperson Joe Rozza told the FT

The price shot up. By 2009, so many speculators had targeted the Basin that some $3 billion in water-rights were bought and sold in that year alone. The government was forced to compete with international speculators, including giant hedge-funds.

By September 2010, the Australian government had spent at least $1.4 billion buying back water-rights. Although the drought eased that same year, the fact that the Aqueduct Alliance is now focusing on the Murray Darling Basin means that the risks and opportunities there are still ‘high priority’.

As one hedge-fund advisor quipped, an emerging worldwide water crisis is creating ‘serious profit opportunities for those in the know’. The Aqueduct Alliance database/ maps will show where those opportunities are located. Another 15 regions across the world will be analyzed once the Alliance has created its first four database/maps.

‘If you play it right,’ says the advisor, ‘the results of this impending water crisis can be very good.’

- See more at: http://newint.org/features/2012/05/0....hxMSthy5.dpuf

Water Crisis Hoax

Thu 8:50 am UTC, 9 Apr 2015 1posted by Jennifer
We Have the Peak Oil Myth; Now Peak Water, Too?

Peak water, like peak oil, is a myth. Primary water exists in abundance under the Earth’s crust.

Peak Water is the idea that, like peak oil, water is a limited resource that we are running out of. The water crisis occurring in California (and elsewhere) is a water crisis hoax in the sense that we are being conditioned to accept artificial scarcity as real scarcity. Artificial scarcity is an age-old trick used by merchants to suppress the supply of a resource or product in order to increase its price. This financial trick is especially noticeable in the oil industry (controlled by the usual New World Order elite families). The Rockefellers propagated the peak oil myth at the Geneva Convention in 1892. John D. Rockefeller used his paid scientists to contend that as oil is composed of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, it must be a residue from living matter, and thus it is a fossil fuel! Twisted logic indeed. The Russians discovered that oil was abiotic decades ago. Oil is normally drilled at 30,000 feet, whereas real fossils are normally not found below 16,000 feet; the whole thing is a scam. Now, new information brought forth by researcher Deborah Tavares of StoptheCrime.net suggests may well be looking at another fable – this time “peak water”.

Control Water, Control Life

Nefarious war criminal Henry Kissinger stated that to control nations, you control oil, and to control people, you control food. He might have added that to control Life itself, you control water, because there is barely any life on Earth as we know it that could survive without water. Many have predicted that the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water, not oil or other subterranean resources. There is good evidence that part of the reason Gaddafi was taken out was because he was so successful in constructing an amazing aquifer system to adequately hydrate the people of Libya. And, we know from researchers such as Dane Wigington that satellite images show geoengineering chemtrails all over California and its coasts. He theorizes the geoengineering of the Pacific is causing the Californian drought.

So, at one level of the game, water is a resource that is practically limited, and is already being fought over with powerful weapons, both admitted (military bombs and weapons) and mostly unadmitted (HAARP and geoengineering) ones. But what if this is all a cover? What if there is an unlimited supply of pure water that could easily be tapped that the Controllers are not telling us about?
peak-water-water-cycle

As this diagram shows, peak water is myth due to the existence of primary water from the Earth’s mantle.
Peak Water vs. Primary Water

The people at the Primary Water Institute say there is just such a thing – primary water. It’s the water just below the Earth’s crust, in the mantle. It is not the water you think of as ground water. It is not part of the normal hydrologic cycle of evaporation and condensation, which they classify as a secondary cycle. Listen as Deboarah Tavares interviews Paul Power who explains the concept of primary water. The illustration above also shows it. The existence of primary water clearly busts the idea of peak water, and shows that we are being lied to yet again by Big Government and the mainstream media about matters of vital importance to our lives.

What’s the Point of the Peak Water / Water Crisis Hoax?

The water crisis hoax fits right in to the UN Agenda 21 plan for global domination. By engineering a drought and pretending there are no viable solutions, the Controllers will drive people off their land and out of their homes in search of wetter areas. This facilitates a land grab and allows Government and corporations to seize more land (either for free or dirt cheap), and pressures people to move into big megalopolises where, in alignment with Agenda 21, they will have to live in shoebox-sized apartments – to save the environment, of course.

Meanwhile, by very real means such as a combination of HAARP and geoengineering, the Government is creating massive food shortages (since such a high percentage of many crops are grown in California), causing stress of lower and middle income individuals and families who are faced with rising food costs and potentially even a lack of food.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaPleXoK8E
drought-®-peak-water
freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/peak-oil-peak-water-crisis-hoax/

http://www.stopthecrime.net/primewater.html


http://tapnewswire.com/2015/04/water-crisis-hoax/

Global Water Going Fast: How Much Is Left?

JUN 17, 2015 08:48 AM ET // BY PATRICK J. KIGER

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The withdrawal of groundwater near Lucerne Lake (dry) in San Bernardino County, Calif., has caused the land to subside, leaving fissures on the landscape. Credit: USGS

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10WaystoCreateWaterasWorldFightsDrought

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UP NEXT
Amazing Sand Dunes Around The World: Photos

The recent reboot of the “Mad Max” movie franchise portrays an apocalyptic future in which civilization has collapsed and leather-clad crazies, who’ve apparently never heard of alternative energy, are battling over the supply of gasoline.

But judging from a pair of just-released scientific studies, the resource that we actually may be fighting over in the future is groundwater.

The new research, led by University of California, Irvine scientists, reveals that humans are rapidly draining water from about a third of the world’s biggest underground basins, or aquifers, more rapidly than they can naturally be replenished.

What If California Runs Out of Water?

Worse yet, we don’t have a clear idea how much water is left in those natural reservoirs, which in the U.S. alone supply drinking water to about half of the population and are a key source of water for the agricultural irrigation systems that help put food on our tables. That means we may well be in danger of running out, and not even realize it.

“Available physical and chemical measurements are simply insufficient,” UCI professor and principal investigator Jay Famiglietti, who is also the senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a press release. “Given how quickly we are consuming the world’s groundwater reserves, we need a coordinated global effort to determine how much is left.”

We’re already seeing the effects in California, which remains desperately parched due to a brutal extended drought.

Californians have been draining water so rapidly from underground aquifers that tens of thousands of square miles of land reportedly are sinking — so drastically that the shifting surface is starting to destroy bridges and crack highways across the state, according to a recent report by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

The two studies, which are being published in the journal Water Resources Research, represent the first effort to use satellite data to look at groundwater loss all over the planet.

The researchers utilized data collect by NASA’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites. The latter measure dips and bumps in the Earth’s gravity which are affected by the weight of groundwater.

Video: Water, Water Everywhere -- 400 Miles Inside Earth

The scientists examined the planet’s 37 biggest aquifers over a 10-year-period ending in 2013. Of those, eight were overstressed, with no natural replenishment to offset human use. Another five aquifers were extremely or highly stressed, meaning that even though they still had some water flowing into them, it wasn’t enough to maintain their water levels.

The most critically endangered water supply in the world was the Arabian Aquifer System, which supplies water to 60 million people in the Middle East. Next on the list was the Indus Basin aquifer of northwestern India and Pakistan, while the Murzuk-Djado Basin in northern Africa was third.

Other institutions that participated in the study included NASA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Taiwan University and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

http://news.discovery.com/earth/glob...t-15061717.htm

See all 154 articles »

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

The scientists examined the planet’s 37 biggest aquifers over a 10-year-period ending in 2013. Of those, eight were overstressed, with no natural replenishment to offset human use. Another five aquifers were extremely or highly stressed, meaning that even though they still had some water flowing into them, it wasn’t enough to maintain their water levels.

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We're going to have to rethink our preference for continual growth. It may help to remember that cancerous tumors also grow continually, but nobody says that that is a good thing.
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