JUMPING BACK IN

LAST WEEK'S ISSUE OF TIME had a very readable article on the problems of water use and availability ("Dying For A Drink"). The picture, from that article, is of Lake Mead. In 1995, when I was living in Arizona, this reservoir was full and now is nearing empty.
I have included the Web reference this in my most recent email to you. I also recommend three books:

Two are by Fred Pierce, a science writer, who has made quite a study of the matter,

"When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - the defining crisis of the Twenty-First Century", and " With Speed and Violence: Why scientists fear tipping points in climate change" (a more general examination of climate change).

The third is by Diane Raines Ward, "Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst". I particularly like this book as it gives a wonderful account of the great Snowy River Scheme in Australia, modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority but superior to it in many ways. As mentioned in a previous posting, there is quite a literature on this topic; these are the most recent I have been able to get from our local library system.

Of course, I will be amazed if you all read all of the above. At least check out the Time article. With all that is going on...the world economies in recession, dwindling savings, the venality of politicians, and worse than useless waging of wars...I hesitate to urge you to read more bad news. Here in the US, it is clear that the next President will have his hands more than full. What can we do as individuals, we might well wonder?

It is really hard to know. As an example, would I buy the new plug in Volt when it becomes available? Oh well, most of you know I am more likely to stay with my 1991 Infiniti G20 which (it at 293,000 miles and I at 71 years) bids fair to outlast me and be my last motor car! Going with the argument...this car will be a "plug in" which means that you can recharge is at night and not spend a cent on fuel so long as you do not exceed the 40 miles battery capacity. Sixty percent of driving in the US has to do with getting to work and back and many will not exceed the 40 miles per day this car promises. Charging up a night will suit the power utilities as this will be 'off peak' power, at least for a while until millions of cars are recharging at night. Wind power will help as more and more wind farms are commissioned, and assuming that the power transmission grids will have been enlarged to take this additional quantity of power.

But consider that burning coal is environmentally dirtier than burning gasoline and, for the foreseeable future, there is no such thing as 'clean coal'. Also, until vast improvements are made in efficiency of cooling at electrical power generating plants, it will take more water to produce that power than is involved in producing the gasoline for the same energy. If we follow T. Boone Pickens Plan, we will exchange natural gas for coal, for cars and for electrical generation as an intermediate step while alternate energy production is developed.

It looks like that what you loose on the roundabouts you pick up on the swings, as the saying goes.
I consider that totally 'plug in' cars will be a huge environmental miscalculation and maybe the Pickens Plan has a lot going for it. Running cars on compressed natural gas is certainly practical as Australia has shown (where you can fill up on liquefied natural gas at most service stations and where you can buy a new car converted to run on this fuel). Notice the link between the fuel you choose and the amount of water needed to produce that fuel. In the case of ethanol from corn that is about four gallons of water for one gallon of ethanol (not including the water needed to produce the fertilizer and the fuels for growing the corn).

Maybe we are learning the value of conservation and moderation. US motorists are driving less and driving more slowly (or were, until gasoline prices fell to current levels...I bought gas at $1.75 the other day). Consequently we are using less fuel overall and our 'persons per million miles killed' has fallen to the lowest rate in years. High efficiency lighting and slower better thought out driving can go a long way, it seems, in conserving energy. As to what to do about profligate water use, who knows what will bring us to our senses?

Last of all, two bons mots from famous Americans:
"When the well's dry we know the worth of water." -- Ben Franklin
"Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over." -- Mark Twain

A WEEK OF SNOW

THE SNOW CAME AND WENT AND THEN CAME AGAIN
This time, we got seven inches or so (that's about 18 cm). The heavy falls came over two days and we had about three inches late in the evening of the first day. I thought to myself, 'You should get out there and shovel that off the driveway while it is light and fluffy.' Of course, I did nothing of the sort and had to tackle four more inches sitting on top of the now heavy snow from the previous day. Never mind...nothing like a little snow shoveling at six in the morning! Ha...as I write this I am listening to the news from Portland where you are getting much the same.

For those of you who liked the Fall picture from the back deck, here is how it looks now. With the temperature down between 20 and 30 deg F, I have been thinking of skiing and have been at waxing skis off and on. As the snow persisted and stayed dry, I finally went down to the shed and got out my wider, back country skis and took a tour around the property.

Behold, cross country ski trails at Painted Post. Altogether, I managed to get about 200 yards of trails to ski about and those of you who might at one time have had a ski outing with me back in my days as a week end ski instructor might recall all that tramping about on skit to make skiable slopes might recognize this bit of work below.

I got about two days of skiing out of this. I took off to Pinnacle Peak Golf Course (Nine holes of skiing and tobogganing just now) this Sunday afternoon.
This is the highest point around here with great views all around but, alas, the snow was just damp enough to clump underfoot (well, underski, if you get my meaning). Lacking glide wax, I fairly soon gave it away.

With my trusty cell phone camera, I took a shot or two so you can get an idea of the conditions there.
There were about a dozen or so having fun on the slope below the clubhouse. No golf today!

Uma caught me at it in the back yard so Here I am...

OVER MY HEAD IN WATER...

I HAVE BEEN READING QUITE A BIT about what we are doing with all the water in the world. At a practical level, there has been a bit of snow clearing from the driveway and some shoving of snow from off my car. For now, the snow has gone away but the temperatures keep around freezing point. Yesterday (Monday) was an exception with the temperature rocketing to the mid-40s; I ventured out into the garden and even took Uma's scooter out for a spin around the block.

I suppose that one thing that retirees can do is to read lots of books that just happen to interest and then pass on some of that to others via a blog, which seems to be just what I am doing. I have been amazed at how much literature there is about our use of water. There seems to be so much to discover about this that I feel more than a little overwhelmed by it all.

About 200 years back, an English clergyman, Thomas Malthus, got worried about the relationship between population and food supplies. Dear Rev. Tom figured that, since food supplies increase linearly and populations increase exponentially, eventually there would be more people in the world than could be fed putting the human race into a precarious situation. I am sure he had no idea how may people would be on the face of the earth 200 years on. The Rev. Tom's ideas have been quite influential in several areas of science, economics, and population dynamics. He was a skeptic about the promised benefits of the looming industrial revolution and, while the grim conclusions arising from his analysis have been delayed in fulfillment, what with the industrialization of food production, the Green Revolution, and the like, it has taken until our own time for his ideas to have their full impact.

One of the 'and the like's has been the phenomenal increase in the use of irrigation in agriculture since his writing. Humans have been irrigating crops for thousands of years because water is like magic when it comes to increasing food production. It takes around 1,000 tons of water to produce a ton of wheat (and lots, lots more to produce a ton of corn) and, if you are relying on rainfall you get just one good crop per year. With irrigation we can produce wheat and other food even in the dessert, multiply yields many times over, and have two or even three crops each year from the same piece of land. So, if you can put 3,000 tons of water onto the ground you stand to get three tons of wheat where you would have only gotten one. Not bad, eh! Actually, completely astonishing!

The good old Brits got modern irrigation going in India about the time that Malthus was writing his stuff about how the world would one day run out of food enough to feed its growing population. Not content with just improving what the Indian farmers had been doing for thousands of year, the Brits build new canals, barrages and dams. When American engineers got wind of this, they got busy with irrigation during the settlement of the West. They learned to make even bigger dams than the Brits had managed to do and soon, using American methods, those Brits were doing the same all over their Empire and also in places like Egypt.

Today, 40% of food is produced through irrigation. Despite this being the Water Planet, only a very small portion is fresh enough to drink or to use for agricultural and industrial purposes. Most fresh water is under ground so, once centrifugal pumps became available, it was not long before farmers were pumping water out of the huge aquifers as well as diverting it from river systems and lakes. There are problems with adding all this water to the land that were not easily foreseen when the irrigation is started. A big problem is rising soil salination; eventually this can stop farming on the land affected so that the amount of land suitable for agriculture actually begins to diminish. This problem may not be insoluble (sorry about the pun) but it will take a lot of money to research it and change farming practices. Another is that we are using water faster faster than it is being replenished by natural cycles.

Still another problem is that the supply of water for human use and for agriculture is also diminishing. This is due to industrial pollution of water on the surface and underground. As an example, where I live there are considerable gas bearing shale formations underground. To get significant amounts of gas out of these formations it is necessary to drill horizontal wells (down into the shale and then sideways) and then to pump in water and sand to fracture the shale and allow the gas to escape and be collected. This takes a million or so gallons of water per drilled, productive well. When the water returns to the surface it bears the sand and lots of other 'gunk' likely as not rendering this water unusable ass well as polluting steams and aquifers. I am sure each of you readers know of similar instances of industrial pollution.

Expanding cities result not only act to reduce farmland by covering agricultural land by buildings, parking lots, and roads that also interferes with hydrological cycle as well as the run off, with pollutants, going straight into rivers and lakes. In the US, road surfaces cover an area equal to the size of Kansas, not counting parking lots that occupy more space than do buildings in most cities. Another effect of cities is to divert water from agriculture as the balance of population shifts from rural to urban living.

Enough of this! Reading in this area is entirely depressing and I warn you not to proceed. It is very hard to know what any individual can do about it, unless you happen to be a Maude Barlow (read her books).

Well, the thing is that there is a fixed amount of water on this planet (disregarding the minute amounts added via small meteorites and comets entering the atmosphere). Surface water is increasingly polluted through population increase, agriculture, and industry. Under pressure to grow more crops, farmers the world over are pumping water out of aquifers faster than the replenishment rate even while available productive land is diminishing. Oh...and then there is global warming possibly resulting in warming and drying of land currently used for food production.

This all too much!!! Maybe Malthus finally has a point.