“The volume of this water resource is a hundred times greater than the amount we’ve extracted from the Earth’s sub-surface in the past century since 1900,” Dr. Vincent Post, lead study author and senior lecturer at Australia’s Flinders University, told the Agence France-Presse.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, water covers approximately 70 percent of the Earth's surface, but less than 1 percent of that is available for human use. This data translates to 1.1 billion people worldwide lacking access to water, and a total of 2.7 billion people facing water scarcity for at least one month of the year.
U.N. Water, the United Nations’ water agency, estimates that by 2030, 47 percent of the world's population will have to face water scarcity issues -- up from the current 40 percent.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Great news for mankind.
It would be great if mankind could come together and reject the fossil fuel industry and their Climate Denials once and for all... And face the coming environmental crisis head on so that future generations have a chance. The time has come to face it, or we face mass deaths worldwide and crises, wars, and costs the quaint free marketers never mention. Those "free market" talkers don't calculate the vast damage their system imposes on mankind, do they? One would think with a "free" market, such costs would get factored in? How do you put a price on worldwide calamity? Can you sue for that?
Water will become scarce. Food will become scarce. So say the scientists.
The impact on food security is particularly worrisome, with the latest science “much less optimistic” tha[n] the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment report:
These results suggest instead a rapidly rising risk of crop yield reductions as the world warms. Large negative effects have been observed at high and extreme temperatures in several regions including India, Africa, the United States, and Australia. For example, significant nonlinear effects have been observed in the United States for local daily temperatures increasing to 29°C for corn and 30°C for soybeans. These new results and observations indicate a significant risk of high-temperature thresholds being crossed that could substantially undermine food security globally in a 4°C world.
http://thinkprogress.org/...
Some climate scientists paint very bleak future. As bleak as it gets. Half a billion people left if we continue on current path bleak: "extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 degrees"....
Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain, was quoted in The Scotsman ahead of the 2009 Copenhagen conference saying the consequences were ‘‘terrifying’’.
‘‘For humanity it’s a matter of life or death ... we will not make all human beings extinct, as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 degrees.
‘‘If you have got a population of 9 billion by 2050 and you hit 4 degrees, 5 degrees or 6 degrees, you might have half a billion people surviving.’’
http://www.smh.com.au/...
That's extremely alarming, but half the world just shrugs it off and leans on the brainwashing they've received from the energy industry to counter this information....
Should geo-engineering be considered? I hear both sides. I just don't know. Seems like we should at least have it in the tool box.