Kevin of Desmogblog has put together a document that actually shows the entire White House hatchet job on this critical CDC report on the effects of global warming on disease.

His biggest discovery? 50% of the report was redacted, over 1500 words. This is criminal and unscientific. Disease outbreaks are going to be a major negative result of climate change and it is the CDC’s mission to plan for them so that stockpiles of medicine can be prepared, hospitals prepped in advance and immunization programs launched. By censoring the message of this report the White House may be taking actions that could result in thousands of deaths in the future.

Residents of Atlanta, Georgia may open their taps in the next month and have nothing come out. 14,500 lawn and landscape workers have been laid off because there is no water. The state has done nothing to deal with the crisis except for asking residents to ‘take shorter showers’. (!) Real estate developers have built like crazy and were never required to prove there was enough water to support the development.

North Carolina today asked its residents to halve their water use through Halloween so the state can evaluate its ability to handle a water crisis.

300,000 Southern Californians (update- make that 500,000) flee fires that cannot be fought because of Santa Ana winds, extreme drought conditions and large amounts of dead, dry brush. Thousands of homes will be lost.

The Great Lakes are down seven inches from their normal levels due to very dry winters. Each inch of loss means that 8000 tons of raw materials that drive manufacturing in the region cannot be shipped this year because of the danger of shipping running aground.

In Canada’s West glaciers are rapidly disappearing. These glaciers supply the lakes and rivers that are the primary water sources for huge farms. The permafrost on the mountains is melting so that snow runoff, instead of running into the streams, is being absorbed by the ground, accelerating the losses to the water sources.

The Colorado river is drying up. It is the only supply of water for the entire South West including much of Mexico as underground aquifers are no longer viable. Yet there have been 300 hundred golf courses built in the region in the last five years.

These stories are all current today. In each case there is no man-made solution, no emergency action we can take to fix the problem. Nor are we doing anything about this- not a thing. We are building housing like crazy in areas that have no regional water sources. A study released today shows that carbon emissions worldwide have risen drastically since 2000, much faster than expected. Again, we are doing nothing.

No matter how rich we are here in North America, we cannot sustain life without water. We have no infrastructure to produce water where there is no natural source and building such an infrastructure would mean mustering hundreds of billions of dollars and a solid political consensus that understands the emergency nature of the problem. Not much chance of that taking place.

I have friends who tell me they can’t read this blog too often because it is depressing. I have held off on blogging because there is too much climate change news every day. It is obvious that this thing is upon us full force yet there is still denial at the very center of power. We have to reach these people somehow and get their attention. Perhaps having dry faucets in the thousands of McMansions around Atlanta will wake a few people up.

I haven’t been posting lately because we’re doing a redesign of the blog and moving it to a WordPress template on my company’s servers.
I’m also tightening my focus to water-related issues. I’ve always been interested in how climate change is affecting us on a personal level, right now, and water is one of the very early indicator issues. It is related intimately with weather issues, another subject I find fascinating. One of the reasons I’m choosing water issues stems from one simple fact: In China only one in 500 people has free access to safe drinking water.

Water will become the most valuable commodity on the planet, surpassing oil, in the next few years. In many places it already is. The oil wars of the second decade of this century will probably be eclipsed by water wars in the next decade, particularly if we don’t take worldwide action right now. It is my hope these conflicts are economic rather than violent as economic conflicts create business opportunities, which in turn, create incentives to resolve the issue (driven by profit motives). Violent wars also present opportunity but this opportunity only results in the creation of weapons which have no positive economic effect and death of innocents. This is a path we cannot allow humanity to go down.
Watch for our new look in the very near future and please contribute your views and stories.

Thanks,
Martin Edic

Blade Runner opens up with street scenes in old LA where at ground level smog and constant drizzle create a hellish vision of a future where those on the literal bottom of society live in an environmental purgatory. When Deckard take flight to visit the offices of the CEO of the android factory he is lifted above this constant cloud into a sunlit aerie of penthouse offices and apartments above huge pyramidal arcologies. This striking contrast was director Ridley Scott’s 1980 vision of a not too distant future. Today in 2007 that future is now:
- The NYTimes has an extensive feature on the vast and permanent smog and pollution in China including this horrifying slide show.
- Only 1 in 500 Chinese has access to clean drinking water
- Greece has lost 50 people to forest fires and declared a national emergency
- Flooding in the midwestern has claimed more than 50 lives with no end in site
- The deaths of miners and rescue workers in Utah due to dangerous mining practices driven by greed and high prices for coal eclipses the story of over 200 miners dying in China at the same time

This is just a sampling of the weather and environmental disasters in place, right now worldwide, yet we still argue about causes and blame. Those arguments are fueled by the vast denial matrix created and funded by energy cartels who, because they are the most advanced practitioners of scenario planning, know the horrifying truth about what we’ve done to this planet already.
Is there a positive story to counter this? Not yet. Barring some amazing breakthrough in cheap, clean and scalable energy production, this feedback loop will accelerate.