“Water rationing has hit the capital. Car washing and lawn watering are prohibited within city limits. Harvests in the region have dropped by 15-30%. By the end of summer, local reservoirs and dams were holding 5% of their capacity.

Oops, that’s not Atlanta, or even the southeastern U.S. That’s Ankara, Turkey, hit by a fierce drought and high temperatures that also have had southern and southwestern Europe in their grip.”

“Based on the record of the last seven years, we can take it for granted that the Bush administration hasn’t the slightest desire to glance down; that no one in FEMA who matters has given the situation the thought it deserves; and that, on this subject, as on so many others, top administration officials are just hoping to make it to January 2009 without too many more scar marks. But, if not the federal government, shouldn’t somebody be asking? Shouldn’t somebody check out what’s actually down there?”

“To find even tentative answers to such questions you have to leave the mainstream. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, for example, interviewed paleontologist and author of The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change, Tim Flannery recently on the topic of a “world on fire.” Flannery offered the following observation:

“It’s not just the Southeast of the United States. Europe has had its great droughts and water shortages. Australia is in the grip of a drought that’s almost unbelievable in its ferocity. Again, this is a global picture. We’re just getting much less usable water than we did a decade or two or three decades ago. It’s a sort of thing again that the climate models are predicting. In terms of the floods, again we see the same thing. You know, a warmer atmosphere is just a more energetic atmosphere. So if you ask me about a single flood event or a single fire event, it’s really hard to make the connection, but take the bigger picture and you can see very clearly what’s happening.”

Great comprehensive post from Tom Engelhardt on the reality of water issues. These are just a few of the many quotable facts in his post.

Sonny Perdue, Governor of Georgia, finally takes decisive action, calling on God to deliver a rainstorm. This after he:

“…allowed an outdoor theme park to build a million-gallon mountain of artificial snow while the Southeast was running dry; it was Governor Perdue and his fellow elected officials. They also allowed the wasteful irrigation of Georgia’s cotton farms and the rampant overbuilding and overslurping of metropolitan Atlanta.”

They won’t get it until the taps are opened and nothing comes out. God is not going to deliver us from climate change- we created it and we’re the ones who have to deal with it.

It has started. Arizona governor Bill Richardson opened the first salvo by suggesting that the Northeast should ’share’ their water with the Southwest. Apparently we’re ‘awash’ in it and they desperately need it to justify building more golf courses , growing more lawns in desert lands and building more McMansions. Now that the Colorado is running dry and their aquifers are empty, they are looking north and covetously eyeing the Great Lakes.

Only one problem. Richardson is running for President and he can’t win without the Northeast so he quickly backed off from his comments. This kind of thing only reinforces that we need a comprehensive water rights policy that is national and international. Alabama and Florida are fighting over watershed rights that transcend state and national boundaries. California and the Southwestern states are doing the same and Mexico can only look on as less and less water flows downstream to them.

No one is advocating the real changes that must be made:

• Immediately put a moratorium on any new construction that cannot show rights to at least 50 years worth of water supplies not currently claimed by others
• Drought areas must impose permanent mandatory water conservation plans on all sectors including businesses
• Long term water reclamation, storage, transportation and generation strategies must be developed and funded
• Rates for water use must immediately be raised two-fold to put the nation on an emergency notice that is a looming national problem
• Raised taxes on excess water use should be funneled into long term water conservation and reclamation strategies

This is a real time problem. And no one, especially the politicians, is doing anything about it.

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.