The Numbers Guy writes a column about how much water it takes to grow and produce a single hamburger: 617 gallons!

Yikes. And I thought it was bad that corn ethanol requires 5 gallons…

Of course most of that water goes right back into the eco-system.

A huge storm in the North Atlantic brought storm surges as high as 20 feet yesterday to Europe and the UK. Barriers on the Thames were closed to protect London. This is the biggest surge since 1953. Fortunately no one was hurt and damage was minimal.

The issue here is that climate change doesn’t simply mean higher ocean levels. Even a slight rise in levels, combined with more violent weather due to warming, will mean more and more of these storms in regions where they have been very rare in the past. Because there was no historical record of major storm surges, these coastal areas are highly developed and support dense populations. The potential for future destruction is much higher because of this.

This is a classic environmental feedback loop. Warming generates storms, higher ocean levels mean higher surges. Interestingly, the same storm caused unstable snowpack conditions in Switzerland, creating dangerous avalanche conditions.

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.

In today’s NYTimes business section there is an article about a very unusual product and business decision made by America’s brand marketing giant, P&G. It seems that for several years they’ve had a product branded under their PUR water purification brand that is a powder that can purify water in the field. It has not been marketed in the US until now. Instead they attempted to sell it in third world countries. When it became obvious that it would not be profitable they did something incredibly unique and forward-thinking: They built a plant in Pakistan to make the product very cheaply. Then they distributed the packets for pennies. A local village market can sell them for a dime and make 5 cents. Each purifies 10 kilos of water. P&G formed a not for profit organization internally to help provide pure water for children globally. This was a big hit within the huge company.
Now they have arranged for US sales via a much smaller company called Reliance that sells into outdoor sports and survival markets including disaster recovery. This is where it gets interesting. They are not out to make a profit on US sales. All P&G proceeds from Reliance (an independent distributor) will be donated to the Children’s Safe Drinking Water program, a not for profit agency.
While there are questions about charging US disaster victims more for this than 3rd world countries, overall it is a great concept. I would hope the major Pharma companies who won’t design drugs for poor markets will take a look at this model. The fact is that climate change and its affects are global- we’re all in this together.
Kudos to Proctor and Gamble.