Warming Will Exacerbate Global Water Conflicts

[RestoreGore]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/19/AR2007081900967.html

By Doug Struck,

The Washington Post,

August 20, 2007.

"As global warming heats the planet, there will be more desperate measures. The climate will be wetter in some places, drier in others. Changing weather patterns will leave millions of people without dependable supplies of water for drinking, irrigation and power, a growing stack of studies conclude... According to the IPCC, that means a drying out of areas such as southern Europe, the Mideast, North Africa, South Australia, Patagonia and the U.S. Southwest... These will not be small droughts.

Richard Seager, a senior researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, looked at 19 computer models of the future under current global warming trends. He found remarkable consistency: Sometime before 2050, the models predicted, the Southwest will be gripped in a dry spell akin to the Great Dust Bowl drought that lasted through most of the 1930s. The spacing of tree rings suggests there have been numerous periods of drought going back to A.D. 800, he said. But, 'mechanistically, this is different. These projections clearly come from a warming forced by rising greenhouse gases.'...

The potential for conflict is more than theoretical. Turkey, Syria and Iraq bristle over the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt trade threats over the Nile. The U.N. has said water scarcity is behind the bloody wars in Sudan's Darfu region. In Somalia, drought has spawned warlords and armies. Already, the World Health Organization says, 1 billion people lack access to potable water. In northern China, retreating glaciers and shrinking wetlands that feed the Yangtze River prompted researchers to warn that water supplies for hundreds of millions of people may be at risk."
~~~~~~~~
This is why I believe there needs to be a World Water Summit of all nations to declare water a human right and work on an equitable plan to conserve our world resources. Corporatization of this resource will become more and more prevalent, and with the instances of water scarcity and drought becoming more pronouced and sustained with anthropogenic climate change as an added component (with water being used for biofuels which strains water supplies for other uses) oil wars will be a thing of the past. I really am grateful as well to see more and more articles in newspapers about this crisis because for me this IS the environmental crisis of our time and if we don't pay attention, we will suffer greatly from it as many are already.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/gallery/2007/mar/20/1?picture=329754632
Slideshow-water crisis

http://image.guim.co.uk/Guardian/gallery/2007/mar/20//[e-mail]