As awaiting the arrival of another rainstorm, a reminder of how near-ultimate-precious is/are/be ‘water‘ — from the American Museum of Natural History:
Compared to the other animals featured in this section, humans seem to be at a disadvantage when it comes to water.
We’re dependent on the day-to-day availability of fresh, clean water.
We can’t survive on seawater, we can’t live underwater, and we can’t capture rainwater on our backs.
We lose water through perspiration, urination, and by exhalation — we breathe out water vapor.
Only by using our intelligence and ingenuity have humans managed to live in areas where water is relatively scarce, as well as places where it’s salty or frozen.
Yes, indeed.
(Illustration found here).
In the US, and in a big chunk of the world, water is taken for granted — much so, Americans try to bathe every day — and for many, many decades. Especially water out of a tap/faucet, so-seemingly right there. The real-core anxious portion of water is without a certain amount, we die, and in extreme cases where dehydration and overheating collide, can die quickly. However: An adult in comfortable surroundings, in contrast, can survive for a week or more with no, or very limited, water intake.
Seven to 10 days, maybe, stretch it to a couple of weeks, maybe — that is, if you’re in ‘comfortable surroundings.’
Water is the precious, and we’re seeing initial stages of this precious water intake going on the outtake. And out here in drought-riddled California, water has become a most-major political issue.
Despite the words of President Obama on Friday while visiting a waterless heart of big agriculture, Fresno, California, situated squat-like and near-center of a hellish-nightmare landscape of the state’s central, San Joaquin Valley, that the food aspect is important for “every working American,” but water is much-too hotplate-politics: “I’m not going to wade into this. I want to get out alive on Valentine’s Day.”
Cute.
And way-extreme-sad.
Obama didn’t want to wade into the fish vs water in state politics — the delta smelt’s survival up against foodstuffs. Or as the politicians blare, and apparently all for show, with no offered solutions for an endlessly-mounting crisis: The state’s key water users have made efforts to reconcile their differences. But Hanneman (Michael Hanneman, agriculture and resource economics professor at UC Berkeley) says lawmakers haven’t made the difficult, far-ranging decisions that are needed.
“They have stayed away from it. And they have stayed away from it because it’s a situation where there’s going to be winners and losers. So they don’t want to touch it,” he said.
But he says, sooner or later, they’re going to have to. Barring a miracle-March, this drought isn’t going to go away.
No shit — from National Geographic last week:
California is experiencing its worst drought since record-keeping began in the mid 19th century, and scientists say this may be just the beginning. B. Lynn Ingram, a paleoclimatologist at the University of California at Berkeley, thinks that California needs to brace itself for a megadrought—one that could last for 200 years or more.
…
“None of this should be a surprise to anybody,” agrees Celeste Cantu, general manager for the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority.
“California is acting like California, and most of California is arid.”
Unfortunately, she notes, most of the state’s infrastructure was designed and built during the 20th century, when the climate was unusually wet compared to previous centuries.
That hasn’t set water management on the right course to deal with long periods of dryness in the future.
Given that California is one of the largest agricultural regions in the world, the effects of any drought, never mind one that could last for centuries, are huge.
About 80 percent of California’s freshwater supply is used for agriculture.
The cost of fruits and vegetables could soar, says Cantu. “There will be cataclysmic impacts.”
An example of an already-impacted situation is the little town of Willits, down in Mendocino County, just a couple of hours south of where I am on the state’s North Coast — earlier this month, the California Department of Public Health reported Willits had less than 100 days of drinking water left, and this despite water rationing for residents mandated in January (150 gallons per day, per household of four; businesses reduce usage by 35 percent).
Rationing was extended until the end of February, and there’s some hope due to the rainfall off storms the last couple of weeks, though, as says local water manager, Denise Rose: “We are in better shape than we were before the rains, but we are not out of the woods yet.”
And like the restaurant business, the essence of success is location, location, location — and seemingly the same for water. Where I live — about two miles, maybe less, from the Pacific Ocean, we use less water than, say, the people in Willits.
Coastal areas tend to be on the down size in overall water usage — Santa Cruz, on the coast south of San Francisco, for instance, averages 113 gallons person a day, and Crescent City, on the coast just 90 miles north of my location, uses 97 gallons per person; while the above-mentioned Central Valley, and desert stretches in the southern part of the state can top 591 gallons of water per person a day.
Water usage goes way up in the desert and with all kinds of industry. We don’t have a big timber business up here any more, so fishing, Humboldt State University, and the marijuana-growing folks are the biggest water users.
Use for the area, however, varies but is below the state level — according to our local Times-Standard last week, the average Humboldt County resident uses about 110 gallons of water per day, way-below the state average of 196 gallons.
And back to humans, water and survival — out of those water-usage numbers above, that includes all water-related shit, like showering, shaving, whatnot. But the big figure is the rate of water consumed for your body weight in order to continue living. Usually half your mass in ounces, for instance, if you weigh 200 pounds, then you’d need to down 100 ounces of water a day to stay alive. And that’s clean water (via PBS).
Keeping those 100 ounces a day (or whatever) is at the mercy of our climate — and it’s going to shit.
Dr Stuart Khan from the UNSW school of civil and environmental engineering (the Guardian):
“We have always had extreme weather events, that’s nothing new, but we are already seeing the impact of them and it’s broadly accepted these instances will increase,” he said.
“The water supply isn’t secure or cordoned off – we draw water from the environment and that water is subject to a number of different things,” he said.
“The ultimate failure is if the water companies have to ask people to boil water before they drink it.
“We saw case studies where that has happened after all sorts of events, such as cyclones, big rainfall and snowstorms.
“You’d expect around 10 boil-water events around the country a year, not all down to extreme weather, but you’d expect that number to rise unless there’s action to mitigate it.”
Freaky-deaky key — ‘unless there’s action.’
Instead, the US along with modern civilization is prone to suicide, as attested by a Yale Project survey last year: About half of Americans (51 percent) say they are “somewhat” or “very worried” about global warming, a 7 percentage-point decline in worry since Fall 2012.
Extreme worry, along with the extreme weather, is a good and natural sensibility.