How scarce will water be when I'm old

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How Scarce will water be when Frykte is old?
	Normal
	Extremely scarce
	There will be lots of water to drink
	Hmm, not sure

Huttan: May 15, 2013

Frykte posted:

How scarce will water be when I'm old? Let's say 2050. I'd put more effort into my OP but I don't know anything about scarcity but I thought it'd be a good topic. Thanks.

It will totally depend on where you live and how the water rights laws are in your area. The amount of water used by the tar sands projects in Alberta is enormous: about 4 barrels of water to produce each barrel of oil. Cadillac Desert is a book that describes how screwed up water policy and usage in the US is.

Darkman Fanpage posted:

I have already begun stockpiling pallets of bottled water in anticipation of the Water Wars.

There is some feeling that the civil war in Syria started over a drought that lasted from 2006 to 2011.

quote:

Here�s the issue: between 2006 and 2011, the eastern 60 percent of Syria experienced �the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago,� forcing 200,000 Syrians off the land (out of 22 million total in Syria) and causing them to abandon 160 towns entirely (source). In one region in 2007-2008, 75% of farmers suffered total crop failure, while herders in the northeast lost up to 85% of their flocks, which affected 1.3 million people (source). Assad�s policies exacerbated the problem. His administration subsidized for water-intensive crops like wheat and cotton, and promoted bad irrigation techniques (source. I�m still looking for a description of what those bad irrigation techniques were.).

These refugees moved to cities like Damascus, which were already dealing with over a million refugees from Iraq and Palestine. They dug 25,000 illegal wells around Damascus, lowering the water table and increasing groundwater salinity (source). The revolt in 2011 broke out in southern Daraa and northeast Kamishli, two of the driest parts of the country, and reportedly, Al Qaeda affiliates are most active in the driest regions of the country (source).

One thing that worsened the problem was Turkey. The Tigris, Euphrates, and Orantes Rivers flow out of Kurdistan in Turkey into Syria. Turkey, in a bid to modernize the Kurdish region, built 22 dams on these rivers up to 2010 in the Southeastern Anatolia Project. They�ve taken half the water out of the Euphrates, and used it to grow large amounts of cotton within Anatolia, doubling or trebling local income in that traditionally rebellious area.

Source

Israel abandoned Gaza when the aquifers underneath the Gaza strip became too saline/polluted to support growing food crops. The "security barrier" follows the borders of the underground aquifer which is why it doesn't follow any above-ground terrain feature.

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