Tag: Water

Lake Tahoe is warming because of climate change

This article discusses how the pristine color of Lake Tahoe is being damaged by climate change.

Climate change is gradually warming Lake Tahoe, clouding its clarity and threatening its fabled “blueness,” scientists at UC Davis warned Thursday.

In its annual “State of the Lake” report, the university’s Tahoe Environmental Research Center said surface water temperatures in July 2017 spiked to an average 68.4 degrees. That was the highest since researchers began taking Tahoe’s temperature in 1968, and 6 degrees higher than the year before.

Geoffrey Schladow, director of the Tahoe center, said the 2017 temperature readings may have been a fluke. But there’s little doubt the lake’s waters are getting heated by global warming, he said.

As Industry Pushes Billion-Dollar Fracked Petrochemical Projects, State Regulators Struggle To Keep Up

This article discusses how the fossil fuel industry is investing in petrochemical plants.

Fueled by fracking in the region, petrochemical and plastics projects in the Ohio River Valley are attracting tens of billions of dollars in investment, but as plans for this build-out hit the drawing boards, signs already are emerging that state regulators are unprepared for this next wave of industrialization. And the implications of their inexperience could mean major threats to the region’s health and environment.

One of the projects currently underway, an underground natural gas liquids (NLG) storage site — designed to support the construction of several huge petrochemical complexes — is undergoing review by state regulators who have little experience with NGL storage facilities of its size.

“We had to juggle a lot of regulatory input in a relatively undefined setting since there are few regulations in Ohio, and that really goes for Pennsylvania and West Virginia as well,” Jonathan Farrell, a project manager with Civil and Environmental Consultants, told attendees at a petrochemical industry conference on June 18.

That lack of well-established state regulations harkens back to the early days of the shale gas rush, when state regulators struggled to keep up with the emergence of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling technologies. The rush to drill while safeguards were still being designed and implemented led to inadequately treated toxic waste being dumped into drinking water supplies for millions of people and problems with radioactive waste that continue to this day.

The Midwest Is Getting Drenched, And It’s Causing Big Problems

This article discusses the impact of increasing amounts of rainfall in the Midwest – it’s not good.

Minnesota is getting wetter. Over the last 100 years, the state has seen more storms that produce heavy rainfall, and its strongest storms have grown more intense. One of the more dramatic changes is the increasing number of “mega-rain” events — rainstorms during which at least 6 inches of rain falls over at least 1,000 square miles and the center of the storm drops more than 8 inches of rain. Minnesota has had 11 mega-rains since 1973,1 and eight of them have come since 2000. Two mega-rains swept through in 2016, which is only the third time the state experienced more than one mega-rain in a year. (It also happened in 1975 and 2002.)

Humans are causing massive changes in the location of water around the world, NASA says

This article discusses the impact that humans are having on the planet’s water resources.

A 14-year NASA mission has confirmed that a massive redistribution of freshwater is occurring across Earth, with middle-latitude belts drying and the tropics and higher latitudes gaining water supplies.

The results, which are probably a combination of the effects of climate change, vast human withdrawals of groundwater and simple natural changes, could have profound consequences if they continue, pointing to a situation in which some highly populous regions could struggle to find enough water in the future.

“To me, the fact that we can see this very strong fingerprint of human activities on the global water redistribution, should be a cause for alarm,” said Jay Famiglietti, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the authors of a study published in Nature in May 2018.

Solar power could save water in thirsty Middle East, North Africa, analysis says

This article discusses the positive impact switching from fossil fuels to solar power generation can have on water supplies.

Thirsty Middle Eastern and North African countries could tap into their solar-energy potential to cope with fresh water scarcity, according to resource experts.

Water could be saved by switching to renewable solar energy from fossil fuel electricity generation that uses up water, said the World Resources Institute (WRI).

The findings show moving to clean energy has benefits aside from cutting planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, said Tianyi Luo, a senior WRI manager.

Climate change is already making droughts worse

This article, by Dr Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, discusses the impact that climate change is having on global water supplies. Few areas of the world are completely immune to droughts and their often-devastating impacts on water resources, ecosystems and people.

Regions as diverse as California, the Eastern Mediterranean, East Africa, South Africaand Australia have all experienced severe – and, in some cases, unprecedented – droughts in recent years.

As with other climate and weather extremes, such as storms and floods, these events have spurred strong interest in questions surrounding the impact of climate change. For example, is climate change making droughts more frequent or severe? And can we expect climate change to contribute to increased drought risk and severity in the future?

Mapped: How global warming and land-use change threaten water security worldwide

This article discusses the impact climate change and land use is having on fresh water.

The world’s water supply has been severely altered by global warming and changes to land use – such as agriculture and damming – over the past 15 years, new satellite data shows.

The Nature study of 32 world regions finds that the largest freshwater losses are occurring across the Middle East, India, Antarctica and Greenland. In contrast, the largest gains are taking place in parts of Asia, North America and South America.

Study: Water shortages to be key environmental challenge of the century, Nasa warns

This article discusses the impact that climate change will have on fresh water. Freshwater supplies have already seriously declined in 19 global hotspots – from China to the Caspian Sea – due to overuse, groundbreaking study shows. There are a lot of good links in this article.

Water shortages are likely to be the key environmental challenge of this century, scientists from Nasa have warned, as new data has revealed a drying-out of swaths of the globe between the tropics and the high latitudes, with 19 hotspots where water depletion has been dramatic.

Areas in northern and eastern India, the Middle East, California and Australia are among the hotspots where overuse of water resources has caused a serious decline in the availability of freshwater that is already causing problems. Without strong action by governments to preserve water the situation in these areas is likely to worsen.

The comprehensive study, the first of its kind, took data from the NASA Grace (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite mission to track trends in freshwater from 2002 to 2016 across the globe.

 

As warming continues, ‘hot drought’ becomes the norm, not an exception

This article discusses the impact climate change is having on water resources.

The signs of rising temperatures are obvious across New Mexico right now, from the mountains to the river valleys, and from rangelands to suburban backyards.

“Climate change for the Southwest is all about water,” said Jonathan Overpeck, who has spent decades studying climate change and its impacts in the southwestern United States. Warming affects the amount of water flowing in streams, and the amount of water available to nourish forests, agricultural fields and orchards. There’s also the physics of the matter: A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, demanding more from land surfaces. Plants need more water, too. “Any way you look at it,” Overpeck said, “water that normally would flow in the river or be in the soil ends up instead in the atmosphere.”

Past southwestern droughts were notable for declines in precipitation. But today’s droughts are different, he explained.  Even in wet years, which will still occur as the climate changes, warmer conditions dry out the landscapes.

“With atmospheric warming, we’re getting what we’re calling ‘hot droughts’ or ‘hotter droughts,’” he said. “That means that they’re more and more influenced by these warm temperatures, and the warm temperatures tend to make the droughts more severe because they pull the moisture out of plants, they pull the moisture out of rivers and out of soil—and that moisture ends up in the atmosphere instead of where we normally like to have it.”