Coming to a Theater Near You: The Greatest Water Crisis in the History of Civilization
William deBuys writes at TomDispatch:
Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres).
The fires were a function of drought. As of summer’s end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat. It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.
Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented temperatures, with Phoenix, as usual, leading the march toward un-livability. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the…
Inside A Fluoride Treatment Facility
An Infowars Nightly News special report shows never-before-seen undercover footage shot at the Austin Water Treatment Facility demonstrates the process of adding the corrosive and highly toxic chemical to the water supply:
Could Seawater Be The Answer To The Fresh Water Crisis?
Photo: Hannes Grobe (CC)
Could the rising sea levels be beneficial to us as drinking water? The National Geographic reports:
With 1.8 billion people predicted to live in areas of extreme water scarcity by 2025, desalination — the removal of salt from water — is increasingly being proposed as a solution.
But before desalination can make a real difference solving in the looming water crisis, officials and experts need to commit to overcoming obstacles that make the process expensive and inefficient, a new paper argues.
Scientists predict that by 2016, the amount of fresh water produced by desalination plants will exceed 10 billion gallons (38 million cubic meters) a year, or double the rate in 2008.
Modern desalination plants use a technology called reverse osmosis, pressing salty water through ultrathin, semipermeable plastic membranes. Unable to pass through, large molecules or ions, such as salt, are filtered out, so fresh water flows out the other side.
This method…
Texas Town To Convert Urine Into Drinking Water
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. Discovery writes:
The drought in Texas has gotten so severe municipal water managers have turned to a once untenable idea: recycling sewage water.
“When you talk about toilet-to-(water) tank it makes a lot of people nervous and grossed out,” says Terri Telchik, who works in the city manager’s office in Big Spring, Texas.
Less than 0.1 inches of rain has fallen on West Texas for months. Normally, the region gets more than 7 inches of rain this time of year. This week’s Department of Agriculture Drought Monitor map shows 75 percent of Texas is in “exceptional” drought stages.
Water for the town’s 27,000 residents comes through the Colorado River Municipal Water District, which has broken ground on a plant to capture treated wastewater for recycling.
Black Hole Hosts Universe’s Most Massive Water Cloud
Photo: NASA
A giant quasar billions of light-years away is surrounded by water vapor that could fill Earth’s oceans over 140 trillion times. Via National Geographic:
In a galaxy 12 billion light-years away resides the most distant and most massive cloud of water yet seen in the universe, astronomers say.
Weighing in at 40 billion times the mass of Earth, the giant cloud of mist swaddles a type of actively feeding supermassive black hole known as a quasar.
Among the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe, quasars are black holes at the centers of galaxies that are gravitationally consuming surrounding disks of material while burping back out powerful energy jets.
“As this disk of material is consumed by the central black hole, it releases energy in the form of x-ray and infrared radiation, which in turn can heat the surrounding material, resulting in the observed water vapor,” said study co-author Eric Murphy, an astronomer with…
‘Super Sand’ Cleans Dirty Drinking Water
Sand has been used as a purifier for thousands of years. An innovative way of cleaning water, by adding graphite waste, provides a cost affective way to bring purified water to those who may not normally have access to a clean water source. Via Treehugger:
The solution is cheap since the sources of graphite could include the waste produced by graphite mining companies that still contains a significant amount of graphite. And the researchers believe that it is possible to modify the graphite oxide to pick out particular pollutants and therefore tailor the super sand to specific areas that might be having trouble with certain water-borne diseases or pollutants.
20 Signs That A ‘Horrific’ Global Food Crisis Is Coming
Zero Hedge writes via The Economic Collapse Blog:
In case you haven’t noticed, the world is on the verge of a horrific global food crisis. At some point, this crisis will affect you and your family. It may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow, but it is going to happen.
Crazy weather and horrifying natural disasters have played havoc with agricultural production in many areas of the globe over the past couple of years. Meanwhile, the price of oil has begun to skyrocket. The entire global economy is predicated on the ability to use massive amounts of inexpensive oil to cheaply produce food and other goods and transport them over vast distances. Without cheap oil the whole game changes.
Topsoil is being depleted at a staggering rate and key aquifers all over the world are being drained at an alarming pace. Global food prices are already at an all-time high and…
The World Of Water Filtration
The Big Berkey
About a year ago we met filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig, director of the documentary Tapped, which outlined the ills of bottled water so effectively that we quickly decided to forgo those five-gallon jugs of water in favor of tap water at the disinformation offices, and I did the same at home.
However, while New York City’s tap water isn’t bad compared to some municipalities, it still contains plenty of chemicals that I have no intention of knowingly ingesting (fluoride, chlorine, various VOCs, etc.), so we decided to install water filters.
At the office we installed a plumbed-in filtered water dispenser from local company Cure Water Systems, and it works well in an office environment, proudly sporting one of Stephanie’s “Get Off The Bottle” stickers.
At home I installed an under-sink filter from Aquasana on the advice of super-informed science writer Terri Mitchell, who contributed a great article to the disinformation anthology You Are Still Being…
Radiation Detected In Drinking Water Across The U.S.
Jeff McMahon writes for Forbes:
Radiation from Japan has been detected in drinking water in 13 more American cities, and cesium-137 has been found in American milk—in Montpelier, Vermont—for the first time since the Japan nuclear disaster began, according to data released by the Environmental Protection Agency late Friday.
Milk samples from Phoenix and Los Angeles contained iodine-131 at levels roughly equal to the maximum contaminant level permitted by EPA, the data shows. The Phoenix sample contained 3.2 picoCuries per liter of iodine-131. The Los Angeles sample contained 2.9. The EPA maximum contaminant level is 3.0, but this is a conservative standard designed to minimize exposure over a lifetime, so EPA does not consider these levels to pose a health threat.
The cesium-137 found in milk in Vermont is the first cesium detected in milk since the Fukushima-Daichi nuclear accident occurred last month. The sample contained 1.9 picoCuries per liter of cesium-137, which…
Are You Drinking Recycled Sewage Water?
Animation by Chris 73 (CC)
OK, so your first reaction is going to be NO WAYYYY! — but you may be wrong. If you live in Orange County, California, or Fairfax County, Virginia, your water may well be going from toilet to tap, albeit via some filtration technology along the way. Kathy Chu reports on the increasing use of waste water in drinking systems in thirsty places around the world, for USA Today:
… “Water is going to be the oil of the 21st century,” predicts Bill Cooper, director of the Urban Water Research Center at the University of California-Irvine.
Clearly, something needs to be done. Roughly 884 million people — 1 of every 8 in the world — still lack access to safe drinking water, according to the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Meanwhile, water use has increased by more than twice the rate of the world’s population growth during the past…
Hydrofracking Is Poisoning U.S. Water Supply
Photo: David R. Tribble (CC)
When the mainstream media decries the practices of large energy companies, you know they must really be operating outside any possibility of acceptable behavior. Case in point: hydraulic fracturing for natural gas deposits. Ian Urbina reports for the New York Times:
The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s gold rush — for natural gas.
The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between thin layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings, generating electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred years.
So energy companies are clamoring to drill. And they are getting rare…
New Invention Has Bicycle Purify Drinking Water
Cycloclean
Why bike? Riding a bicycle is good for your health, curbs pollution as an environmentally conscious form of transportation, and can now improve your drinking water! Via Smart Planet:
Bicycling is a great way to burn calories and get fit. But a new kind of bike may improve the health of entire communities in an entirely different way.
Nippon Basic, a start-up based in Japan, has plans to scale up production of a bicycle that purifies water for those living in remote villages or disaster areas. Cycloclean functions just like any other bicycle, except that the addition of a water filtering system allows bikers to crank out drinking water using the same pedaling motion that propels bikers forward. The rotation of the bike chain helps to remove impurities by driving a motor that pumps water through a system of filters, pumps and hoses located near the rear wheel.
But just how much drinking…
Ray Kurzweil: No Energy Or Water Shortages, Climate Change Is No Problem
Ray Kurzweil. Photo by Michael Lutch. Courtesy of Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.
Lauren Feeney elicited some gems from futurist Ray Kurzweil in her interview for PBS. Among his predictions:
- “In 20 years we’ll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar.”
- Life extension technology is about to take off — meaning far greater life expectancy.
- There will be no water shortage as we use the abundant electricity to convert polluted water.
- We are going to have plenty of food from “vertical agriculture, where we grow plants, fruits, vegetables and meat in computerized factories by artificial intelligence; hydroponic plants tended by intelligent robots to create fruits and vegetables, in-vitro cloned meats, basically just cloning the part of the animal that you want to eat, which is the muscled tissue.”
- We shouldn’t worry about climate change — the new technologies we’re developing will beat it.
Crazy stuff! I’m not sure I want to eat cloned portions of animals grown…
What’s In Your State’s Water Supply?
Russell McLendon’s investigation for Mother Nature Network reveals just which toxins are in your state’s drinking water:
…The U.S. government had virtually no oversight of drinking-water quality before the 1970s, leaving the job to a patchwork of local laws that were often weakly enforced and widely ignored…
Dr. Russell Blaylock Explains Fluoride’s Deadly Secret
Dr. Russell Blaylock M.D. is a retired neurosurgeon and author whose trailblazing research has tirelessly documented the fact that there is an epidemic of neurological disorders in the western world which are directly connected to toxins in our environment.
Peter Vallone, Fluoride-Hating Councilman, Wants Your Teeth to Rot
Peter F. Vallone, Jr.
[disinfo ed.'s note: Phunkychic666, who posted this story, stresses that it's the comments to the Voice article that are worth reading, not the story itself.]
The comments on this article by Sergio Hernandez on the Village Voice site are well worth the read:
A city councilman from Queens apparently wants your your teeth to rot and fall out. The Daily News says Councilman Peter Vallone is planning to introduce a bill that would end New York’s 45-year practice of adding fluoride to its tap water, citing safety concerns and comparing the mineral to prescription anti-depressants.
Via the News:
“This amounts to forced medication by the government,” said Councilman Peter Vallone (D-Queens), who plans to introduce fluoride-removal legislation at the next Council meeting, “What’s next? They decide we’re depressed and add Prozac to our drinking water?”
Of course, scientists and government agencies (including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have long held that water…
U.S. Wants to Reduce Fluoride in Drinking Water
Source: LearnAnatomy (CC)
I almost couldn’t believe this headline from WebMD. Turns out that the government’s motivation for wanting to reduce fluoride levels in water is not actually due to the many deleterious health effects of ingesting fluoride, but still, it’s a start!
The recommended level of fluoride in U.S. drinking water supplies should be lowered to prevent dental problems, according to a joint announcement today by officials from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The HHS is recommending that water supplies contain 0.7 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water, replacing the current recommended range of 0.7 to 1.2 milligrams.
That recommendation won’t go into effect immediately. It will be published in the Federal Register, followed by a period of comment from the public and others for 30 days. [disinfo ed.'s note: go to the HHS site to find out more.]
In other action today, the EPA…
15,000 Gallons of Animal Fat Clog the Houston Ship Channel
What spills threaten to contaminate our waters? Well, I bet beef fat wasn’t your first guess. 2010 ended with 100,000 gallons of raw sewage leaked into the Buffalo Bayou which was estimated to take three weeks to repair. 2011 brings animal fat. NPR reports:
Workers with the U.S. Coast Guard and the Texas General Land Office used pitchforks on Wednesday to pierce and remove chunks of beef fat clogging the Houston Ship Channel, shutting down nearly a mile of one of the nation’s busiest marine arteries.
No ship traffic is delayed, however, because the spill occurred at the end of the waterway, said Richard Brahms, a spokesman with the Coast Guard.
Some 15,000 gallons of animal fat poured into the channel through a storm drain on Tuesday after an onshore storage tank owned by agricultural company Jacob Sterns and Sons leaked 250,000 gallons of the greasy substance, Brahms said.
Erin Brockovich Where Are You? Hexavalent Chromium Found In 31 American Cities
Animation by Chris 73 (CC)
This is the best advertisement for reverse-osmosis walter filters that I’ve seen yet. Mind you, the intentionally-added fluoride in many public water systems is just as bad — although interested parties would have you believe otherwise. Don’t think that bottled water is the answer, either — many bottled waters contain chemicals too because 40% of bottled water is drawn from municipal supplies. From the Washington Post:
A new analysis showing the presence of a probable carcinogen in the tap water of 31 cities across the country, including the District and Bethesda, has raised questions about what consumers in those communities can do to reduce their exposure.
The chemical, hexavalent chromium, got public attention via the 2000 film “Erin Brockovich” and has been deemed a “probable carcinogen” by the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health.
Although basic water filters such as those made by Brita and PUR do…
