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Water for People

已有 4555 次阅读 2019-6-24 08:34 |个人分类:生活点滴|系统分类:海外观察

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Water for People

It is well known one can die of thirst before hunger. Water is essential for life. The world’s water supply from rainfall, river flow, and underground aquafers are more or less constant. But our population are ever growing and projected to reach 10 billion by 2050. Thus shortage of water for human survival looms in the near future. In fact water crises are already occurring in various parts of the world (the latest well known case is that of Cape town, South Africa last year https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=-cAPXYzqCtK5ggf3yrLoCg&q=cape+town+water+crisis+2018&oq=Cape+town+water+crisis&gs_l=psy-ab.1.1.0l10.1073.6046..8515...0.0..0.185.1845.20j3......0....1..gws-wiz.....0..35i39i70i249j35i39j0i131.mGaeXewOkJU   Another not well known but real problem is the fact that the mighty Colorado river becomes almost a trickle by the time it enters the sea https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2014/05/19/a-sacred-reunion-the-colorado-river-returns-to-the-sea/ ). Thus the question: what is the solution?

Two are being discussed and tried. The first is desalination of sea water. It is expensive. But necessity can dictate it. For example, the country of Israel is already doing it and producing half of the water needs of her population. The second is to drag large iceberg (of hundred million tons) from the Southern or Northern artic regions to where it is needed. This is being proposed for South Africa. Again it is an expensive undertaking and success of the project is not certain.

Anyhow, such long term serious problems for humanity, similar to climate change, do not get enough attention from the government and the population for understandable reasons until perhaps too late. 




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