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http://www.newsweek.com/middle-east-water-crisis-spreads-united-states-447401

QuoteSecret conversations between American diplomats show how a growing water crisis in the Middle East destabilized the region, helping spark civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and how those water shortages are spreading to the United States.

Classified U.S. cables reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting show a mounting concern by global political and business leaders that water shortages could spark unrest across the world, with dire consequences.

Many of the cables read like diary entries from an apocalyptic sci-fi novel.

“Water shortages have led desperate people to take desperate measures with equally desperate consequences,” according to a 2009 cable sent by U.S. Ambassador Stephen Seche in Yemen as water riots erupted across the country.

On Sept. 22 of that year, Seche sent a stark message to the U.S. State Department in Washington relaying the details of a conversation with Yemen’s minister of water, who “described Yemen’s water shortage as the ‘biggest threat to social stability in the near future.’ He noted that 70 percent of unofficial roadblocks stood up by angry citizens are due to water shortages, which are increasingly a cause of violent conflict.”

Seche soon cabled again, stating that 14 of the country’s 16 aquifers had run dry. At the time, Yemen wasn’t getting much news coverage, and there was little public mention that the country’s groundwater was running out.

These communications, along with similar cables sent from Syria, now seem eerily prescient, given the violent meltdowns in both countries that resulted in a flood of refugees to Europe.

Groundwater, which comes from deeply buried aquifers, supplies the bulk of freshwater in many regions, including Syria, Yemen and drought-plagued California. It is essential for agricultural production, especially in arid regions with little rainwater. When wells run dry, farmers are forced to fallow fields, and some people get hungry, thirsty and often very angry.

The classified diplomatic cables, made public years ago by Wikileaks, now are providing fresh perspective on how water shortages have helped push Syria and Yemen into civil war, and prompted the king of neighboring Saudi Arabia to direct his country’s food companies to scour the globe for farmland. Since then, concerns about the world’s freshwater supplies have only accelerated.

It’s not just government officials who are worried. In 2009, U.S. Embassy officers visited  Nestle’s headquarters in Switzerland, where company executives, who run the world’s largest food company and are dependent on freshwater to grow ingredients, provided a grim outlook of the coming years. An embassy official cabled Washington with the subject line, “Tour D’Horizon with Nestle: Forget the Global Financial Crisis, the World Is Running Out of Fresh Water.”

“Nestle thinks one-third of the world’s population will be affected by fresh water scarcity by 2025, with the situation only becoming more dire thereafter and potentially catastrophic by 2050,” according to a March 24, 2009, cable. “Problems will be severest in the Middle East, northern India, northern China, and the western United States.”

At the time of that meeting, government officials from Syria and Yemen already had started warning U.S. officials that their countries were slipping into chaos as a result of water scarcity.

By September 2009, Yemen’s water minister told the U.S. ambassador that the water riots in his country were a “sign of the future” and predicted “that conflict between urban and rural areas over water will lead to violence,” according to the cables.

Less than two years later, rural tribesmen fought their way into Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and seized two buildings: the headquarters of the ruling General People’s Congress and the main offices of the water utility. The president was forced to resign, and a new government was formed. But water issues continued to amplify long-simmering tensions between various religious groups and tribesmen, which eventually led to a full-fledged civil war.

Reveal reviewed a cache of water-related documents that included Yemen, Nestle and Saudi Arabia among the diplomatic documents made public by Wikileaks in 2010. Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, found similar classified U.S. cables sent from Syria. Those cables also describe how water scarcity destabilized the country and helped spark a war that has sent more than 1 million refugees fleeing into Europe, a connection Friedman has continued to report.

The water-fueled conflicts in the Middle East paint a dark picture of a future that many governments now worry could spread around the world as freshwater supplies become increasingly scarce. The CIA, the State Department and similar agencies in other countries are monitoring the situation.

In the past, global grain shortages have led to rapidly increasing food prices, which analysts have attributed to sparking the Arab Spring revolution in several countries, and in 2008 pushed about 150 million people into poverty, according to the World Bank.

Water scarcity increasingly is driven by three major factors: Global warming is forecast to create more severe droughts around the world. Meat consumption, which requires significantly more water than a vegetarian or low-meat diet, is spiking as a growing middle class in countries such as China and India can afford to eat more pork, chicken and beef. And the world’s population continues to grow, with an expected 2 billion more stomachs to feed by 2050.

The most troubling signs of the looming threat first appeared in the Middle East, where wells started running dry nearly 15 years ago. Having drained down their own water supplies, food companies from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere began searching overseas.

In Saudi Arabia, the push to scour the globe for water came from the top. King Abdullah decreed that grains such as wheat and hay would need to be imported to conserve what was left of the country’s groundwater. All wheat production in Saudi Arabia will cease this year, and other water-intensive crops such as hay are being phased out, too, the king ruled.

A classified U.S. cable from Saudi Arabia in 2008 shows that King Abdullah directed Saudi food companies to search overseas for farmland with access to freshwater and promised to subsidize their operations. The head of the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh concluded that the king’s goal was “maintaining political stability in the Kingdom.”

U.S. intelligence sources are quick to caution that while water shortages played a significant factor in the dissolution of Syria and Yemen, the civil wars ultimately occurred as a result of weak governance, high unemployment, religious differences and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in addition to water shortages.

For instance, the state of California has endured a record drought without suffering an armed coup to overthrow Gov. Jerry Brown.

But for less stable governments, severe water shortages are increasingly expected to cause political instability, according to the U.S. intelligence community.

In a 2014 speech, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said food and water scarcity are contributing to the “most diverse array of threats and challenges as I’ve seen in my 50-plus years in the intel business.

“As time goes on, we’ll be confronting issues I call ‘basics’ resourcesâ€"food, water, energy, and diseaseâ€"more and more as an intelligence community,” he said.

These problems are not just happening overseas, but already are leading to heated political issues in the United States. In the western part of the country, which Nestle forecast will suffer severe long-term shortages, tensions are heating up as Middle Eastern companies arrive to tap dwindling water supplies in California and Arizona.

Almarai, which is Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company and has publicly said it’s following the king’s directive, began pumping up billions of gallons of water in the Arizona desert in 2014 to grow hay that it exports back to the Middle East. Analysts refer to this as exporting “virtual water.” It is more cost effective to use the Arizona water to irrigate land in America and ship the hay to Saudi Arabia rather than filling a fleet of oil tankers with the water.

Arizonans living near Almarai’s hay operation say their groundwater is dropping fast as the Saudis and other foreign companies increase production. They are now worried their domestic wells might suffer the same fate as those in Syria and Yemen.

In January, more than 300 people packed into a community center in rural La Paz County to listen to the head of the state’s water department discuss how long their desert aquifer would last.

Five sheriff’s deputies stood guard at the event to ensure the meeting remained civil â€" the Arizona Department of Water Resources had requested extra law enforcement, according to county Supervisor Holly Irwin.

“Water can be a very angry issue,” she said. “With people’s wells drying up, it becomes very personal.”

Thomas Buschatzke, Arizona’s water director, defended the Saudi farm, saying it provides jobs and increases tax revenue .  He added that “Arizona is part of the global economy; our agricultural industry generates billions of dollars annually to our state’s economy.”

But state officials admit they don’t know how long the area’s water will last, given the increased water pumping, and announced plans to study it.

“It’s gotten very emotional,” Irwin said. “When you see them drilling all over the place, I need to protect the little people.”

After the meeting, the state approved another two new wells for the Saudi company, each capable of pumping more than a billion gallons of water a year.

Back in Yemen in 2009, U.S. Ambassador Seche described how as aquifers were drained, and groundwater levels dropped lower, rich landowners drilled deeper and deeper wells. But everyday citizens did not have the money to dig deeper, and as their wells ran dry, they were forced to leave their land and livelihoods behind.

“The effects of water scarcity will leave the rich and powerful largely unaffected,” Seche wrote in the classified 2009 cable. “These examples illustrate how the rich always have a creative way of getting water, which not only is unavailable to the poor, but also cuts into the unreplenishable resources.”

New word: unreplenishable. (?)

Technology to some extent can provide help, because passive condensation collectors can locally provide small amounts. A tree is a passive condensation collector. The leaves on deciduous trees are at different angles, some up and some down. The surface of the leaves is hydrophobic, to not absorb water. Leaves above shield leaves below to inhibit evaporation, and the water collects in droplets that either fall straight down to water the tree or run down the branches to water the center part, the trunk. Trees also cool the earth by providing shade and allowing plants in the area around to receive water. This is s couple of reasons why  trees are so vital to the ecosystem.

An old survival trick is to use a sheet of plastic to wrap a small tree up and then shake it vigorously in the morning hours. You can collect enough water to keep yourself hydrated that way. Just your tip for the day.  :biggrin:

Southern California is starting to understand the problem.  At one time, I heard some Californians suggest a pipeline from the Pacific Northwest, which has traditionally always been awash in water.  While that would help redistribute water, the Pacific Northwest's supplies are not unlimited, and I can imagine them drained dry by the heavy demands of So Cal.  Hell, the population of the Los Angles suburbs is bigger than the whole of Montana and Idaho.

Some places will still have ample water supplies, but as the resource becomes limited, people in areas of heavy rain will end up competing for their own water.  But never fear, Corporate America will make the best of a bad situation and step up to the plate to distribute water to the highest bidder.  The last wealthy man left standing will be the winner.

The article explains clearly how we fail to thrive as a species. I understand that coordination and love are key ingredients to thriving.

Was at Glacier National Park a couple of years ago. The glaciers feed several large lakes and a lot of towns South, West and East of there. If you go there you understand, because the area South and East is largely prairie. Glacier rises right out of the prairie. The Northern part extends into Canada. Lose the glaciers you lose a substantial percentage, if not most, of the water.

Also read a thing that the loss of ice in Greenland and the shift of ice at Antarctica was of such mass it could affect the planet's wobble, though apparently not hazardously. Scary shit. We should have been doing something about it 50 years ago.

Don't do anything with rainwater, without first contacting your attorney ... he needs his cut!

https://www.truthorfiction.com/collecting-rainwater-is-illegal-in-some-states/

Further highlighting the fact humans as a species needs to stop overpopulating the planet.

Makes a lot of fucking sense to move to where water is.. . Think about tomorrow instead of today.  If you live in a desert don't bitch to me about the lack of water. Pick your stupid ass up and move to where it rains once and again instead of waiting for all of the water to be gone  and want me to come fight your water war..

If only there were some kind of massive water reserve we could distill into something drinkable... :lol:

Plenty of (rain)water around these parts.

Sendt fra min SM-G920F med Tapatalk

I can certainly see the day coming when we'll have vast ghost towns in the western part of the US and other places around the world unless they find ways to pump huge amounts of water westward, but why should cities with plenty of water be willing to let their water supplies be taken to other parts of the country or even parts of the world? 
In this country and many others living in deserts really is a choice. It's not debatable like say...homosexuality..(cough cough)  We don't have border guards preventing people from moving. I understand that for some people, especially poor people moving across the country isn't easy and can create some hardships, but no more hardship than dying of thirst..

Within our children's lifetime, water will likely be more valuable than oil.  Eventually some areas of the world will need to de-salinate the ocean for it, but that is very energy intensive.  I've heard about generating electricity on buoys via the wave action.  That could be a potential solution, but who knows how that would impact other systems. 

People have been crying that we are running out of water for decades without every bothering to explain what they're saying.  As a result people tend to think "I pump it out of the ground, I use it, it goes down the drain and eventually into the river and back into the ground.  What's the big deal?"  They simply don't realize that it takes thousands of years for water to make it down to where we pump it from.  And they also talk about a shortage of water and global flooding virtually simultaneously and just expect the general populous to understand that these are two separate problems which do not cancel each other out.

The last time I remember being taught something about water usage being a problem was in grade school back in the early '80s, when I was too young to actually understand what they were saying and why it was a problem, not that they did anything more than simply state that it was a problem and how you shouldn't let the water run when you brush your teeth if you wanted to fix it.  It made the subject seem trivial, unimportant and stupid.  In fact, the only effect it had on my life is that from that point forward for a long time, when I heard about water usage being a problem, I simply ignored it, assuming I already knew everything I needed to know, it wasn't a big deal and if I wanted to do something about it I would just not flush the toilet after I peed once or twice and, boom, I've done my part.

For as serious an issue as this actually is, the public education effort about this issue has been beyond pathetic.

Put brick in toilet tank.

Put flow restrictor in shower head.

Don't drink water, drink whiskey ;-)

So Tank Girl is the future?

Quote from: Jason78 on April 19, 2016, 01:11:14 PM
So Tank Girl is the future?

God, that movie was SO STUPID and SO FRIGGING GREAT!  I love the "It's like the first time you had sex" quote.