GLOBAL WARMING, CLIMATE CHANGE, PROLONGED DROUGHT, INCREASING POPULATION, HYDRAULIC FRACTURING AND DIMINISHING WATER SUPPLIES

The H20 HOV program this past week at the San Juan Capistrano Community Center was very informative, and I am very grateful for the efforts of San Juan Capistrano, Dana Point and San Clemente’s staff to educate our fellow citizens.

I have been a residence of San Juan Capistrano since 1973, and I am  concerned that our state legislature and local city councils are not giving serious thought to the stresses population growth and hydraulic fracturing have on our water supply.  Water is our most precious resource, and we cannot afford to waste it.

If we are going to survive, we cannot limit our thinking or actions to within the area of our city limits, we must begin thinking outside the box, because most of our water comes from outside our city limits. 

We are going to have to take into consideration the effects our reliance on fossil fuels has on global warming, climate change and our water supply because they are all interrelated.  We have no choice when it comes to water, we must factor in the considerable effects population growth and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) have on our already over-stressed water supplies.

The knowledge that carbon emissions would sooner or later threaten the survival of our species has been known for literally thousands of years.

From ancient times, people suspected that the climate of a region could change over the course of centuries.  For example, Theophrastus, a pupil of Aristotle, told how “the draining of marshes had made a particular locality more susceptible to freezing, and he speculated that lands became warmer when the clearing of forests exposed them to sunlight.”

Renaissance and later scholars were witnesses to the effects of how deforestation, irrigation, and grazing since ancient times altered the lands around the Mediterranean, and they acknowledged that these human interventions had a plausible effect on local weather.

In 1824, Joseph Fourier “found that Earth's atmosphere kept the planet warmer than would be the case in a vacuum, and he made the first calculations of the warming effect.  He recognized that the atmosphere transmitted visible light waves efficiently to the earth's surface. The earth then absorbed visible light and emitted infrared radiation in response, but the atmosphere did not transmit infrared radiation efficiently, therefore increasing surface temperatures.”

In a 1827 paper Fourier stated, "The establishment and progress of human societies, and the action of natural forces, can notably change the state of the ground surface over vast regions, as well as the  distribution of waters and the great movements of the air.  Such effects have the ability to make the mean degree of heat vary over the course of several centuries,  for the analytic expressions contain coefficients which depend on the state of the surface, and which greatly influence the temperature.”

In 1859, John Tyndall “determined that coal gas, a mix of methane and other gases, strongly absorbed infrared radiation.”  Five years later, he took Fourier's earlier work one step further when he investigated “the absorption of infrared radiation in different gases. He found that water vapor, hydrocarbons like methane (CH4), and carbon dioxide (CO2) strongly block infrared radiation.”

Svante Arrhenius followed in 1896 by “calculating that cutting CO2 in half would suffice to produce an ice age” and that “a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would give a total warming of 5-6 degrees Celsius.” 

Sound familiar?

Moving forward in time, it should be noted that EVERY president since John F. Kennedy has sounded the global warming/climate change alarm, yet our government has done very little about global warming and climate change relative to the scale, scope and longevity of the problem.

Over the past five decades, ever since we journeyed to the moon, we have been witnesses to the public’s capacity to solve public problems  diminish sharply, while simultaneously the power of the private sector, banks, financial institutions, and corporations has risen, eroding the power of democratic governments to govern.

Since 1979, beginning with the first World Climate Conference, held in Geneva,  more than two dozen scientific conferences have been held.  Despite a scientific consensus that global warming and climate change are real and the future of humanity threatened, little has been politically accomplished.  Declarations and treaties have been signed, and “sustainable development goals" created to better protect the environment, and guarantee food and power to the poorest.  In the end, however, it has been essentially “business as usual” with little to no progress being made.

One does not have to look far to see the effects of global warming and climate change, especially in the ways it affects our water supplies.  A look at the Landsat photos of Lakes Powell and Mead, from 1985 to the present, for example, shows the gravity of the problem facing the Colorado river basin and, for that matter, us as well.

Scientists predict that Lake Mead could be a dry lake bed between now and 2021, while the latest drought monitor released by the National Climatic Data Center this past week shows that the our entire state is under moderate drought conditions, but when you look closely at the map, 76.6% of the state is experiencing extreme drought conditions, and for 24.7% of the state, the level of dryness is "exceptional."

The cause?  More than a decade of severe to exceptional drought and the demands of increasing population,  Combined you have the recipe for catastrophic disaster.

The U.S. Water Resources Council, established in 1965 (P.L. 89-80) stated that “declining ground water levels [caused by extended severe to exceptional droughts] and increasing population indicate that the freshwater supply is reaching its limits. . . .”

In 2003, the Council reported that “significant groundwater depletion has already permanently reduced an aquifer’s storage capacity or allowed saltwater to intrude into freshwater sources. Tremendous population growth, driving increases in the use of public water supplies is anticipated in the Western and Southern states, areas that are already taxing existing supplies.”

The extended moderate to exceptional drought throughout the southwest and California the past decade have taken its toll. And now we are compounding the problem by allowing hydraulic fracturing to continue virtually unabated thanks to a lack of, or ineffective, regulation.

To continue our reliance on fossil fuels is not only downright dumb; it is suicidal. Oil, coal and natural gas are finite and they are rapidly being depleted.  Burning them only continues to put additional greenhouse gas (GHG) into the atmosphere, trapping infrared energy that would normally be dissipated into space. The result is the planet continues to warm, just as Svante Arrhenius predicted more-than 100 years ago, and this warming is causing significant changes in our climate.

The proof that global warming and climate change are real is not only irrefutable; it is  overwhelming.  The notion that fossil fuels are supply-constrained rather than finite has gone from “being generally dismissed, to being partially accepted, to being vociferously dismissed.”  At the same time, the “public conversation about energy and climate, especially in the United States, [has gone] from one of ‘How shall we reduce our carbon emissions’ to ‘How shall we spend our new found energy wealth?’”

San Juan Capistrano’s Ground Water Recovery Plant (GWRP), I am told, currently provides 43-percent of our daily water.
 

• What happens if  it has to supply 100-percent of our daily need?
  
• What effect will an increase in our population have on its ability to supply our needs?