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“Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough.”
~ Oprah Winfrey
It's just so sad. There are some crazy sick people in this world.
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Peak Water: Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry. How Three Regions Are Coping
By Matthew Power Email 04.21.08 | 6:00 PM
Photo: Donald Milne
That the news is familiar makes it no less alarming: 1.1 billion people, about one-sixth of the world's population, lack access to safe drinking water. Aquifers under Beijing, Delhi, Bangkok, and dozens of other rapidly growing urban areas are drying up. The rivers Ganges, Jordan, Nile, and Yangtze — all dwindle to a trickle for much of the year. In the former Soviet Union, the Aral Sea has shrunk to a quarter of its former size, leaving behind a salt-crusted waste.
Water has been a serious issue in the developing world for so long that dire reports of shortages in Cairo or Karachi barely register. But the scarcity of freshwater is no longer a problem restricted to poor countries. Shortages are reaching crisis proportions in even the most highly developed regions, and they're quickly becoming commonplace in our own backyard, from the bleached-white bathtub ring around the Southwest's half-empty Lake Mead to the parched state of Georgia, where the governor prays for rain. Crops are collapsing, groundwater is disappearing, rivers are failing to reach the sea. Call it peak water, the point at which the renewable supply is forever outstripped by unquenchable demand.
This is not to say the world is running out of water. The same amount exists on Earth today as millions of years ago — roughly 360 quintillion gallons. It evaporates, coalesces in clouds, falls as rain, seeps into the earth, and emerges in springs to feed rivers and lakes, an endless hydrologic cycle ordained by immutable laws of chemistry. But 97 percent of it is in the oceans, where it's useless unless the salt can be removed — a process that consumes enormous quantities of energy. Water fit for drinking, irrigation, husbandry, and other human uses can't always be found where people need it, and it's heavy and expensive to transport. Like oil, water is not equitably distributed or respectful of political boundaries; about 50 percent of the world's freshwater lies in a half-dozen lucky countries.
Freshwater is the ultimate renewable resource, but humanity is extracting and polluting it faster than it can be replenished. Rampant economic growth — more homes, more businesses, more water-intensive products and processes, a rising standard of living — has simply outstripped the ready supply, especially in historically dry regions. Compounding the problem, the hydrologic cycle is growing less predictable as climate change alters established temperature patterns around the globe.
One barrier to better management of water resources is simply lack of data — where the water is, where it's going, how much is being used and for what purposes, how much might be saved by doing things differently. In this way, the water problem is largely an information problem. The information we can assemble has a huge bearing on how we cope with a world at peak water.
That data already shows the era of easy water is ending. Even economically advanced regions face unavoidable pressures — on their industrial output, the quality of life in their cities, their food supply. Wired visited three such areas: the American Southwest, southeastern England, and southeastern Australia. The difficulties these places face today are harbingers of the dawning era of peak water, and their struggles to find solutions offer a glimpse of the challenge ahead.
On the descent into Sky Harbor International Airport, Phoenix's endless grid of streets and tract homes is etched into the desert floor like the imprinted surface of a microchip. When the sunlight hits at the right angle, the canals that zigzag across the landscape light up like semiconductor traces surging with electricity.
And Phoenix is sprawling at a rate that seems to rival Moore's law. In the 1990s, the metro area was growing at the rate of an acre every three hours. The population is expected to nearly double in the next 20 years. But cities, unlike microchips, don't double in efficiency every 18 months. A 2007 government report stated that staggering growth in the American Southwest "will inevitably result in increasingly costly, controversial, and unavoidable trade-off choices." The issue: how to parcel out a dwindling water supply.
The city's chief water sources are the Salt River Project and the Central Arizona Project, two massive water systems that bookend a century-long effort to hydrate the region. The Salt River Project began in 1903 with the Roosevelt Dam, which reined in the flood-prone waterway. Today, the SRP is a vast network of reservoirs, hydroelectric dams, and channels. As for the Central Arizona Project, it's one of the largest and most expensive aqueducts in the US, completed in 1993 at a cost of $3.6 billion. The 336-mile CAP canal diverts 489 billion gallons a year from the Colorado River, irrigating more than 300,000 acres of farmland and slaking the thirst of Phoenix and Tucson.
Intel's Len Drago outside the company's Arizona chip fab.
Photo: Donald Milne
The CAP isn't the only straw sucking at the Colorado. Seven states and dozens of Indian reservations, as well as Mexico, tap its flow. Development has sapped the river, a problem exacerbated by a drought called "perhaps the worst in 500 years" by US interior secretary Gale Norton. Lake Mead, an immense reservoir that dams the Colorado to supply most of Phoenix's water, has a 50-50 chance of running dry by 2021, according to a study by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Larry Dozier, the CAP's deputy general manager, calls this finding "absurd," claiming that studies show the reservoir won't disappear entirely, even in the worst case. However, the Scripps researchers counter that their calculations are conservative and warn that "the water shortage is likely to be more dire in reality."
Chandler, a city on the southeastern edge of Phoenix, epitomizes the regional dilemma. Founded in 1912 to accommodate farmers who ventured into the Sonoran Desert, Chandler supports a population that has tripled in the past 20 years to 250,000. On the outskirts of town, where the last remaining farms fade into the scrub, stand three colossal Intel semiconductor manufacturing plants: Fab 12, Fab 22, and the gleaming new Fab 32, which produces state-of-the-art chips on a floor area equivalent to 17 football fields. Intel is a key driver of the local economy. The company employs 10,000 people and has invested $9 billion in Chandler; its workers, on average, earn four times the Arizona median salary. Just one problem: The fabs are also by far the city's biggest consumer of water.
Chip fabrication is a thirsty process. The silicon wafers must be rinsed after each of the several dozen semiconductor layers is applied and etched. Consequently, the Intel campus has been designed to maximize every drop of the 2 million gallons it uses daily. Intel, wary of spilling its manufacturing secrets, bars journalists from entering the enormous silver and white monolith. Fortunately, the plant's circulatory system is visible from the outside. Len Drago, who is responsible for the facility's environmental profile, offers to show it to me. As we walk around the building's perimeter, he explains how water flows through the plant.
The tiniest imperfection can render a wafer useless, so incoming water cascades through a series of filters until its mineral content is a hundred-thousandth that of Colorado River water. The briny byproduct goes into a towering tank that looks like a Jules Verne moon rocket, which distills out the remaining water and pumps it back to the beginning of the system. The salty sludge goes to an evaporation pond. The purified water, meanwhile, is used to wash chips. The rinse water is treated and then sent to other parts of the campus: the air scrubbers that filter the plant's emissions, the massive cooling towers that keep workers from suffocating in the desert heat. Even the drought-resistant desert landscaping in the plant's parking lot is irrigated with wastewater.
The Thirst of Nations
Modern life runs on water. But the wells are running dry.
— Greta Lorge
Infographics by Travis Stearns
But Intel doesn't reuse all of its wastewater. Every day, the company pumps 1.5 million gallons to a $19 million reverse-osmosis desalination plant it built for Chandler. This water, cleaned to drinking standards, is pumped 6 miles away and injected 600 feet down into a sandstone aquifer beneath the city. To date, Intel has banked more than 3 billion gallons. The facility recycles or stores 75 percent of the water it brings in, Drago says.
Intel isn't simply trying to be a good corporate citizen. Nor is it merely out to save money. Running a sustainable operation greases the regulatory wheels when the company wants to expand. Because Intel was well within the government's environmental thresholds for the site, Fab 32 didn't even require a new water-use permit. It hasn't always been this way, Drago admits. "Back in the early 1980s, we had three Superfund sites in California," he says. "It's a lot easier to do things the right way. Especially in the long term."
The long term, however, will be ruled by the twin realities of an exploding population and a hotter, drier climate. Dave Siegel, Chandler's water czar, describes how he plans to continue providing for the growing city (and his biggest customer, Intel). The government has legal rights to all the water it needs, he says, not only from the SRP and the CAP but from 27 wells drilled into the aquifer. "That's legal water, mind you," he says. "It's a different thing than physical water." Legal water refers to the complex array of agreements, treaties, and laws that govern water use in the American West — and federal and state allocations trump Chandler's municipal rights. As for physical water, that's the stuff coming out of the tap. All the legal water in the world isn't enough to wash a bandanna if there's no physical water available.
So Chandler came up with a clever plan. The city banks as much excess CAP water as it can, pumping it underground along with Intel's contribution. Thanks to this so-called recharge, the local aquifer is actually rising a few feet a year. Siegel maintains that even if the most apocalyptic predictions came true — say, the rivers collapse completely — Chandler would be able to soldier on. "If we never recharge another drop," he says, "we have enough water underneath us to last about 100 years." His projection includes future growth, including two more Intel fabs now on the drawing board.
John Halsall, director of water services at Thames Water in London.
Photo: Donald Milne
But many scientists say that banking river water underground is not enough. Gary Woodard, a bearded water resource expert at the Sahra Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has made a career of studying the issues facing water-stressed regions around the world. He admires Intel's efforts, but he cautions that direct water consumption is only half the story. To describe the other half, he invokes the "water-energy nexus": the idea that it takes water to produce energy, and energy to take advantage of water. That is, supplies of water and power are interdependent.
"Intel is doing everything it can," Woodard says, "but high-quality recycling, pumping water up and down and recirculating it, uses an incredible amount of energy." The Intel campus draws the power equivalent of 54,000 homes every year. Intel gets a sizable portion of that power from the Palo Verde Nuclear plant outside of Phoenix, and this means that it takes far more water to make a microchip than actually circulates through the company's recycling system. "No energy generation system uses more water than a low-desert nuclear plant," Woodard says. Palo Verde uses 20 billion gallons annually to cool its turbines. That water is emitted as water vapor from its cooling towers, to fall as rain somewhere else. None of this is figured into Intel's water footprint. Neither are the additional employees, new homes built in the desert, and cars that will come along with Intel's next round of fabs. More parking lots will absorb more solar radiation, contributing to Phoenix's urban heat island. More energy and more water will be required for cooling.
Other experts share Woodard's concern. Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California, a leading think tank on water issues. He isn't surprised that Intel and Chandler are optimistic about the future. Their cheerful attitude, he believes, reflects their confidence that social and economic priorities are on their side. "It shows to what lengths we'll go to ensure water for high-value uses," Gleick says. "Truth is, Intel will always be able to pay more than anybody else for water. They can act as though it's not scarce, because for them it's a relatively small cost."
If moneyed special interests determine the going price of water, eventually they will edge out users who can't afford to pay top dollar. Agriculture will be squeezed out, as will water rights for poorer communities. And the environment, it goes almost without saying, will twist in the wind: "That's why the Colorado River no longer reaches its delta," Gleick says. Intel will continue to drive Chandler's economy, lubricate the regulatory process, and burnish its image while small towns elsewhere along the Colorado wither. If this seems mercilessly Darwinian, it's also true that Intel has a critical role to play in solving water issues. Ever-more-capable microprocessors are at the heart of efforts worldwide to keep the water flowing.
Looking out at Kensington Gardens in London, where ornate fountains shimmer in the sunshine, it's difficult to imagine that this famously damp city has less water per person at its disposal than Dallas, Rome, or Istanbul. But it's true, and the problem is getting worse. I'm sitting in a restaurant next to the gardens with John Rodda, a hydrologist with Britain's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. White-haired and buttoned-down, Rodda presents his doom-and-gloom outlook with quintessential British stoicism. He pulls out a map of Britain and points to the country's southeast, printed an angry shade of red to indicate water scarcity. "We fall well below the World Bank standard, per capita, of a water-stressed region," he says.
In the summer of 2006, London was hit by the worst drought in three decades. After two consecutive dry winters (the time of year when rainfall usually replenishes the water supply), the city imposed restrictions on watering lawns, filling swimming pools, and other nonessential uses. Newspaper columnists raised the specter of Londoners lining up at fire hydrants to collect water rations. Desperate to maintain supplies, water companies considered extreme measures: cloud seeding, bulk transportation by tanker, even towing icebergs down from the Arctic.
Unlike Arizona, where industry and agriculture use the vast majority of the water, London serves mainly the people who live there. But there are a lot of them: 7.5 million, expected to exceed 8 million by 2016. "We've got a huge number of people living on a small island where it doesn't rain as much as people think," says Jacob Tompkins, director of Waterwise, a London-based nonprofit devoted to water efficiency, "and we're living in the driest bits."
The 2006 drought made it clear that anything more severe, like a longer run of dry winters, would push the system toward collapse. "It would shut down the economy," Tompkins says. Then there's the changing pattern of rainfall. After the 2006 drought, the summer of 2007 was one of the wettest on record. But that rain fell in downpours rather than the customary drizzle, causing devastating floods. "It used to rain the same amount every year," Tompkins continues. "We built some reservoirs and it was fine. But rainfall intensity has doubled, and rain comes in storm events. In terms of infrastructure, that doesn't work very well."
L. J. Arthur, a farmer in Australia's desiccated Murray-Darling basin.
Photos: Donald Milne
London's infrastructure has a more fundamental problem: It's creaking with age. "Charles Dickens was the best-selling author when most of our pipe work went in," says John Halsall, director of water services at Thames Water, the private company that provides water to greater London. Thames Water maintains more than 300 reservoirs, 99 treatment plants, and more than 20,000 miles of pipe. The city's water system was a triumph of 19th-century engineering, but one-third of the mains are more than 150 years old, veterans of such scourges as Hitler's bombs and corrosively acidic soil. Thames' system leaks 180 million gallons a day, 30 percent of overall flow. To fix a leak, which the company does some 82,000 times a year, it has to shut down traffic and dig up the streets in one of the most congested cities on Earth. A brief walk around the West End turns up a half-dozen work crews digging up Victorian mains, scooping through layers of history to repair the pipes one segment at a time.
Replacing all the Victorian pipes would cost an estimated $3.6 billion. The conundrum facing Thames Water is how to upgrade the crumbling system without tearing up the city or bankrupting the company. There are two sets of solutions: On one hand are small, local, high tech projects. On the other are traditional large-scale civil engineering initiatives that have been a staple of water management since the Roman Empire. Tompkins favors the small-scale approach. In particular, he likes metering. There's no way to measure the water flowing through much of the underground infrastructure, which makes it hard to identify leaky sections. Likewise, not even a quarter of the city's households are metered, and that makes it difficult to encourage conservation. If consumers understood exactly how much they were using, Tompkins reasons, perhaps they would change their behavior, like a dieter motivated by the scale readout every morning.
Metering addresses a lack of information about water at the lowest level, right in the pipe. And now there's a way to do it more effectively than ever. In the grand tea room of a posh business club known as the Institute of Directors, overlooked by huge oil portraits of admirals and lords, Michael Tapia shows me a device called iStaq. Tapia is CEO of Qonnectis, iStaq's manufacturer. Barely the size of a hardcover book, the unit can be tucked away under a manhole cover and transmit measurements of water level, pressure, flow, and other variables. "The system itself is intelligent," Tapia says. "It will send you an email or text saying, You have a burst pipe.'" Qonnectis has a $400,000 contract with Thames Water to help detect leaks.
The Thirst of Nations
Electric, gas, and water utilities all stand to benefit from smart metering. So far, smart water meters have been deployed mostly in oil-rich Middle Eastern cities like Doha and Abu Dhabi, where water is precious and infrastructure relatively new. However, simply measuring the flow is a surprisingly powerful motivator. Research shows that installing a meter in a house so people can see how much water they're using can reduce consumption by 10 percent. With the right political carrots and sticks, Tompkins estimates, 70 percent of the city's homes could be metered in just over a decade. "People need to get away from the idea that you just turn on the tap and all the water you want is there," he says.
As promising as smart meters are, giant utilities like to think big, and to them metering is only one drop in an Olympic-size pool. Thames Water has grander designs. The company hopes to dig a 20-mile drainage tunnel, called the Thames Tideway, underneath the river to its sewage treatment plant. The structure would be a hedge against climate change, designed to prevent the city's sewers from flushing into the watercourse as storms intensified. And to address storage capacity, plans call for a huge new reservoir in Oxfordshire. But projects of this scale can take 20 years to complete, and the company is under pressure to find new supplies sooner than that.
Thames Water's most controversial project is a $400 million desalination plant called the Thames Gateway. The proposed facility could take in seawater, filter out the salt, and deliver 35 million gallons of drinking water a day during drought emergencies. Desalination would essentially drought-proof the city, the company claims. It's an appealing solution. The ocean is practically limitless, and the plant would run on biodiesel, giving it a green imprimatur. The project was moving through the approval process in 2006 when London's tough, left-leaning mayor, Ken Livingstone, blocked it.
Livingstone argued that the plant was too expensive and that desalination is too energy-intensive. Stripping seawater of its salt is a pricey way to obtain freshwater, cost-effective only for high-end uses like drinking, but not bathing or watering gardens. And the mayor questioned the proposal's environmental cred: Biodiesel emits carbon, and desalination's super-salty byproduct is toxic to marine life. Thames Water would do better, he insisted, to repair London's decrepit labyrinth of pipes.
With the desalination plant deadlocked, London is running out of time. "The big projects we do are taking longer and longer to get approval, and it doesn't take much to throw them off track," Halsall says. "While we're debating, the risk increases to our basic supply."
Australia has always been dry. It's the most arid continent after Antarctica. Covering an area roughly the size of the lower 48 states, it supports less than one-tenth the US population, and even that is an enormous strain on water supplies. The country was founded during the second-worst drought in its history, but the worst dry spell is unfolding right now. Rainfall, which has declined to 25 percent of the long-term average, is projected to plummet another 40 percent by 2050.
Three factors are working to desiccate the landscape. One is simple overexploitation of existing resources. More water is withdrawn to support agriculture, industry, and cities than the system can handle. Another is El Niño, a weather pattern that periodically alters rainfall, further drying the continent. The third is climate change. Australia is growing hotter, which compounds the other two problems by boosting both consumption and evaporation.
The Thirst of Nations
The convergence of these factors could have catastrophic results. Every major city in Australia is hobbled by mandatory restrictions on water consumption, but most of the country's water — two-thirds — goes to agriculture. The economics of food production have always been based on ready access to cheap water. The price of beer has been rising since a jump in barley prices, a development that many joke could lead to large-scale civil unrest. But it's no joke: The global price of wheat hit its highest level in decades in December, partly due to Australia's water shortage. The most fundamental impact of scarcity will be on Australia's ability to feed itself.
Two hundred miles north of Melbourne, in a dusty farmyard in Moulamein, New South Wales, L. J. Arthur slides open a large steel barn door and steps into the shadows. A few minutes later, the silver-haired, 53-year-old rice grower emerges pushing a helicopter on detachable wheels, the tail rotor braced against his shoulder. We clamber into the bubble cockpit. "From the air, you'll get a much better sense of what two years with no water looks like," he says, checking the gauges. A cloud of dust billows around us, and the pitch of the rotor's whine rises as we pull away from the ground.
We climb to 1,000 feet, and Arthur shouts over the engine, "In a normal year, this would be a carpet of every shade of green imaginable, rice fields as far as you can see." The landscape is tinder-dry, the fields a shorn patchwork of grays and browns, stretching in mind-boggling flatness toward the ochre wastes of the outback. "In a normal year, we'd have 1.2 million tons of rice under production. This year we have 15,000, and there's no telling if that will make it." Rice is often dismissed as the wrong crop for the region because it requires flood irrigation. But producers in the basin can grow 10 tons per hectare, among the highest yields in the world.
We swoop low over a stubble field, scattering a flock of emus. A huge red kangaroo lies languidly in the shade of a eucalyptus. The local native animals are doing fine for now, Arthur tells me, helped along by a watering pond he dug for his sheep. But the future of people in this arid corner of an arid continent is far less certain.
For the second year in a row, the region's rice farmers have received no water at all from the Murray River, the 1,500-mile lifeline that flows out of the Snowy Mountains and helps hydrate the cropland for 40 percent of Australia's food. Inflows into the Murray River last year were the lowest in 116 years of recorded levels, almost half the previous low. Reservoirs in the southern basin hold only 20 percent of capacity, and the summer drawdown hasn't begun.
No one who tries to eke out a living from this land is untouched. The 400,000-square-mile Murray-Darling basin, named for the two main rivers that run through it, receives only 6 percent of the continent's increasingly scarce rainfall. In some places, the groundwater is too salty to drink. Coastal cities are investing in desalination plants, but desalting technology is simply too expensive to use for agriculture. Without irrigation from the river, agriculture couldn't exist here. The farms would literally dry up and blow away.
We land near downtown Moulamein, where a dozen tractors are parked around a shallow clay pit the size of a shopping mall. Since no crops are in the ground, the government has hired local growers to dig the giant hole as an emergency reservoir for the town. Some cash-strapped farmers are now members of road-building crews. A nearby rice-processing plant laid off 90 workers, and the press has reported on depression and suicide among ruined farmers. Many small towns in the basin are teetering on the brink of economic collapse.
A few hours away from Arthur's farm, the managers of the Coleambally Irrigation Cooperative have set out to make Australian agriculture viable. The co-op is a group of 320 farmers connected by a 300-mile network of irrigation channels. Their section of the basin received just 3 percent of its water allocation in December. That means they'll have to become vastly more efficient. Bringing that about is the goal of Murray Smith, Coleambally Irrigation's CEO. In Australia, one-third of agricultural water, on average, is lost to leakage, seepage, evaporation, and faulty metering. Smith thinks the future of farming in Australia is "more crop per drop." Toward that end, his company has invested $15 million in a host of technologies to minimize waste.
In a back room at Coleambally headquarters, Smith calls up a series of displays on a computer screen showing real-time measurements of flow, temperature, and salinity at remote-controlled irrigation gates spread over thousands of acres. Software helps determine exactly where water is being wasted; problems can be addressed by opening or closing gates. Out where the canals draw water from the river, automated flume gates control the inflow. This kind of centralized management is revolutionizing irrigation. It's the same sort of network that allows engineers at Thames Water to watch over London's water supply, the same technology that lets Intel managers optimize the flow of millions of gallons through Fab 32.
There are other datastreams as well. In much the way an MRI depicts the inner workings of the human body, Smith's co-op is using electromagnetic imaging to map the hidden hydrography beneath fields, showing where buried streambeds lurk to draw away precious irrigation water. Sensors dragged through canals can help spot seepage, and sensors embedded in soil can help tailor the irrigation to a particular crop. Eventually, all of this data will be monitored by the farmers themselves through a single Web site, providing a more precise picture of water use than growers have ever had.
Not every farmer wants to risk being an early adopter. When Smith took over the company four years ago, some of the new systems were having problems. Gates didn't work, metering was off, and some crops were lost. Farmers were angry. Smith received death threats. "We're talking about people's livelihoods," he says. Still, Smith has faith in the co-op's network. "Nobody has ever integrated all these technologies into a single irrigation district. Coleambally is going to be the best in the world."
But what about the inescapable facts of drought, climate change, overuse, and scarcity? Smith acknowledges that pain is inevitable, and he envisions a fierce competition among the basin's farmers. Some farmers will be ruined. Some will cash out, availing themselves of one of Australia's newest innovations, an open market for water rights, where 1 megaliter (264,000 gallons) goes for $360. Those who survive will be the ones who use water most efficiently by planting less-thirsty crops and adopting better methods, and they'll have the market to themselves. "There are benefits to being the last man standing," Smith says.
The flow of water through a swath of drought-stricken farmland is complicated. The hydrology of an entire continent is mind-boggling. A day's drive to the east, in the leafy, ironically drizzly capital city of Canberra, I meet Stuart Minchin, a specialist in water information systems who works for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. CSIRO's campus is spread across a lush, eucalyptus-covered hillside above the capital, and Minchin has invited me to see his baby, the Water Resources Observation Network. The centerpiece of the facility is a new $1 million computing and visualization center. I follow Minchin into a large, windowless space outfitted like a cross between the set of The Situation Room and the deck of a Star Destroyer. One wall is covered with several theater-size screens. A bank of computer monitors flashes graphics.
"The problem with both water science and water policy is that there's a vast amount of data and no easy way to understand it," Minchin says. "We're thinking about how to create spatial understanding of water issues." I don a pair of 3-D glasses, and a huge map of Australia leaps off one of the screens, scattered with dozens of blue bar graphs that seem to reach out toward me.
Information about reservoir levels in Murray-Darling used to be spread among 40 Australian agencies. So WRON set up a Web robot to screen-scrape the data and display it on a satellite map. A graphical slider tracks the levels by date. "It's a very powerful way to show information," Minchin says. He imagines using a Google Street View-type technology to map an entire watershed, down to the last wilting gum tree.
The Thirst of Nations
In an adjoining room, a huge bank of servers whirs: The Intel processors, whose manufacture is draining the Colorado River half a world away, are being harnessed to solve Australia's water crisis. "We've never known the answers to basic questions like how much water is in the entire basin," Minchin says. For more than a year, this supercomputer has been crunching 40 terabytes of remote sensing data. When it's finished this year, the analysis will shed light on the way water moves through the region and the consequences of human exploitation. It could hold the secret to restoring the Murray-Darling basin to health.
Minchin is confident that WRON will make a crucial difference to Australia's future — but he doesn't underestimate the challenge. "We'll never have a secure continent," he says. "But at least we can know what the limits are and try not to exceed them."
On the other side of the Snowy Mountains, Hume Dam corrals the Murray River into one of the largest reservoirs in Australia. When construction was finished in 1936, Hume was among the world's greatest public-works projects. It can store 400 trillion gallons and release them at will, providing a stable source of water to the farms and towns along the Murray River and securing Australia's economy for the foreseeable future.
In the sweltering heat, I walk across the concrete expanse of the spillway, more than a mile from end to end. Far below, Lake Hume is not even a quarter full.
In Peter Gleick's view, we have to move away from the "hard path," the massive civil-engineering projects and exploitation of untapped sources that defined the 20th century. Instead, we must turn to a "soft path," making the most efficient use of what we already have. Technology can help, and some new infrastructure will be necessary, Gleick believes. But the larger issue is conceptual: We must view efficiency itself as a source of water and tap this hidden wellspring. Americans already use 20 percent less water per capita than they did a generation ago. Gains in industrial use are even more impressive: A ton of US steel manufactured today requires just 2 percent of the water it did in the 1940s. Still, we are using more than we have. Can we change enough, and soon enough? "The whole point of peak water," Gleick says, "is that we have to fundamentally rethink who gets to use water for what."
It's the first day of Australia's summer, the beginning of Lake Hume's annual drawdown. Measuring rods poke out of the earth high above the lake's surface. Reaching far up the valley, a forest of dead gum trees, drowned decades ago when the lake was filled, is reemerging. Black spires poke their skeletal branches skyward. It's an eerie sight. In the worst-case scenario, Lake Hume will contract to 1 percent capacity this summer. The bed of the Murray River will be all that remains.
Matthew Power (matthewpower.net@gmail.com) has written for Harper's, Men's Journal, and The New York Times.
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-05/ff_peakwater?currentPage=all
Austrian woman says her father imprisoned her
By Heinz-Peter Bader
Reuters
Monday, April 28, 2008
AMSTETTEN, Austria: Austrian police have arrested a man they believe imprisoned his daughter in a windowless basement for 24 years, abused her and fathered seven children with her.
Police said the woman, identified as 42-year-old Elisabeth F, told them her father Josef had lured her into the basement of the block where the family lived in Amstetten in 1984, and drugged and handcuffed her before locking her up in the dungeon.
Three of her children were locked up since birth in the basement of the drab, grey building along with their mother and had never seen sunlight or received any education, police said.
Authorities were still trying to piece together details of the case, which is reminiscent of that of Austrian Natascha Kampusch who spent eight years locked up in a windowless cell before dashing to freedom in August 2006.
Police said Josef, a 73-year-old electrical engineering technician by training, was in custody and had told investigators how to enter the basement prison through a small hidden door, operated by a secret code which only he had known.
"There is not only one, but a number of rooms: one room to sleep in, one to cook, and there are also sanitation facilities," Franz Polzer, head of the criminal investigations unit in the province of Lower Austria, told broadcaster ORF.
Josef's wife Rosemarie had been unaware of what happened to her daughter and it was assumed Elisabeth had disappeared voluntarily when her parents received a letter from her saying they should not search for her.
Elisabeth gave birth to seven children during her ordeal, one of whom died shortly after being born, police said.
Three of the younger children were brought up by Josef and his wife after they were left at the building, the first child accompanied by a note from Elisabeth saying she was unable to care for the baby herself.
Three others, including the two eldest aged 18 and 19, and the youngest, aged 5, had been locked up in the basement with their mother since birth.
"The father seems to be very authoritarian and decided what happened and what was supposed to happen in the family -- and today we know why he very closely guarded the basement," Polzer said.
LOCKED UP SINCE BIRTH
The case only came to light when the oldest child became seriously ill and was taken to hospital in Amstetten. Josef said that child had also been left unconscious on his doorstep, according to media reports.
A 19-year-old girl, who was seriously ill and is still fighting for her life, was last weekend dropped off at the hospital in Amstetten.
Doctors appealed for the girl's mother, who at that time was believed to have disappeared, to come forward to provide more details about the daughter's medical history.
Josef then brought Elisabeth and her remaining two children out of the dungeon, telling his wife that their "missing" daughter had chosen to return home, police said.
"This is not a mother abandoning her child which then had to be admitted to hospital in a serious condition ... We know that she herself has been kept imprisoned by her own father for 24 years in the basement and furthermore she obviously was also subjected to sexual abuse," Polzer said.
After questioning and assurances that she would have no further contact with her father -- who she said abused her from the age of 11 -- Elisabeth agreed to make a "comprehensive statement".
The news sent shockwaves through Amstetten, a town of around 22,000 some 130 km (80 miles) west of the capital Vienna.
"It is so horrible, I can see the house from my balcony and from my window and when I think now of who was in there, I can simply not imagine that," neighbour Corina Schmid told ORF as onlookers gathered in the street outside the three-storey building and investigators in white suits continued their search of the premises.
"I spoke to (Rosemarie) at Christmas, and she told me they didn't know where the daughter was, she had simply vanished," neighbour Margarete Gollonitsch told the broadcaster.
Rosemarie, as well as Elisabeth and her children were receiving psychological counselling. DNA samples of all those involved were taken and would be analysed, police said.
(Reporting by Karin Strohecker; Editing by Dominic Evans)
Significant 'Red Tide' Season Predicted For 2008 Based On Computer Models And Observations
ScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2008) — The end of April usually brings the first signs of harmful algae in New England waters, and this year, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and North Carolina State University (NC State) are preparing for a potentially big bloom.
A combination of abundant beds of algal seeds and excess winter precipitation have set the stage for a harmful algal bloom similar to the historic "red tide" of 2005, according to researchers from WHOI and NC State. The 2005 bloom shut down shellfish beds from the Bay of Fundy to Martha's Vineyard for several months and caused an estimated $50 million in losses to the Massachusetts shellfish industry alone. The weather patterns over the next few weeks will determine whether this year's algal growth approaches the troubles of 2005.
The research team--led by WHOI senior scientists Don Anderson and Dennis McGillicuddy and physical oceanographer Ruoying He of NC State--is several years into the development of a computer model to predict the intensity and location of blooms the toxic algae Alexandrium fundyense in the Gulf of Maine. Though the scientists are reluctant to make an official "forecast" until they can further test their models, colleagues in coastal management and fisheries believe the seasonal forecasting model can already serve as a useful tool for preparing the seafood industry for contingencies.
"With advance warning of a potentially troublesome year for algae, shellfish farmers and fishermen might shift the timing of their harvest or postpone plans for expansion of aquaculture beds," said Anderson, director of the WHOI Coastal Ocean Institute. "Restaurants might make contingency plans for supplies of seafood during the summer, and state agencies can ensure they have adequate staff for the significant monitoring efforts that might be required to protect public health and the shellfish industry."
Seeds or "cysts" of A. fundyense naturally germinate and turn into swimming cells that rise from the seafloor around April 1 of each year. By the end of April, cells usually begin to appear in large numbers in the waters off coastal Maine. The algae are notorious for producing a toxin that accumulates in clams, mussels, and other shellfish and can cause paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) in humans who consume them.
According to a seafloor survey conducted in the fall of 2007 by Anderson's team, the number of Alexandrium cysts--the dormant, seed-like stage of the algae's life-cycle--is more than 30 percent higher than what was observed in the sediments prior to the historic bloom of 2005. The seed beds were especially rich in mid-coast Maine, origin of many of the cells that affect western Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.
Other environmental factors then determine the extent to which the blooms spread down the New England coast. Much of the Northeastern United States was hit with record- or above-average rain and snowfall this winter, which will provide an extra pulse of fresh water and nutrients into coastal waters this spring. The blend of nutrients and fresh water into salty sea water can improve growing conditions for the algae.
"Our hypothesis is that cyst abundance and the weather determines the bloom season," said McGillicuddy, a biological oceanographer in the WHOI Department of Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering. "Will the conditions this spring lead to an extensive bloom along the New England coast" The wind patterns of the next few weeks will determine that."
The research team has run its computer model through four scenarios, using the predominant wind patterns from each year since 2004. Toxicity levels during those years have ranged from little to nothing in the western Gulf of Maine (2004 and 2007), to extremely high levels (2005 and 2006). Blooms were worst for scenarios in which the spring weather was dominated by strong northeast winds, which tend to drive Alexandrium cells toward the southern New England coast. When southwesterlies dominated, the algae tend to stay offshore. Even when there are a lot of cells and toxicity, the effect can be confined to offshore waters.
Anderson, McGillicuddy and He distribute observations and data-driven models once per week with more than 80 coastal resource and fisheries managers in six states and at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration (which oversees food safety).
McGillicuddy and more than a dozen students, technicians, and biologists will depart from Woods Hole on April 28 on the research vessel Oceanus on the first of four expeditions to take stock of this year's bloom and to study the causes of several recent blooms in the historically fertile fishing grounds around Georges Bank. Biologists and oceanographers were surprised by the substantial scale and persistence of Alexandrium blooms discovered on Georges Bank last year.
The research into harmful algal blooms is supported by NOAA's Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research, and the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation (through the Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health). Additional work examining other species of toxic algae in the Gulf and on Georges Bank is supported by the NOAA Oceans and Human Health Initiative (OHHI).
Adapted from materials provided by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080424165309.htm
Credit crunch? The real crisis is global hunger. And if you care, eat less meat
A food recession is under way. Biofuels are a crime against humanity, but - take it from a flesh eater - flesh eating is worse
This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday April 15 2008 on p27 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:01 on April 15 2008.
Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession that is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch. You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters over the past year, that of wheat by 130%. There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices.
But I bet that you have missed the most telling statistic. At 2.1bn tonnes, the global grain harvest broke all records last year - it beat the previous year's by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?
There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation, will feed people.
I am sorely tempted to write another column about biofuels. From this morning all sellers of transport fuel in the United Kingdom will be obliged to mix it with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. The World Bank points out that "the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol ... could feed one person for a year". This year global stockpiles of cereals will decline by around 53m tonnes; this gives you a rough idea of the size of the hunger gap. The production of biofuels will consume almost 100m tonnes, which suggests that they are directly responsible for the current crisis.
On these pages yesterday Ruth Kelly, the secretary of state for transport, promised that "if we need to adjust policy in the light of new evidence, we will". What new evidence does she require? In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity, in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate.
But I have been saying this for four years, and I am boring myself. Of course we must demand that our governments scrap the rules that turn grain into the fastest food of all. But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals - which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.
While meat consumption is booming in Asia and Latin America, in the UK it has scarcely changed since the government started gathering data in 1974. At just over 1kg per person per week, it's still about 40% above the global average, though less than half the amount consumed in the United States. We eat less beef and more chicken than we did 30 years ago, which means a smaller total impact. Beef cattle eat about 8kg of grain or meal for every kilogram of flesh they produce; a kilogram of chicken needs just 2kg of feed. Even so, our consumption rate is plainly unsustainable.
In his magazine The Land, Simon Fairlie has updated the figures produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby's book Can Britain Feed Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet produced by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half Britain's current total). Even if we reduced our consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4m hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture. A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food stocks.
But I cannot advocate a diet that I am incapable of following. I tried it for about 18 months, lost two stone, went as white as bone and felt that I was losing my mind. I know a few healthy-looking vegans, and I admire them immensely. But after almost every talk that I give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey.
What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? One approach is to work out how great a cut would be needed to accommodate the growth in human numbers. The UN expects the population to rise to 9 billion by 2050. These extra people will require another 325m tonnes of grain. Let us assume, perhaps generously, that politicians such as Ruth Kelly are able to "adjust policy in the light of new evidence" and stop turning food into fuel. Let us pretend that improvements in plant breeding can keep pace with the deficits caused by climate change. We would need to find an extra 225m tonnes of grain. This leaves 531m tonnes for livestock production, which suggests a sustainable consumption level for meat and milk some 30% below the current world rate. This means 420g of meat per person per week, or about 40% of the UK's average consumption.
This estimate is complicated by several factors. If we eat less meat we must eat more plant protein, which means taking more land away from animals. On the other hand, some livestock is raised on pasture, so it doesn't contribute to the grain deficit. Simon Fairlie estimates that if animals were kept only on land that is unsuitable for arable farming, and given scraps and waste from food processing, the world could produce between a third and two-thirds of its current milk and meat supply. But this system then runs into a different problem. The Food and Agriculture Organisation calculates that animal keeping is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impacts are especially grave in places where livestock graze freely. The only reasonable answer to the question of how much meat we should eat is as little as possible. Let's reserve it - as most societies have done until recently - for special occasions.
For both environmental and humanitarian reasons, beef is out. Pigs and chickens feed more efficiently, but unless they are free range you encounter another ethical issue: the monstrous conditions in which they are kept. I would like to encourage people to start eating tilapia instead of meat. This is a freshwater fish that can be raised entirely on vegetable matter and has the best conversion efficiency - about 1.6kg of feed for 1kg of meat - of any farmed animal. Until meat can be grown in flasks, this is about as close as we are likely to come to sustainable flesh-eating.
Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.
monbiot.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/15/food.biofuels
Freshening of deep Antarctic waters worries experts
From: Reuters
Published April 18, 2008 09:09 AM
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Scientists studying the icy depths of the sea around Antarctica have detected changes in salinity that could have profound effects on the world's climate and ocean currents.
The scientists returned to the southern Australian city of Hobart on Thursday after a one-month voyage studying the Southern Ocean to see how it is changing and what those changes might mean for global climate patterns.
Voyage leader Steve Rintoul said his team found that salty, dense water that sinks near the edge of Antarctica to the bottom of the ocean about 5 km (3 miles) down was becoming fresher and more buoyant.
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So-called Antarctic bottom water helps power the great ocean conveyor belt, a system of currents spanning the Southern, Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans that shifts heat around the globe.
"The main reason we're paying attention to this is because it is one of the switches in the climate system and we need to know if we are about to flip that switch or not," said Rintoul of Australia's government-backed research arm the CSIRO.
"If that freshening trend continues for long enough, eventually the water near Antarctica would be too light, too buoyant to sink and that limb of the global-scale circulation would shut down," he said on Friday.
Cold, salty water also sinks to the depths in the far north Atlantic Ocean near Greenland and, together with the vast amount of water that sinks off Antarctica, this drives the ocean conveyor belt.
This system brings warm water into the far north Atlantic, making Europe warmer than it would otherwise be, and also drives the large flow of upper ocean water from the tropical Pacific to the Indian Ocean through the Indonesia Archipelago.
If these currents were to slow or stop, the world's climate would eventually be thrown into chaos.
"We don't see any evidence yet that the amount of bottom water that's sinking has declined. But by becoming fresher and less dense it's moving in the direction of an ultimate shutdown."
Rintoul said results of the bottom water samples in the Ross Sea directly south of New Zealand and off Antarctica's Adelie Land further to the west, were a crucial finding.
"We didn't know that before we left but it's now clear that both of those regions are becoming fresher for some reason."
GLOBAL WARMING TO BLAME?
During the voyage, scientists from Australia, Britain, France and the United States measured salinity, carbon dioxide and iron concentrations as well as currents between Antarctica and Australia.
Rintoul said his team are studying if faster melting of icesheets or sea ice is the source of the fresher water but he said it was too early to tell if global warming was to blame.
Over the coming months, his team will study oxygen isotopes collected from water samples.
"Oxygen isotopes act as a tracer of ice melt and that information should help pin down exactly what the cause of the freshening is in the deep ocean," said Rintoul, of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre.
"The leading hypothesis at the moment for why it's freshening is that the floating ice around Antarctica is melting more rapidly than in the past."
He pointed to studies showing winds around Antarctica changing because of global warming and the ozone hole.
"The most likely scenario is that those changes in winds have changed the circulation of the ocean, in particular caused more upwelling of relatively warm water from below and that could have caused the increased melting of ice around Antarctica," he said.
"The next challenge over the coming months and year will be to see just how well we can this pin down."
(Editing by Jeremy Laurence)
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http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/34921
Docs Fear Deadly Combo of Flu, MRSA
Influenza Opens Door for Superbug Infections, Health Experts Say
By DAN CHILDS
ABC News Medical Unit
April 26, 2008—
One is a viral illness responsible for an estimated 35,000 deaths every year. The other is a potentially deadly superbug, a horrifying legacy of antibiotic overuse that is now resistant to almost every treatment today's doctors can throw at it.
Even on their own, infection with either influenza or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) can lead to a grave situation. But now, health officials are keeping an eye out for an even more harrowing threat -- simultaneous infection with both diseases. And they say that, in children at least, these cases of co-incident infection appear to be on the rise.
So far, what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has learned about the potential link between flu and MRSA in young patients is disturbing.
According to an official health advisory issued Jan. 30, between Oct. 1, 2006, and Sept. 30, 2007, the agency received a total of 73 reports of child deaths due to influenza. In 22 of these cases, the children were also infected with some form of the staph bug, mostly MRSA.
This compares with only three such cases of co-infection during the same period in 2005 and 2006, and just one such case identified in 2004-2005.
And on Friday, the Boston Globe reported that Massachusetts health officials have linked MRSA to two recent deaths in children from the flu, renewing concerns over such a surge.
It is not the first time that viral and bacterial infections have gone hand-in-hand, notes Dr. Jonathan C. Weissler, chief of medicine at University of Texas Southwestern University Hospitals in Dallas.
"It is well known that community-acquired staph pneumonia is much more common in patients who have influenza," he says. "This has not changed."
But when it does happen, the results can be disastrous. Infectious disease experts say spikes in this kind of co-incidence of influenza and drug-resistant bugs have happened in the past, with devastating results even for many healthy individuals.
"The association of influenza viral infection disrupting the mucosa to permit secondary bacterial infection is not new," says Dr. Jerome Klein, professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine. "This is what happened in the influenza pandemic in 1957, which was co-incident with a pandemic of multidrug resistant staphylococcal infections. Not only were the elderly and immunocompromised prone to the combination, but otherwise healthy individuals were felled with substantial morbidity and mortality."
"Thus, now when children -- and maybe adults also -- get influenza that is complicated by pneumonia, the bacterial cause of the pneumonia will likely be MRSA," says Dr. William Schaffner, professor and chairman of preventive medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. "Thus, we have a new phenomenon that can cause serious, life-threatening disease and is more difficult to treat."
Ganging Up on the Body's Defenses
Contracting both the flu and MRSA at the same time is far more than simple coincidence, scientists believe. Rather, they suspect that the damage inflicted on the lungs and airways by the flu virus allows MRSA germs to sneak into vulnerable tissues and gain a foothold.
The timing of concerns over the links between flu and MRSA come at a time when pandemic fears are growing and reports of nonhospital superbug infections are on the rise.
"The public health groups in the state and the CDC are concerned about a confluence as 'the perfect storm,' a virulent influenzal pandemic -- for example, bird flu, SARS or [another viral illness] occurring at the same time as the increasing incidence of MRSA," says Klein.
Beating the Bugs
Schaffner says the key to heading off the dangerous partnership between influenza and MRSA is to go on the attack against the flu with increased vaccination rates.
It is a task that is easier said than done. Schaffner notes that only about one-third of children actually receive the flu vaccine during a given season. Part of the reason behind this low turnout could be the number of groups that actively discourage parents from having their children vaccinated against the flu. These groups claim that these vaccines -- primarily, the forms of the vaccine that contain thimerosal -- are a primary cause of autism in children.
One group, known as SafeMinds, provides a printable brochure on its Web site titled "Help Spread the Word About the Flu Vaccine." The group encourages supporters to leave the brochure in their doctors' offices and other locations.
On the other side of the vaccination equation, current CDC recommendations do little to bolster flu vaccination among kids, as they urge vaccination primarily of children 6 months to 5 years old, and others "if feasible."
But this could change soon. Schaffner says that by the 2008-2009 flu season, the agency will change its guidelines to recommend that everyone under the age of 19 receive the flu vaccine.
Additionally, he hopes that parents and pediatricians will take immunization recommendations more seriously as additional information about MRSA and influenza become public.
"This strengthens even more the rationale for vaccinating all children against influenza each year," he says. "If you prevent the initial influenza infection, you also prevent the dire complication of MRSA pneumonia. Thus, vaccinating all children against influenza is a public health program with a double benefit -- what could be better than that?"
Dr. Diane Kang contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ColdFlu/Story?id=4727218&page=1
Exposed: the great GM crops myth
Major new study shows that modified soya produces 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 20 April 2008
Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.
The study – carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt – has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.
Professor Barney Gordon, of the university's department of agronomy, said he started the research – reported in the journal Better Crops – because many farmers who had changed over to the GM crop had "noticed that yields are not as high as expected even under optimal conditions". He added: "People were asking the question 'how come I don't get as high a yield as I used to?'"
He grew a Monsanto GM soybean and an almost identical conventional variety in the same field. The modified crop produced only 70 bushels of grain per acre, compared with 77 bushels from the non-GM one.
The GM crop – engineered to resist Monsanto's own weedkiller, Roundup – recovered only when he added extra manganese, leading to suggestions that the modification hindered the crop's take-up of the essential element from the soil. Even with the addition it brought the GM soya's yield to equal that of the conventional one, rather than surpassing it.
The new study confirms earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsanto GM soya produced 6 per cent less than its closest conventional relative, and 11 per cent less than the best non-GM soya available.
The Nebraska study suggested that two factors are at work. First, it takes time to modify a plant and, while this is being done, better conventional ones are being developed. This is acknowledged even by the fervently pro-GM US Department of Agriculture, which has admitted that the time lag could lead to a "decrease" in yields.
But the fact that GM crops did worse than their near-identical non-GM counterparts suggest that a second factor is also at work, and that the very process of modification depresses productivity. The new Kansas study both confirms this and suggests how it is happening.
A similar situation seems to have happened with GM cotton in the US, where the total US crop declined even as GM technology took over. (See graphic above.)
Monsanto said yesterday that it was surprised by the extent of the decline found by the Kansas study, but not by the fact that the yields had dropped. It said that the soya had not been engineered to increase yields, and that it was now developing one that would.
Critics doubt whether the company will achieve this, saying that it requires more complex modification. And Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington – and who was one of the first to predict the current food crisis – said that the physiology of plants was now reaching the limits of the productivity that could be achieved.
A former champion crop grower himself, he drew the comparison with human runners. Since Roger Bannister ran the first four-minute mile more than 50 years ago, the best time has improved only modestly . "Despite all the advances in training, no one contemplates a three-minute mile."
Last week the biggest study of its kind ever conducted – the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development – concluded that GM was not the answer to world hunger.
Professor Bob Watson, the director of the study and chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when asked if GM could solve world hunger, said: "The simple answer is no."
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/exposed-the-great-gm-crops-myth-812179.html
Study links Parkinson's disease to long-term pesticide exposure
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Friday March 28 2008. It was last updated at 10:47 on March 28 2008.
Scientists have found further evidence of a link between Parkinson's disease and long-term exposure to pesticides.
A study of more than 300 people with the neurological disease — which can affect movements such as walking, talking and writing — found that sufferers were more than twice as likely to report heavy exposure to pesticides over their lifetime as family members without the disease.
Previous studies have pointed to a possible link between pesticide exposure and Parkinson's and public authorities are trying to work out whether these risks should be classed as significant. A £906,000 project to study the links launched in 2006 by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, for example, is due to report this summer.
Variations in several genes have been identified that contribute to the disease, but these defects are rare and only account for a small proportion of the incidence of the disease, which afflicts around 120,000 people in the UK. The majority of cases are thought to be a result of an interaction between genes and the environment.
Lifetime exposure
The new research, led by American scientists, looked at the lifetime pesticide exposure of 319 Parkinson's patients and more than 200 of their relatives without the disease. The results, published today in the journal BMC Neurology, showed that people with Parkinson's were 1.6 times as likely to report an exposure to pesticides in their lifetimes compared with the controls.
In addition, people with the Parkinson's were 2.4 times as likely as people without the disease to report heavy exposure to pesticides, classed as more than 215 days over a lifetime.
The strongest associations were between people with Parkinson's who had been exposed to herbicide and insecticide chemicals such as organochlorides and organophosphates. No links were found between Parkinson's disease and drinking well-water or living or working on a farm, two commonly used proxies for pesticide exposures.
"In this dataset, these tended to be people who used a lot of pesticides in their homes and in their hobbies," said William Scott of the University of Miami, who took part in the study. "There were not many people who routinely used pesticides for their occupation."
Though the evidence is growing, the researchers said that there was not enough biological evidence yet to conclude that Parkinson's was definitely caused by pesticide exposure. The biological mechanism linking the two is still unknown. The researchers added that future genetic studies of Parkinson's could consider the influence of pesticides, because exposure to these chemicals may trigger the disease in genetically predisposed people.
Key role
Kieran Breen, director of research at the Parkinson's Disease Society (PDS), said: "The association between pesticides and Parkinson's has been recognised for some time, and this study supports this link and strengthens the fact that pesticides play a key role."
The PDS has carried out a survey of more than 10,000 people with Parkinson's and preliminary results show that 9% had long-term pesticide or herbicide exposure, which is defined as exposure for more than a year.
"Of the 3,000 carers surveyed, most of whom were family members, less than 2% had had similar exposure," said Breen. "This demonstates that pesticides may be contributing to nerve cell death in some people with Parkinson's, but is unlikely to be the only cause."
Symptoms of the disease first tend to appear when a patient is older than 50, and can include tremors and muscle rigidity. The Parkinson's Disease Society estimates that around 10,000 new diagnoses of the disease are made ever year in the UK.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/mar/28/parkinsons.disease
Yeppers...at least that's the plan for the moment:)
Thank you OU...have yourself a great weekend too:)
Enjoy the weekend folks :)
You're welcome many :)
CHE.UN.TO 12.15 (Cdn)
BCST 4.70
GORO 5.08
RGN 1.80
hehe...not such a bad way to become extinct...
...in a blaze of glory!
and thank you for the compliment :)
Slow down
Mower head tattoo
No place left to tattoo
Piano and Violin building
"This unique piano house was built recently in An Hui Province, China. Inside of the violin is the escalator to the building. The building displays various city plans and development prospects in an effort to draw interest into the recently developed area."
Sing me a sweet song
Beauty and strength
I was fine...just a small bruise but a big laugh more than anything :)
Stickman...
Funny story...
Yesterday afternoon I was out shopping. I pulled in to this mini mall and parked several doors down from the store I needed to go to. I got out of the car and started walking towards the store. A few shops down, in the opposite direction, a woman opened the front door and hollered out to a guy who was about to get into his car then they started talking. I had turned my head and looked in their direction half listening to their conversation as I continued walking. Then Bam!!! I walked straight dab into a pillar/post! LOL and thought to myself "that'll teach you for being nosy and eaves dropping on someone elses convo."
'One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. "Which road do I take?" she asked. "Where do you want to go?" was his response. "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter.' -- Lewis Carroll
SUE.TO .68 (Cdn)