Water: Hot and Salty

Most of us know very little about water. It comes in two types, salt and fresh. It has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom and is written H2O. In the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake, you can float. A random collection of facts—like knowing a dozen Latin tags—is usual, even for many in science or medicine. For most Americans, access to water is a given. Like the right to vote, it seems a birthright. And when you turn on a tap, do you ask whether you can drink the water that comes out? Probably not.

I want to suggest you consider expanding your world view. And that you follow the rapidly evolving water story, because whether you do so or not, water is about to change your life and will profoundly affect the lives of your children and grandchildren in ways both great and small. Water matters to our lives at every level, from the personal to the geopolitical. Its role in global warming, as well as its atomic structure and how it interacts with consciousness, all matter. Water has always driven destiny and is driving ours now. This is my first column on water. There will be others. I believe water will be a far bigger factor in our future than petroleum.

A little baseline data: Water covers over 70% of the earth’s surface, and 97% of it is salt. Two percent is frozen into glaciers and ice caps. Only one percent is drinkable, and half of that comes from below the earth’s surface. Globally, water is one large intricately integrated system.

The 97% constitutes a world ocean that is rapidly changing from the sea of your youth. It is more acidic and warmer, and these changes have been quietly altering not only the temperature but the molecular structure of the ocean.1 And it is unequivocally caused by human activity. A scientific, if not political, consensus has emerged about this, whose central hypothesis is that this global system is very quickly moving into crisis.

The interaction at the interface between the water and the air above results in the sea absorbing carbon. Between 1800 and 1994, according to a study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, the world ocean absorbed approximately 118 billion metric tons of carbon—roughly half the amount produced by fossil fuel combustion. One of the effects of this has been to make seawater increasingly acidic,2 which in turn has resulted in a decrease of carbonate ions, an essential construction component of marine life used by all manner of ocean creatures for everything from building coral reefs to shells.3

Richard Peely, one of the authors of the National Center for Atmospheric Research study, describes the change this way: “This is leading to the most dramatic changes in marine chemistry in at least the past 650,000 years .”4

According to Mark Jacobson, a Stanford assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, between 1751 (the beginning of the industrial age) and 2004, surface ocean pH dropped only from approximately 8.25 to 8.14.4 By the end of this century, James Orr, a scientist at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory, says the change could be another 0.3-0.4 units.5

Chris Langdon at the University of Miami, and one of the National Center for Atmospheric Research report coauthors, explains, “This threat is hitting coral reefs at the same time that they are being hit by warm-inducing mass bleaching events.”3

The implications of such a change are not fully understood but are generally recognized to be fairly catastrophic. This much of the scenario is already clear: coral reefs throughout the world, as a result of temperature change and increased acidity, are dying, and the ecosystem that depends upon healthy reefs is severely disrupted and getting worse. How worse can it get? The journal Geology, in describing exactly the combination of increased temperature and increased acidity, says it may have contributed to the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, when about 95% of the ocean life became extinct—the worst mass extinction on record. Not good...cont'd

http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/1550-8307/PIIS1550830706004770.pdf

the tap I think "In 20 years, I'm going to remember I once did this."

I'm not optimistic.

for the sake of our progeny, we must never give up hoping that we can somehow find ways to solve the huge problems upon us now. Water wars are already being fought in the ME. What do you think the Israeli/Lebanon fiasco was about? According to many, it was about water.
For years, I was not aware enough to conserve water. Now, I cherish every drop and like you, wonder if my, our grandchildren will have access to any water at all.

In other news, watch the climate change hearings this afternoon on Cspan. The truth might not "set us free" but it's a damn good start.

How many problems would end by doing so? 97% is a lot of saltwater...

It was also the aqueduct system that allowed Ancient Rome to grow... an impressive system indeed.

(in either case, I think we're all doomed. So are the corals.)

energy intensive - there are desalinisation plants in Saudi Arabia, for instance, where the oil to run them is cheaper than the water they produce, but it's not an economically feasible option in most places.