The world is facing a looming global water crisis that threatens to "spiral out of control" as increased demand for water and the intensifying impacts of the climate crisis put huge pressure on water resources, a UN report has warned.
I'd call it corporate gaslighting, passing the blame onto consumers to shield themselves from any accountability that could harm their bottom line. Similar to how they've roped a generation into believing the rhetoric of the consumer's "carbon footprint" to shift the responsibility of climate action and deflect attention away from the world's major polluters; multi-conglomerate companies.
That wasn't corporations, that was a grassroots effort spearheaded by the left and famous climate proponents. Unless you're insinuating Al Gore and Bill Nye the Science Guy were being bribed by big business the whole time.
NASA climatologist James Hansen testified to Congress in 1988 and the UN formed the IPCC that same year.
The atmosphere was still at a very safe and very reasonable 350 ppm (pre-industrial normal was 280-300 ppm), so all the emissions up to 1988 could be ignored if we had just taken action after 1988.
Since then, we fucked up. And we primarily fucked up by stopping the transition to cheap nuclear power that was already well underway, because we got scared of it after 1987 (Chernobyl).
If we had ignored those fears and listened to James Hansen, we probably could have kept CO2 below 400. It's now 420.
This is not what happened. Takes like this, that oversimplify and make things seem inevitable aren't very helpful.
For decades before 1988 and for decades after, people have advocated for the environment. The shift to an understanding that we can have an impact on our planet has been slow and hard-won. Don't pretend like one person or one hearing or one technology could have prevented all this - that's just not true.
You may be upset that nuclear wasn't or isn't used more, but it doesn't really matter at this point - we are here, and we have really inexpensive and seemingly low impact technologies like solar and wind with battery or other types of storage. Plus, we can now have a more distributed grid with installs right in people's homes.
Move past whatever has you hung up on nuclear, there's lots of other ways to have a positive impact on our environmental future.
I'll be honest, this is part of the reason I'm not moving back to California, despite missing the sunshine a lot. I figure as global warming intensifies, we'll probably get California weather here in the PNW, but with more water.
That’s what I’ve been thinking for a while too. That California would basically turn into Mexico. However I’ve been surprised by the weather these past 5 years. Unseasonable and strange extreme weather has actually brought more moisture, not less. To the extreme other end of trouble with flooding and such. There is a tropical storm warning in San Diego right now. The first one ever.
Global temperature rise means all kinds of different things for local weather. We shouldn’t assume that we can take the weather we have now and just dial it up 12 degrees.
About 10% of the global population already lives in countries with high or critical water stress.
Meanwhile, scarcity will worsen in the Middle East and the Sahel region in Africa, where water is already in short supply.
Extreme and prolonged droughts, made more frequent and severe by the climate crisis, are also putting pressure on ecosystems, which could have “dire consequences” for plant and animal species, the report’s authors said.
Solutions include better international cooperation to avoid conflicts over water, Connor said.
“There is an urgent need to establish strong international mechanisms to prevent the global water crisis from spiraling out of control,” said Audrey Azoulay, the director general of UNESCO, the UN’s cultural body.
“Water is our common future, and it is essential to act together to share it equitably and manage it sustainably.”
Here in Mayotte, water has been increasingly rationed since 2017. Today we have running water every other day, a bit less than half the time if you count the actual hours. Quite a few people have wells, but far from everyone. There has been an immigration crisis for the past fifteen years too, and the population is officiously estimated to be twice the census (600k vs 300k officially). People are coming in from the nearby islands where there is endemic corruption and France's development aid (74M€ staggered through several years) only seldom reached the population, as far as retellings of immigrants have taught me it was largely hijacked. Anyway, that should be our clue... but nothing has been made so far, only vague plans about an additional desalination plant... the rainy season, Kashikazi (roughly november to april), becomes less and less wet by the year. It's not looking good.