China Pursuing Water Security? Good luck with that, dudes!

AFP feed to Yahoo News, April 18, 2015:

China's struggle for water security

By Giles Hewitt

Way back in 1999, before he became China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao warned that water scarcity posed one of the greatest threats to the "survival of the nation".

Sixteen years later, that threat looms ever larger, casting a forbidding shadow over China's energy and food security and demanding urgent solutions with significant regional, and even global, consequences.

The mounting pressure on China's scarce, unequally distributed and often highly polluted water supply was highlighted in a report released at the World Water Forum this week in Daegu, South Korea.

Published by the Hong Kong-based NGO, China Water Risk (CWR), it underlined the complexity of the challenge facing China as it seeks to juggle inextricably linked and often competing concerns over water, energy supply and climate change.

"There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to China's water-energy-climate nexus," the report said.

"More importantly, China's energy choices do not only impact global climate change, but affect water availability for Asia," it said, warning of the danger of future "water wars" given China's upstream control over Asia's mightiest rivers.

The Qinghai-Tibetan plateau is essentially the world's largest water tank and the origin of some of Asia's most extensive river systems including the Indus, Brahmaputra and Mekong. The most significant link in the nexus the report describes is the fact that 93 percent of China's power generation is water-reliant.

"Chinese officials are starting to say water security comes first," the report's author Debra Tan told AFP in Daegu. "Because without it, there is no energy security and, of course, no food security."Agriculture accounts for between 65 and 70 percent of China's water use and vast amounts are wasted by inefficient irrigation.

Harappan Civilization May Have Been Killed by 200 Year Drought

Not good news for the southwest USA, for sure, where we've been in a long-term drought going on 50 years now.  Snail shells tell the tale...

From nature.com

Two-hundred-year drought doomed Indus Valley Civilization

Monsoon hiatus that began 4,200 years ago parallels dry spell that led civilizations to collapse in other regions.

• Emma Marris

03 March 2014

 

The decline of Bronze-Age civilizations in Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia has been attributed to a long-term drought that began around 2000 bc. [Well attested.]  Now palaeoclimatologists propose that a similar fate was followed by the enigmatic Indus Valley Civilization, at about the same time. Based on isotope data from the sediment of an ancient lake, the researchers suggest that the monsoon cycle, which is vital to the livelihood of all of South Asia, essentially stopped there for as long as two centuries.

 

The Indus Valley, in present Pakistan and northwest India, was home to a civilization also known as the Harappan Civilization. It was characterized by large, well-planned cities with advanced municipal sanitation systems and a script that has never been deciphered. But the Harappans seemed to slowly lose their urban cohesion, and their cities were gradually abandoned.

The link between this gradual decline and climate has been tenuous because of a dearth of climate records from the region. So Yama Dixit, a palaeoclimatologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and her colleagues examined sediments from Kotla Dahar, an ancient lake near the northeastern edge of the Indus Valley area in Haryana, India, that still seasonally floods.

The team assigned ages to sediment layers using radiocarbon dating of organic matter. In various layers, they collected the preserved shells of tiny lake snails (Melanoides tuberculata), which are made of a form of calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) called aragonite. The team also looked at the oxygen in the argonite molecules, counting the ratio of the rare oxygen-18 isotope to the more prevalent oxygen-16.

The Riddle of Ancient Kerma's Survival During Drought Now Explained

The most powerful kingdoms in the world at the time were not able to escape the overwhelming forces of nature when climate change in the guise of drought for 30 years and rising temperatures devasted their lands, their people and, in some cases, wiped away their kingdoms forever. 

And yet we, today, if we're thinking about it at all, appear to be blythely assuming that somehow it won't affect US, nosirree, it may make some islands in the Pacific disappear, it may cause mass starvation in Africa and Bangladesh and other places, including China, but then, who cares about THEM?  They're over-populated anyway and this is just Nature's way of restoring equilibrium.  And so we in the west go on our sanguine way.  Tick...tick...tick...  In the end, even Kerma bit the dust, both figuratively and literally.

From Phys Org

Solved: Riddle of ancient Nile kingdom's longevity

Apr 29, 2013

(Phys.org) —Researchers have solved the riddle of how one of Africa's greatest civilisations survived a catastrophic drought which wiped out other famous dynasties. Geomorphologists and dating specialists from The Universities of Aberystwyth, Manchester, and Adelaide say that it was the River Nile which made life viable for the renowned Kerma kingdom, in what is now northern Sudan.

Kerma was the first Bronze Age kingdom in Africa outside Egypt.

Their analysis of three ancient river channels where the Nile once flowed shows, for the first time, that its floods weren't too low or too high to sustain life between 2,500 BC and 1,500 BC, when Kerma flourished and was a major rival to its more famous neighbour downstream.  They also show that the thousand year civilisation came to end when the Nile's flood levels were not high enough and a major channel system dried out - though an invasion by resurgent Egyptians was the final cause of Kerma's demise.

Downstream in Egypt, a catastrophic 30 year drought 4,200 years ago, which produced low Nile floods, created chaos in the old kingdom for at least a century.  Other civilisations in the near east and Mesopotamia were also severely hit by this drought.

The team's findings, funded by the Sudan Archaeological Research Society (SARS) and the Australian Research Council, are published in the journal Geology.

Professor Mark Macklin from The University of Aberystwyth said: "This work is the most comprehensive and robustly dated archaeological and palaeoenvironmental dataset yet compiled for the desert Nile.

"The relationship between climate change and the development of Old World riverine civilizations is poorly understood because inadequate dating control has hindered effective integration of archaeological, fluvial, and climate records."

Professor Jamie Woodward from The University of Manchester said: "In Nubia four thousand years ago the Kerma people farmed what we might call the Goldilocks Nile: its floods were just large enough to support floodwater farming, but not so big as to cause damage to the riverside settlements.

"It's quite remarkable that the Kerma civilization was able to flourish, produce amazing craftsmanship and wealth, at a time when their Egyptian rivals to the North were struggling with environmental, social, and political strife.

"Until now we didn't understand why that was - but thanks to our field work in Sudan, this riddle has now been solved."

The team used cutting edge geological dating methods to analyse the dried up channels, now 20 km from the today's river course. It is the first time individual flood events on the desert Nile have been dated.  Using hundreds of deep irrigation pits dug by modern Sudanese farmers, Macklin and Woodward were able to observe the geological history of the old channels. In places, these old channel belts are well preserved at the modern land surface. They are between 1 and 3 km wide with Kerma sites on their margins.  According to Derek Welsby from the British Museum who led the archaeological survey, Kerma's wealth and power may have been underpinned by its agriculturally-rich hinterland utilising the banks of the ancient channels.

Archaeological surveys of the floodplain in the Dongola Reach to the south of Kerma have discovered more than 450 sites spanning the Neolithic (pre–3500 B.C.) to the Medieval Christian period (A.D. 500–1500). Many sites are associated with the Nile's ancient channels.  He said: "Kerma's success was also down to their reliance on animal husbandry practices that are less susceptible to changes in flood level, more mobile, and better able to cope with environmental stress.
"They were a truly remarkable civilisation, producing some of the most exquisite pottery in the Nile Valley."

The paper is titled "Reach-scale river dynamics moderate the impact of rapid Holocene climate change on floodwater farming in the desert Nile."


Background article from Phys Org, that talks more about that mega-drought that occurred more than 4,200 years ago: 

Climate and drought lessons from ancient Egypt, Aug 16, 2012

Drought May Have Doomed Sumerian Civilization

Absolutely fascinating! 

Recently I watched a PBS special on the Dust Bowl, a drought that affected large swatches of the "Bread Basket" of the USA but extended also to other parts of the country, for TEN long years, from 1930 until 1940. 

From PBS Dust Bowl Special website. 

Untold damage was done to the ecology of the country.  Tens of thousands of families and hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted from their homesteads as the earth beneath their feet literally blew away! Families were torn apart.  Hundreds of people were smothered to death in the horrible all-encompassing, all-engulfing BLACK dust storms of the period in the worst-affected regions of the country.  Thousands more people, mostly children and the elderly, died from a disease similar to the  Black Lung caused by the never-ending dust.  The medical establishment at the time had no cure.  Millions of domesticated and wild animals died as a result of the drought and the dust storms.  Some died of thirst; some died of starvation; some were suffocated to death.

Dust clouds from the never-ending storms in the Dust Bowl could be traced in the stratosphere by the equipment of the day, circulating around the globe (perhaps similar in effect to volcanic "winters" caused by eruptions like Krakotoa in the 1880s, but lasting much longer because more and more dust blew up into the stratosphere each year for ten years...)  Yes, the entire globe was affected.  Perhaps worst of all, this hit the USA just as The Great Depression (part of a world-wide depression) was taking a firm hold here.

I cannot even begin to imagine what might have happened here during that time IF THAT DROUGHT HAD LASTED 200 YEARS!  Would I even be here today?  Doubtful.  I wasn't born until 1951, after the end of WWII.  The worst effects of the drought ended about a year before the USA got involved in WWII, with the attack on Pearl Harbor.  But if that drought had not ended, could the USA have played the role it ultimately did in that war?  My dad may not have met and married my Mom and started a family....  Hell, my dad might not have even survived.  He was 8 years old when the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl started.  If things had not gotten better around 1940 - who knows...

Article:

Drought May Have Killed Sumerian Language

Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer

Date: 04 December 2012 Time: 11:35 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO — A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says.

Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues. But several pieces of archaeological and geological evidence tie the gradual decline of the Sumerian civilization to a drought.

The findings, which were presented Monday (Dec. 3) here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, show how vulnerable human society may be to climate change, including human-caused change.

"This was not a single summer or winter, this was 200 to 300 years of drought," said Matt Konfirst, a geologist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

Beginning about 3500 B.C., the Sumerian culture flourished in ancient Mesopotamia, which was located in present-day Iraq. Ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing, built the world's first wheel and arch, and wrote the first epic poem, "Gilgamesh."

But after 200 to 300 years of upheaval, the Sumerian culture disappeared around 4,000 years ago, and the Sumerian language went extinct soon after that.

Konfirst wanted to see if a drought that spanned about 200 years may have caused the decline. Several geological records point to a long period of drier weather in the Middle East around 4,200 years ago, Konfirst said. The Red Sea and the Dead Sea had increased evaporation; water levels dropped at Lake Van in Turkey, and cores from marine sediments around that period indicate increased dust in the environment.

"As we go into the 4,200-year-ago climate anomaly, we actually see that estimated rainfall decreases substantially in this region and the number of sites that are populated at this time period reduce substantially," he said.

Around the same time, 74 percent of the ancient Mesopotamian settlements were abandoned, according to a 2006 study of an archaeological site called Tell Leilan in Syria. The populated area also shrank by 93 percent, he said.

"People still live in this region. It's not that the collapse of a civilization means that an area is completely abandoned," he said. "But that there's a sharp change in the population."

During the great drought, two waves of marauding nomads descended upon the region, sacking the capital city of Ur. After around 2000 B.C., ancient Sumerian gradually died off as a spoken language in the region. For the next 2,000 years, the tongue lingered on as a dead written language, similar to Latin in the Middle Ages, but has been completely extinct since then, Konfirst said.

The coincidence of the social upheaval, depopulation in the area and the geologic record of drought suggests climate change might have played a role in the loss of the Sumerian language, Konfirst said.
The findings also suggest that modern-day civilizations may be vulnerable to climate change, he said.

Mega Droughts in Sierra Nevada Confirmed

The last mega-drought to hit the area was devasting to Native Americans living there.  What would another mega-drought do the current much larger populations living in the region today?  And how would we respond?

Sierra Nevada 200-Year Megadroughts Confirmed
ScienceDaily (June 1, 2012) — The erratic year-to-year swings in precipitation totals in the Reno-Tahoe area conjures up the word "drought" every couple of years, and this year is no exception. The Nevada State Climate Office at the University of Nevada, Reno, in conjunction with the Nevada Drought Response Committee, just announced a Stage 1 drought (moderate) for six counties and a Stage 2 drought (severe) for 11 counties.

Reno, Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada are no strangers to drought, the most famous being the Medieval megadrought lasting from 800 to 1250 A.D. when annual precipitation was less than 60 percent of normal. The Reno-Tahoe region is now about 65 percent of annual normal precipitation for the year, which doesn't seem like much, but imagine if this were the "norm" each and every year for the next 200 years.

Research by scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno and their partners at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego indicates that there are other instances of such long-lasting, severe droughts in the western United States throughout history. Their recent paper, a culmination of a comprehensive high-tech assessment of Fallen Leaf Lake -- a small moraine-bound lake at the south end of the Lake Tahoe Basin -- reports that stands of pre-Medieval trees in the lake suggest the region experienced severe drought at least every 650 to 1,150 years during the mid- and late-Holocene period.

"Using an arsenal of cutting edge sonar tools, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), and a manned submersible, we've obtained potentially the most accurate record thus far on the instances of 200-year-long droughts in the Sierra," Graham Kent, director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory said. "The record from Fallen Leaf Lake confirms what was expected and is likely the most accurate record, in terms of precipitation, than obtained previously from a variety of methods throughout the Sierra."

Kent is part of the University of Nevada, Reno and Scripps research team that traced the megadroughts and dry spells of the region using tree-ring analysis, shoreline records and sediment deposition in Fallen Leaf Lake. Using side-scan and multibeam sonar technology developed to map underwater earthquake fault lines such as the West Tahoe fault beneath Fallen Leaf Lake, the team also imaged standing trees up to 130 feet beneath the lake surface as well as submerged ancient shoreline structure and development. The trees matured while the lake level was 130 to 200 feet below its modern elevation and were not deposited by a landslide as was suspected.

The team, led by John Kleppe, University of Nevada, Reno engineering professor emeritus, published a paper on this research and is presenting its findings in seminars and workshops.

"The lake is like a 'canary in a coal mine' for the Sierra, telling the story of precipitation very clearly," Kent said. "Fallen Leaf Lake elevations change rapidly due to its unique ratio between catchment basin and lake surface of about 8 to 1. With analysis of the standing trees submerged in the lake, sediment cores and our sonar scanning of ancient shorelines, we can more accurately and easily trace the precipitation history of the region."

Water balance calculations and analysis of tree-ring samples undertaken by Kleppe, Kent and Scripps scientists Danny Brothers and Neal Driscoll, along with Professor Franco Biondi of the University's College of Science, suggest annual precipitation was less than 60 percent of normal from the late 10th century to the early 13th century. Their research was documented in a scientific paper, Duration and severity of Medieval drought in the Lake Tahoe Basin, published in the Quaternary Science Reviews in November 2011.

Tree-ring records and submerged paleoshoreline geomorphology suggest a Medieval low-lake level of Fallen Leaf Lake lasted more than 220 years. More than 80 trees were found lying on the lake floor at various elevations above the paleoshoreline.

"Although the ancient cycle of megadroughts seems to occur every 650 to 1150 years and the last one was 750 years ago, it is uncertain when the next megadrought will occur. With climate change upon us, it will be interesting to see how carbon dioxide loading in the atmosphere will affect this cycle," Kent said.

Professor Paula Noble, in the University's College of Science's Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering, is expanding this research to include the fine-scale study of climate change through out the Holocene (about 12,000 years) using recently collected 40-foot-long sediment cores in Fallen Leaf Lake.

Climate Change 4200 Years Ago

No one has yet answered why the weather patterns suddenly shifted - and stayed shifted for some 300 years!  Our scientists know that this happened, and our archaeologists have uncovered the resulting devastation.  Civilizations were destroyed.  People and animals starved to death when the rains were cut by as much as 50% in almost all areas of the globe.  In these days when a few years without rain can cost billions of dollars in crop losses, send the price of food sky high and kill hundreds of thousands (as in Somalia, for instance), what would we do if the rains were cut by 30 to 50% for 300 years?  What would happen to Africa?  China?  India?  The United States? 

From Science at msnbc.com
Ancient city survived as civilizations collapsed
Archaeologists involved in arduous excavation want to know, 'How did that happen?'
updated 7/29/2011 1:01:26 PM ET

As ancient civilizations across the Middle East collapsed, possibly in response to a global drought about 4,200 years ago, archaeologists have discovered that one settlement in Syria not only survived, but expanded.

Their next question is — why did Tell Qarqur, a site in northwest Syria, grow at a time when cities across the Middle East were being abandoned? [Oh please, people who were fleeing drought-destroyed fields, towns and city-states had to live somewhere where there was a reliable water supply!]

"There was widespread abandonment of many of the largest archaeological sites and ancient cities in the region and also large numbers of smaller sites," said Jesse Casana, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. "At Tell Qarqur and probably at other sites also in the Orontes River Valley, where our site is located, (settlement) continues, and in our case, seems to have probably broadened (during that time)."

Casana and Boston University archaeologist Rudolph Dornemann discovered mud-brick homes beyond the city's fortification walls, suggesting the area was thriving.

"It seems like there is an intensively occupied core and fortified area, and more dispersed settlement surrounding it," said Casana. One of the team members, Amy Karoll, presented the research at the 76th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in April.

Digging up history
Tell Qarqur was occupied for about 10,000 years, between 8,500 B.C. and A.D. 1350. While excavations have taken place off and on for nearly three decades now, only a small portion of the city has been excavated so far. The long history of the site makes digging down to the 4,200-year-old remains difficult. To compensate, the team has used Ground Penetrating Radar to help map structures beneath the surface.

One of the most interesting excavated finds is a small temple or shrine made out of stone that also dates back 4,200 years. "It's a small stone building with a whole series of plastered basins inside the building that were used probably in some kind of libation ritual," said Casana.

The team also found large standing stones, bones from baby sheep, cult stands used for incense and decorative figurines, some of which are now on display in a local museum.

Global climate change
Environmental data gathered from numerous sources, including ocean sediment cores and plant remains, suggests that there was a climate event that rocked the Middle East and much of the planet 4,200 years ago.

"At 4,200 years ago, there was an abrupt climate change, and abrupt drying, and abrupt deflection of the Mediterranean westerly winds that transport humid air into the eastern Mediterranean region," Harvey Weiss of Yale University told LiveScience.

Weiss has been researching the phenomenon, working with other scholars to figure out how broad an event this was and what its effects were.

"That deflection of those winds reduced the annual precipitation across western Asia for about 300 years," he said, with rainfall being reduced somewhere between 30 percent and 50 percent. This meant that cities in the Middle East that depended on rain-fed crops had a difficult time surviving. The intense drought extended nearly globally, Weiss noted.

Along with the Mesopotamian and eastern Mediterranean societies that met their demise, Old Kingdom Egypt, a civilization that built the Great Pyramids, collapsed. "A different weather system reduced the flow of the Nile River at the same period so the Nile was affected," Weiss said.

Casana cautioned that not all scholars are convinced that climate change was the main cause for the collapse of cities in the Middle East. [Really?]

"It's a pretty thorny question," Casana said.

Some researchers "simply don't like the sort of one-to-one causal story that that kind of narrative tells, in which the rain stopped falling and everybody died," he said, adding that the way people were farming and using the land may also have played an important role. [But not enough of a role to shift global rainfall patterns!  Come on!]

Another factor is the shaky political stability that large states sometimes endure. "There are other scholars who simply think that the decline of these civilizations, at that time, is kind of part and parcel of the story of civilization itself," Casana said. [Well of course political instability of already shaky regimes would have resulted when people were starving to death!]

Why did Tell Qarqur survive?
The question now is why Tell Qarqur is different. Why did the site survive and expand while so many others collapsed? Casana said that until more excavation is done, the jury will still be out as to why.
Weiss believes that the Orontes River, on which the city is located, is the key to answering this question. He pointed out that other archaeological sites on the river, including Qatna and Nasriyah, also appear to have prospered during this time of collapse.

"The Orontes River is fed by a huge underground chamber of water, which is called a Karst," Weiss said. "That huge underground source of water continued to flow and to feed the Orontes River during this period when rainfall was diminished."

There are other questions. Before the collapse hit, Tell Qarqur was within the sphere of influence of a powerful kingdom known as Ebla. That kingdom was destroyed sometime prior to 4,200 years ago. This likely changed the way the city was governed and managed, something that future excavations may reveal.

"What happens to the political realities of the community at Qarqur I don't know," said Casana. "I'm sure there must have been some change."

Weiss said that the discovery of cities that grew during climate collapse offers a new frontier for archaeologists and scientists to investigate.

"I think that the early bronze four (the scientific name for this period of collapse) culture of the Orontes is only just now emerging for our attention and that it's going to provide an extremely interesting example of cultural growth in unique environments during this period," he said.

****************************************************************

Dudes, start looking for other areas where it is known that such Karsts, and other "guaranteed" sources of fresh water, existed 4,200 years ago. 

More Short-Sighted Policies = Ecological Disaster

Iran's largest lake turning to salt
By NASSER KARIMI, Associated Press – Wed May 25, 6:32 am ET

Abandoned ships stuck in solidified salt of Oroumieh Lake.AP.

OROUMIEH LAKE, Iran – From a hillside, Kamal Saadat looked forlornly at hundreds of potential customers, knowing he could not take them for trips in his boat to enjoy a spring weekend on picturesque Oroumieh Lake, the third largest saltwater lake on earth.

"Look, the boat is stuck... It cannot move anymore," said Saadat, gesturing to where it lay encased by solidifying salt and lamenting that he could not understand why the lake was fading away.

The long popular lake, home to migrating flamingos, pelicans and gulls, has shrunken by 60 percent and could disappear entirely in just a few years, experts say — drained by drought, misguided irrigation policies, development and the damming of rivers that feed it.

Until two years ago, Saadat supplemented his income from almond- and grape-growing by taking tourists on boat tours. But as the lake receded and its salinity rose, he found he had to stop the boat every 10 minutes to unfoul the propeller — and finally, he had to give up this second job that he'd used to support a five-member family.

"The visitors were not enjoying such a boring trip," he said, noting they had to cross hundreds of meters of salty lakebed just to reach the boat from the wharf.

Other boatmen, too, have parked their vessels by their houses, where they stand as sad reminders of the deep-water days. And the lake's ebbing affects an ever-widening circle

In April, authorities stopped activities at the nearby jetty in Golmankhaneh harbor, due to lack of water in the lake, now only two meters deep at its deepest. Jetties in Sharafkhaneh and Eslami harbors faced the same fate.

The receding water has also weakened hotel business and tourism activities in the area, and planned hotel projects remain idle since investors are reluctant to continue.

Beyond tourism, the salt-saturated lake threatens agriculture nearby in northwest Iran, as storms sometimes carry the salt far afield. Many farmers worry about the future of their lands, which for centuries have been famous for apples, grapes, walnuts, almonds, onions, potatoes, as well as aromatic herbal drinks, candies and tasty sweet pastes.

"The salty winds not only will affect surrounding areas but also can damage farming in remote areas," said Masoud Mohammadian, an agriculture official in the eastern part of the lake, some 370 miles (600 kilometers) northwest of the capital Tehran.

Other officials echoed the dire forecast.

Salman Zaker, a parliament member for Oroumieh warned last month that, "with the current trend, the risk of a salt tsunami is increasing." Warning that the lake would dry out within three to five years — an assessment agreed to by the local environment department director, Hasan Abbasnejad — Zaker said eight to 10 billion tons of salt would jeopardize life for millions of people.

Masoud Pezeshkian, another lawmaker and representative for city of Tabriz in the eastern part of the lake said, "The lake has been drying but neither government nor local officials took any step, so far."

How did this disaster develop, and what can be done now?

Official reports blame the drying mainly on a decade-long drought, and peripherally on consumption of water of the feeding rivers for farming. They put 5 percent of the blame on construction of dams and 3 percent on other factors. Others disagree about the relative blame.

The first alarm over the lake's shrinking came in late 1990s amid a nagging drought.

Nonetheless, the government continued construction of 35 dams on the rivers which feed the lake; 10 more dams are on the drawing boards for the next few years.

Also completed was a lake-crossing roadway between Oroumieh and Tabriz, cities on the west and east of the lake. No environmental feasibility study was done in the planning for the road, and environmentalists believe the project worsened the lake's health by acting as a barrier to water circulation.

Nasser Agh, who teaches at Tabriz Sahand University, suggested miscalculations led to late reaction to save the lake. "Experts believed it would be a 10-year rotating drought, at first," he said. But long afterward, the drought still persists, with devastating effects.

In the early 2000s, academic research concluded that the lake could face the same destiny as the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which has been steadily shrinking since rivers that feed it were diverted by Soviet Union irrigation projects in 1960s. It is now less than one-tenth of its original size.

In April, the Iranian government announced a three-prong effort to save the lake: a cloud-seeding program to increase rainfall in the area, a lowering of water consumption by irrigation systems, and supplying the lake with remote sources of water.

Mohammad Javad Mohammadizadeh, vice-president to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in charge of environmental affairs, said the government approved the three-part approach.

Some experts termed the weather control portion of the program as only a "symbolic action" by government, saying the best answer would be to release more water currently being held back by dams. The evaporation rate has been three times the rainfall rate, making the rivers' historic role vital to sustaining the lake.

"The lake is in such a misery because of the dams," Ismail Kahram, a professor in Tehran Azad University and a prominent environmentalist, told The Associated Press. Three-fifths of the lake has dried up and salt saturation has reached some 350 milligrams per liter from 80 milligrams in 1970s, he said.

Kahram said the government should allow 20 percent of the water from the dams to reach the lake.

Mostafa Ghanbari, secretary of the Society for Savior of the Lake Oroumieh, believes transferring water from the Caspian Sea may be "the only way to save" the lake. But such a project would be ambitious, requiring the pumping of water some 430 miles (700 kilometers), from a body of water at considerably lower elevation.

In the green and beautiful city of Oroumieh, famous for peaceful coexistence between Azeri people, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians as well as Muslims and Christians, talk about the fate of the lake is common among ordinary people in teahouses and on the streets.

Many express happiness with the government decision to manipulate clouds in hopes of increasing rainfall.

"It is a good decision. Every evening I look at the dark clouds that are coming and I tell my family soon there will be rain," and on some nights there have been showers, said Masoud Ranjbar, a taxi driver.

However, Eskandar Khanjari, a local journalist in Oroumieh, called the cloud-seeding plan "a show." He said recent rainfall was only seasonal, as predicted by meteorologists.

Scoffing at the promises of officials and what he called "non-expert views," he said of efforts to save the lake: "It seems that people have only one way; to pray for rain."

Beyond the debates by national and local authorities some folks here suggest another way Oroumieh could be saved.

A local legend says wild purple gladiolas have had a miraculous role in doing just that. The flowers have grown every year for a thousand years in the spot where a princess of Oroumieh was killed as she warned the people of the city about an invading enemy.

As a recent sunset turned the lake golden, Kamal the boatman tried to find some hope in the returning blossoms.

"You see, still wild purple gladiolas are appearing in the spring," he said. "The city and its lake can eventually survive."

-- Yeah, right, I wish you luck Mr. Kamal. With the current regime not going anywhere soon, run by incompetent gold-diggers who are so busy stashing away gold in their Swiss bank accounts they can't be bothered to have a care for the actual average citizens of Iran, your lake WILL die and so will your city.

Four Devastating Asian Droughts Captured in Tree Rings

Study details at least four epic droughts in Asia
Thursday, April 22 07:42 pm
(This story from the UK version of Yahoo News from AP)
Jean-Louis Santini

Data collected over the past 15 years for the study is expected to help scientists understand how climate change can unleash large-scale weather disruptions.

Any drastic shifts to the seasonal monsoon rains in Asia, which feed nearly half the world's population by helping crops grow, could have serious socio-economic consequences, according to scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

They mapped out past droughts and their relative severity by sampling the wood of thousands of ancient trees across Asia. Among them was a drought that caused tens of millions of people to starve to death in the late 1870s.

"Global climate models fail to accurately simulate the Asian monsoon, and these limitations have hampered our ability to plan for future, potentially rapid and heretofore unexpected shifts in a warming world," said lead author Edward Cook, head of Lamont's Tree Ring Lab.

Prior to the study, published in Friday's edition of Science, reliable instrumental data collected in Asia -- such as temperature, rain accumulations and winds -- only dated back to 1950.

The scientists pointed to some evidence that monsoon changes are driven at least in part by variations in sea-surface temperatures, with some speculation but no certainty that warming global temperatures could modify and possibly intensify these cycles.

The tree-ring records suggested that climate may have played an important roll in the fall of China's Ming dynasty in 1644, by providing additional evidence of a severe drought already referenced in some historical Chinese texts as the worst in five centuries at the time.

According to the study, the drought occurred at some point between 1638 and 1641, most severely in northeastern China close to Beijing. It is believed to have helped fuel rebellions by farmers that eventually contributed to the Ming dynasty's fall.

Southern China is currently experiencing its worst drought in nearly a century. [I think it's a good guess that this drought - and fear - are primary driving forces behind the construction of an unprecedented number of gigantic dam projects that are disrupting the lives of millions of Chinese; the government probably figures it can deal with grumbling dispossessed farmers who, after all, have more or less sufficient food to survive - so what if they've been kicked off the land their families have farmed for the past thousand years; the government would not be able to long survive 300 million rioting starving farmers or - even more frightening, the starving residents of the cities.]

Rainfall determines the width of the annual growth rings of some tree species. The researchers' trek across Asia to find trees old enough for long-term records took them to over 300 sites, to Siberia, Indonesia, northern Australia, Pakistan and as far east as Japan.

"It's everything from lowland rainforests to high in the Himalayas," said study coauthor Kevin Anchukaitis, a Lamont tree ring scientist.

"You have a tremendous diversity of environment, climate influences and species."

University of Hawaii meteorologist Bin Wang said the tree-ring atlas is valuable to monsoon forecasters, allowing them to detect short-term and long-term patterns thanks to the detailed spatial areas and the length of the record.

Dead Babies Wash Up on Chinese Beach

Dead babies wash up on Chinese beach
Two mortuary workers were detained and two senior hospital staff were sacked in eastern China after the bodies of at least 21 infants and foetuses were found in a river.
Published: 9:25PM BST 30 Mar 2010

At least eight bodies had tags indicating they were from the hospital of Jining Medical University in Shandong province, Xinhua news agency reported.

Authorities were quoted by Beijing News saying the corpses could have been those of aborted foetuses or babies who had died of illness. They were found on the outskirts of the city of Jining.

Xinhua quoted a spokesman for the city government as telling reporters that two mortuary workers had been sacked in connection with the incident and were in police custody.

Naming the two workers as Zhu Zhenyu and Wang Zhijun, Xinhua quoted the spokesman as saying that the two had been paid to dispose of the bodies.

“Investigations by police and health authorities show that Zhu and Wang had reached verbal agreements privately with relatives of the dead babies to dispose the bodies and charged fees,” the spokesman, Gong Zhenhua, said.

“They subsequently transported the bodies secretly to the Guangfu River, but they had failed to bury the bodies completely,” he was quoted as saying.

The river was not a source of drinking water for the city and municipal tests found it had not been contaminated, Xinhua reported. [Yeah, right. One has to now wonder how many other bodies and body parts were dumped into the river.  I don't believe for an instant that any of these bodies were "buried" and somehow became "uncovered."  And that is just an outright lie about the river not being a source of drinking water.  Right now China is experiencing a SEVERE drought of several years' duration and ALL rivers are being used as sources of drinking water, right while unprocessed chemical pollutants and unprocessed human waste continue to be dumped into them at record rates.]

Two senior officials, Li Luning and He Xin, director and deputy director of the hospital’s logistics department, were removed from their posts, and a vice president of the hospital, Niu Haifeng, was suspended, Gong said.

The incident exposed “a serious loophole in the hospital’s management and indicates a lack of ethics and legal awareness of some hospital staff,” Gong said. “It exerts a very negative impact on society and teaches us a profound lesson.”

He said the city government had ordered health authorities to immediately launch a general overhaul of body treatment at all local hospitals.

One of the bodies had been bundled into a plastic bag marked “hospital waste”, Beijing News said.

Abortion is common in China, where at least 13 million births are terminated every year, due in part to the nation’s so-called “one-child policy,” which limits most urban couples to just one offspring.

The family-planning rules are widely blamed for fuelling abortions of female foetuses in China, where boys are traditionally favoured.

Reports of poor treatment of patients – both living and dead – in China’s underfunded hospitals are also not uncommon.

Last June, a hospital in central China’s Hubei province was found to have dumped the bodies of two adults and six aborted foetuses at a construction site after failing to locate relatives of the dead, state media reported. [Question: How could an aborted foetus not have a relative? Is the mother not a relative?]

A bag containing severed human limbs was also discovered in the case, in the city of Xiangfan.

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This is just one incident that has been "discovered" and reported (shocking, actually, that it was allowed to make the news) - multiply this about 10,000 times and you will begin to get a picture of what is really happening in China these days - day in and day out.

Drought Caused Collapse of Chinese Dynasties

What happened before happened many times, and is happening now... Ancient China: Lack Of Rainfall Could Have Contributed To Social Upheaval And Fall Of Dynasties ScienceDaily (Nov. 7, 2008) — Chinese history is replete with the rise and fall of dynasties, but researchers now have identified a natural phenomenon that may have been the last straw for some of them: a weakening of the summer Asian Monsoons. Such weakening accompanied the fall of three dynasties and now could be lessening precipitation in northern China. Results of the study, led by researchers from the University of Minnesota and Lanzhou University in China, appear in the journal Science. The work rests on climate records preserved in the layers of stone in a 118-millimeter-long stalagmite found in Wanxiang Cave in Gansu Province, China. By measuring amounts of the elements uranium and thorium throughout the stalagmite, the researchers could tell the date each layer was formed. And by analyzing the "signatures" of two forms of oxygen in the stalagmite, they could match amounts of rainfall--a measure of summer monsoon strength--to those dates. The stalagmite was formed over 1,810 years; stone at its base dates from A.D. 190, and stone at its tip was laid down in A.D. 2003, the year the stalagmite was collected. "It was unexpected that a record of surface weather would be preserved in underground cave deposits," said David Verardo, director of the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Paleoclimatology Program, which funded the research. "These results illustrate the promise of paleoclimate science to look beyond the obvious and see new possibilities." "Summer monsoon winds originate in the Indian Ocean and sweep into China," said Hai Cheng, author of the paper and a scientist at the University of Minnesota. "When the summer monsoon is stronger, it pushes farther northwest into China." These moisture-laden winds bring rain necessary for cultivating rice. But when the monsoon is weak, the rains stall farther south and east, depriving northern and western parts of China of summer rains. A lack of rainfall could have contributed to social upheaval and the fall of dynasties. The researchers discovered that periods of weak summer monsoons coincided with the last years of the Tang, Yuan and Ming dynasties, which are known to have been times of popular unrest. Conversely, the scientists found that a strong summer monsoon prevailed during one of China's "golden ages," the Northern Song Dynasty. The ample summer monsoon rains may have contributed to the rapid expansion of rice cultivation from southern China to the midsection of the country. During the Northern Song Dynasty, rice first became China's main staple crop, and China's population doubled. "The waxing and waning of summer monsoon rains are just one piece of the puzzle of changing climate and culture around the world," said Larry Edwards, geologist at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the paper. For example, the study showed that the dry period at the end of the Tang Dynasty coincided with a previously identified drought halfway around the world, in Meso-America, which has been linked to the fall of the Mayan civilization. The study also showed that the ample summer rains of the Northern Song Dynasty coincided with the beginning of the well-known Medieval Warm Period in Europe and Greenland. During this time--the late 10th century--Vikings colonized southern Greenland. Centuries later, a series of weak monsoons prevailed as Europe and Greenland shivered through what geologists call the Little Ice Age. In the 14th and early 15th centuries, as the cold of the Little Ice Age settled into Greenland, the Vikings disappeared from there. At the same time, on the other side of the world, the weak monsoons of the 14th century coincided with the end of the Yuan Dynasty. A second major finding concerns the relationship between temperature and the strength of the monsoons. For most of the last 1,810 years, as average temperatures rose, so, too, did the strength of the summer monsoon. That relationship flipped, however, around 1960, a sign that the late 20th century weakening of the monsoon and drying in northwestern China was caused by human activity. If carbon dioxide is the culprit, as some have proposed, the drying trend may well continue in Inner Mongolia, northern China and neighboring areas on the fringes of the monsoon's reach. If, however, the culprit is man-made soot, as others have proposed, the trend could be reversed, the researchers said, by reduction of soot emissions. The research also was supported by the National Science Foundation of China and the Gary Comer Science and Education Foundation. Adapted from materials provided by National Science Foundation.

At the Mercy of Rain

Archeology Writer Warns of Drought With Climate Change By Grant Rhodes, Guest Writer, 2-05-08 Brian Fagan, a leading archaeological writer, said at a lecture at the University of Montana Tuesday night that one of the key ramifications of climate change will be its effect on the world’s water. “Many millions of people in the world today live at the mercy of the rain,” Fagan said. “And because of that, one of the great issues of climate change is our vulnerability.” As part of the 2008 Wilderness Institute’s Lecture Series, Fagan’s presentation was entitled, “The Great Warming Drought and the Flail of God: An Archaeologist Looks at Climate Change.” It focused on how, until recently, we knew little about ancient climate change. But now archaeologists are able to illustrate how civilizations survived and adapted to different warming and cooling periods hundreds of years ago. Fagan noted at the beginning of “The Little Ice Age,” which lasted from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Century, storms and rains destroyed crops, forcing people to adapt to the changing conditions. “It was a period of serious famine but also a period of agricultural innovation,” Fagan said. “In short, there was an agricultural revolution.” Fagan uses these historical examples as a lesson that climate change forces people to be innovative. “It is the social and cultural impact of climate change that makes all the difference.” Fagan warned that it is not just Africa and other under-developed regions that will suffer from a water shortage. Parts of the Southwest United States and Southern Rockies, along with parts of the Midwest along the Eastern slope of the Rockies, are considered arid or semi-arid regions. “In the next century, extreme drought will affect 30 percent of us on Earth, which will be up from 3 percent,” Fagan said. Moderate drought would affect half of all of us, he added. “These are reasonable forecasts for the future. We must learn from the lessons of climate change in the past.” So how do we deal with global warming and impending crisis of water shortage today? “The issue isn’t if we can stop global warming. The issue is how do we live with it,” Fagan said. It is important to not let the issue become the “silent elephant in the room,” Fagan warned. There is a need to address it on a personal level as well as on a governmental level. While trying to stay as apolitical as possible on the issue, Fagan did say, “We spend so much money on stupid wars, and we don’t spend it on our future.” Fagan assured the audience that despite an impending water shortage, life will go on. “Humans are adaptive, and capable of making changes, but at the expense of great suffering,” he said. While saying nobody knows what global temperatures will do—whether they will continue to increase or begin to go down—Fagan admitted to being scared at the possibilities. Not scared for himself, but for future generation, because they will be the ones that have to live with it. Speaking to a crowd of mostly students, Fagan warned, “We are playing a huge game of Russian Roulette, and you guys are right in the middle of it.”

Water Wars - More Precious Than Oil

Darlings - here's a no-brainer investment tip: buy a good water ETF like PHO, and hang on to it for dear life for the next 20 years. Think I'm full of baloney? Just take a look at what is happening in the USA: severe, sustained drought in the southwest due to climate changes; the same in the southeast US (I sure wouldn't want to be living in Atlanta right now); more and more sink holes showing up in Florida due to depletion of water tables. We also have deteriorating and collapsing infrastructure, often more than 100 years old, that needs to be replaced. We have lead pipes and PCP pipes, both hazardous to people's health. We have antiquated sewerage treatment systems. We have systems that co-mingle sanitary sewerage with storm run-off. And we in the USA have a LOT of fresh water sources and the technology to provide safe drinking water to all of our population. BUT - THE COST! Oy! The cost! So, what are they going to do in China? Asia? Africa? From the Times Online December 4, 2007 Water shortages are likely to be trigger for wars, says UN chief Ban Ki Moon By Leo Lewis in Beppu A struggle by nations to secure sources of clean water will be “potent fuel” for war, the first Asia-Pacific Water Summit heard yesterday. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, told delegates from across the region that the planet faced a water crisis that was especially troubling for Asia. High population growth, rising consumption, pollution and poor water management posed significant threats, he said, adding that climate change was also making “a bad situation worse”. Mr Ban went on to condemn the lack of heed paid by governments to these warning signs: “Throughout the world, water resources continue to be spoiled, wasted and degraded. “The consequences for humanity are grave. Water scarcity threatens economic and social gains and is a potent fuel for wars and conflict.” His remarks come as environmental experts in Great Britain have identified 46 countries — home to 2.7 billion people — where climate change and water-related crises will create a high risk of violent conflict. A further 56, representing another 1.2 billion people, are at high risk of political instability, claims a report by International Alert, which concludes that it is now “too late to believe the situation can be made safe solely by reducing carbon emissions worldwide and mitigating climate change”. Janani Vivekananda, one of the authors of the International Alert report said: “Water management will be a huge tinderbox and now is the time for international organisations to come together. There is huge potential not just for conflict but for co-operation.” Mr Ban's comments were echoed by many of the other speakers at the water summit, who gathered in southwestern Japan to discuss a range of issues, including policies that might prevent the various aspects of an Asian water crisis deepening into armed conflict. Yasuo Fukuda, the Japanese Prime Minister, vowed yesterday that water and climate change would be at the top of the agenda for the Group of Eight summit in Japan next summer. The Beppu summit, which began on the same day as UN Climate Change talks in Bali, also coincides with a study directly linking water shortages to violence throughout history. In a report published in by the United States National Academy of Sciences journal today, David Zhang, of Hong Kong University, has analysed a half millennium's worth of human conflict — more than 8,000 wars — and concluded that climate change and resulting water shortage has been a far greater trigger than imagined previously. If global warming continues, water shortages could trigger more wars, Dr Zhang told The Times: “We are on alert, because this gives us the indication that resource shortage is the main cause of war. Human beings will definitely have conflicts over this; whether it turns to war depends on the quality of the social buffer available to each nation, but the danger is right there.” The Asia Development Bank, which was also represented at the Beppu summit, informed delegates that without rational water development and better management, the future social development of Asian developing countries would be seriously jeopardised. The president of the ADB, Haruhiko Kuroda, said that his bank now plans to double investment in Asian water projects to $2 billion per year, given the potential for conflict if water governance remains weak.