Make no mistake about it, water supplies are already dire in many places around the world. The poorer the country, the less access there is to clean, portable water. Thousands of people die due to easily treatable diseases that were stamped out in much of the western world a long time ago. Yet things are going to get much worse for us all if we do not drastically change the way we do things here on Earth.
From MSNBC:
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Half the world's population could face a shortage of clean water by 2080 because of climate change, experts warned Tuesday.Wong Poh Poh, a professor at the National University of Singapore, told a regional conference that global warming was disrupting water flow patterns and increasing the severity of floods, droughts and storms — all of which reduce the availability of drinking water.
Wong said the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that as many as 2 billion people won't have sufficient access to clean water by 2050. That figure is expected to rise to 3.2 billion by 2080 — nearly tripling the number who now do without it.
Most of those numbers are especially focused on the Asian continent, where burgeoning urban populations not only strain water infrastructure but pollute the supply nearby. Rising ocean levels are also a problem for low-lying areas in South Asia. Even in one of the richest areas of the world, California, will begin to suffer as the snowpacks of the Sierra Mountains continues to dwindle year by year. Much of the arid state relies on the snowpack through the dry summer and fall months. There are countless other problem spots, but all can be dealt with if we plan ahead, conserve better and stop emitting so much damn carbon into the atmosphere.
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