Atlanta Water Shortage

There’s been a ton of talk about new carbon emission standards and with Obama now in the White House, there will probably be a lot of money spent on new legislation, new policies and all with the aim or curbing or slowing down global warming.

Personally I think that many people miss the big picture when it comes to global warming. The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years and has survived just fine with us and will do just fine without us. Throughout the history of the earth there has been a definite movement between warm and cold periods. I think that what is misunderstood most about these temperature changes in the past is that everyone assumes they are extremely gradual.

For example you hear people talk about an ice age that lasts 10,000 years or a warmer period that may last 5,000 years, but in the middle of those overall trends there have been period of 50 years or even 100 years that may completely buck the trend. One of the great examples I read about was when the great conveyor - seen here which is huge underwater river in the ocean more than 40 times as large as all the fresh water rivers on earth, part of it stopped flowing in the not too distant path (maybe 20 to 30,000 years ago). Well the warm water the great conveyor brings up from the equator keeps much of continental Europe and the east coast of the US to some extent much warmer than it would be normally.

When the great ocean conveyor belt stopped flowing, the climate of France took about 3 years to be plunged into extremely cold weather and much of Europe experienced the same conditions. Many scientists are saying that now because of the melting of the north pole ice, the extra fresh water may serve to disrupt or partially half the great conveyor - which has been theorized adds close to 10-15 degrees of warmth to the areas it passes through.

Here is the direct quote from this article that I found particularly enlightening:

For early humans living in Europe 30,000 years ago - when the cave paintings in France were produced - the weather would be pretty much like it is today for well over a thousand years, giving people a chance to build culture to the point where they could produce art and reach across large territories.

And then a particularly hard winter would hit.

The spring would come late, and summer would never seem to really arrive, with the winter snows appearing as early as September. The next winter would be brutally cold, and the next spring didn’t happen at all, with above-freezing temperatures only being reached for a few days during August and the snow never completely melting. After that, the summer never returned: for 1500 years the snow simply accumulated and accumulated, deeper and deeper, as the continent came to be covered with glaciers and humans either fled or died out. (Neanderthals, who dominated Europe until the end of these cycles, appear to have been better adapted to cold weather than Homo sapiens.)

So is Global Warming a bit of red herring, when we really should be worried about Global Cooling?

With Hanna zooming past the east coast, we can turn our eyes to the next possible rainmaker - Hurricane Ike.

Hurricane Ike is a category 3 hurricane as of this writing, and early tracking suggests it might thread the needle between Florida and Cuba and come up the west coast of Florida.

On that track, it could very easily end up bringing Georgia some much needed rain.  Alternatively, if it follows Hanna but as a larger storm, it could at least brush Georgia.

In any case, Ike is the next big system in the area - what are your thoughts?

For the first time since July, 2007, Georgia has moved from “exceptional” to “extreme” drought status.  While, it’s certainly an improvement, state climatologist David Stooksbury says “If this were a hospital patient, this would be like going from grave to critical”.

As you probably know, Lake Lanier is still way below normal.  It’s about 15 feet below its normal summer level, which equates to about 362 billion gallons low.

For the math on that number (please correct me if I’m wrong):

• Full pool is 2,554,000 acre-feet of water
• Lanier is currently holding around 1,443,000 acre-feet of water
• That means its down by 1,111,000 acre-feet
• There are 325,851.429 gallons per acre-foot, which means:
• 1,111,000 acre-feet = 362,020,937,619 gallons

That’s quite a lot of water.  The lake has been going up for the last few months, but it tends to plateau near the end of March and then start to drop.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens this summer.  Will we hit the magic 1035′ level (even if it’s not as bad as we thought)?  Lower than that?  What do you think?

EERE News is reporting on a study by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography that puts the odd at 50% that Lake Mead will drop too low for power production by the year 2017 and run completely dry by 2021.

If that were to happen, it would leave about 1.3 million people without power and approximately 8 million people without water.

From Save and Conserve:

The Lake Mead/Lake Powell/Colorado River system is currently at about 50% capacity. Based on current water use & projected future demand, the system is on an unsustainable death spiral. Things are so bad that there is a 10% chance Lake Mead could be dry by 2014. That should be alarming for residents of the southwest, to say the least.

These numbers are based on forecasted climate conditions and water demand.  If either of those variable shift, it could buy them a few more years.  Still, the future looks pretty bleak for that area.