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The Most Deadly and Destructive Change

September 1st, 2009 · No Comments

A Fish Out of Water struggles to survive, finding a path toward a safer environment. FishOutofWater is a thoughtful, engaged scientist, passionately struggling to help us find our way toward a prosperous, climate-friendly future. Here is a guest post focusing on what is happening with  glaciers.

In climate change, drought, reduced water supplies and famine will affect billions of people. The global catastrophe is beginning on the high plateaus of the Andes, Tibet, and western north America. Disappearing alpine glaciers are threatening global water supplies. The “Water People” of the high antiplano of Bolivia are at ground zero of the drying. Rivers have slowed to a trickle and pastures have turned to dust bowls. Bolivia’s glaciers, the source of their rivers have melted to remnants.

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Climate change is melting tropical and temperate glaciers reducing water supplies and agricultural production from the Andes to the Alps, from Tibet to Montana. Billions of people are becoming affected by reductions in water supplies caused by melting glaciers. Global water shortages and famine begin with melting glaciers and drying high plateaus. Bolivia is but the starkest example.

Glacier National Park will be glacier free in a few decades at the present rate of melting.

Boulder Glacier 1932

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Boulder Glacier 2005

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Glacier National Park is the poster child for the warming and drying of the west. Cities and farms from California to Colorado are fighting to find enough water.

The largest of all catastrophes that is being set in motion is the drying of Tibet and the rapid disappearance of Tibetan glaciers. The water supplies of billions of people are in danger.

Coal power consumes huge quantities of water and is the largest source of the greenhouse gas CO2.

According to the California Energy Commission (cited in Paul Gipe’s WIND
ENERGY COMES OF AGE, John Wiley & Sons, 1995), conventional power plants
consume the following amounts of water (through evaporative loss, not
including water that is recaptured and treated for further use):

WATER CONSUMPTION–CONVENTIONAL POWER PLANTS
Technology

gallons/kWh

Nuclear    0.62
Coal         0.49
Oil            0.43
Combined Cycle 0.25

Small amounts of water are used to clean wind turbine rotor blades in arid climates (where rainfall does not keep the blades clean). The purpose of blade cleaning is to eliminate dust and insect buildup, which otherwise deforms the shape of the airfoil and degrades performance.

Similarly, small amounts of water are used to clean photovoltaics panels.

Water use numbers for these two technologies are as follows:

WATER CONSUMPTION–WIND AND SOLAR
Technology

gallons/kWh

Wind [1]   0.001
PV [2]       0.030
Wind therefore uses less than 1/600 as much water per unit of electricity produced as does nuclear, and approximately 1/500 as much as coal.

Replacing coal fired power plants with renewable energy is needed to save global water supplies.

Tags: climate change

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