Drying Up
2007-10-22 08:41AM PDT/Home
Great article by Jon Gertner on the drying of the west in this weekend's NY Times Magazine. Most interesting is that like air-conditioning, there's also a compounding effect with fresh water in the face of global warming:
Meanwhile, it is a perverse side effect of global warming that we may have to emit large volumes of carbon dioxide to obtain the clean water that is becoming scarcer because of the carbon dioxide we’ve already put into the atmosphere. A dry region that turns to desalination, for example, would need vast amounts of energy (and money) to purify its water.
Update: After reading The Drying of the West, I've changed how I shower. I run the water, get wet, and turn it off. Suds up and then turn the water back on and rinse off. Makes for a faster shower as well, nothing like the cold air to motivate you along!
Here's a nice product idea: it would be nice to have a stop flow button in my shower to make this really easy, especially if it kept the water temperature at the same level when I restart the flow to rinse off.
Update: More on the idea of changes in climate change causes a compounding effect on various problems, this article in Wired: Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere Increasing, makes the point that an increase in water temperature causes the ocean to absorb less carbon dioxide. As they put it, "Think that a warm Coke has less fizz than a cold Coke".