Water: First Casualty of Climate Change?

Now I know GE and others have been taking out ads in Wired and elsewhere crowing about their desalination plans, and why not? When global warming hits us like a hammer, water will be the first thing we lose. Just ask Darfur about that one. The news gets worse. From CNET:

"The rising temperature of Earth is causing water sources such as glaciers and lakes to rapidly retreat, according to, among others, Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of the leading scientific figures trying to get more research funding for alternative energy....In the United States, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California and Nevada is expected to decline by 30 percent to 70 percent by 2100, he said. If it declines by 20 percent, people will be told to stop watering their lawns or flushing toilets often. A decline of about 50 percent or greater could rewrite the demographics of California. And a massive decline in the snowpack could cause a collapse of the agriculture industry, prompting a migration out of the state, Chu said."

First, what are the odds that another informed doomsayer happens to be a fellow UC Berkeley nerd? Of course, I'm counting both myself and Susan Solomon, senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the co-chair of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who I talked about in my article on exponology. The unfortunate result of this strange collusion is that necks everywhere are going to think this hard science has a well-known liberal agenda. Hopefully, they'll think that all the way until the hour of their doom, at which point I will bid them a fond farewell as they hang onto their ignorance like a flotation device while the world goes to pieces around them.

Second, is this news to anyone? I hope not. When things heat up, water dries up. That much should be apparent, and it's not a stretch from that point of departure to realize that one of the first things climate change will do is reorient the planet's population around places that either get enough rainfall to sustain our civilization or are near the ocean. Which is itself another enviro headache waiting to happen: The seas will be much more acidic by then, and that's going to take some technology.

But humans are up for it, as we always are. The problem comes from unseen complications arising from excessive desalination, which you just know is going to happen. This is survival we're talking about, not some science project. Consider yourself thirsty.