Monthly Archive: March 2015

Credit: Reuters / Lucy Nicholson

NASA’s top water scientist says California only has about one year’s worth of water left in storage, and its groundwater – often used as a backup for reservoirs and other reserves – is rapidly depleting. He suggests immediately rationing water.

California just had the driest January since record-keeping began in 1895, with groundwater and snowpack levels at all-time lows, NASA scientist Jay Familglietti wrote in a column for the Los Angeles Times. He said the state has been running out of water since before the current years-long drought and storage levels have been falling since at least 2002, according to NASA satellite data.

“California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain,” said Familglietti. “In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.”

A team of NASA scientists, using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, discovered that the state’s Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins were 11 trillion gallons (41.6 trillion liters) below normal seasonal levels. The researchers say that water levels have steadily dropped since the launch of GRACE in 2002.

Californians use an average of 181 gallons of water each day and a total of around 2.5 trillion gallons a year, according to data from the USGS website.

Familglietti called for an immediate and dramatic rationing of water, including for domestic, municipal, agricultural and industrial uses. A recent Field Poll shows that 94 percent of Californians surveyed believe the drought is serious, and one-third support mandatory rationing.

Other solutions to rationing are desalination plants. San Diego is building the largest ocean desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere. The $1 billion project will deliver 50 million gallons of drinking water a day and is scheduled to open in 2016, while 15 other plants are planned along the coastline from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Basin.

READ MORE: California drought worst in 1,200 years – study

But there are a few drawbacks: the San Diego plant requires more electricity to produce than any other water source, and in order to get 50 million gallons of drinking water it has to process 100 million gallons of seawater, which once returned to the ocean as discharge water has double the saline level.

“This plant can’t come online fast enough,” Bob Yamada, water resources manager at the San Diego County Water Authority, told the Sacramento Bee. The Authority serves 3.1 million people and is buying all of the plant’s freshwater production.

“It’s drought-proof. That’s one of the most important attributes. It will be the most reliable water source we have,” he added.

Desalination has been adopted by other nations with fewer natural freshwater supplies – Israel, Australia and Saudi Arabia, for example. There also exist more other measures, that don’t require electricity or processing plants, such as DIY solar powered water still/condensers.

Another remedy being considered by California municipalities is wastewater recycling, which involves treating city sewage to drinking water standards and using it to refill reservoirs.

Based on this article by RT.com

The post Only 1 year of water left in California, NASA scientist suggests rationing appeared first on Exposing The Truth.

Not all chemicals are equal, and neither are all pesticides. As in most areas, many people are misinformed by vague polarizing texts that frequently talk about “toxic” chemicals without stating the dose. There are things you need to know about pesticides, and I did my best to put them all into 5 points.

1. Organic farming uses pesticides, and they aren’t necessarily less toxic

2. The best alternatives to spraying are biological controls and genetic engineering

The downside of spraying anything is that you have to create this solution, ship it to the area it is being used, and then not all of it gets where you want (some of it goes into the soil and wind). The impacts on insects who are not even interested in eating the plants are logically greater when Bt is being sprayed than when it is being expressed in the tissues of the plants.

The most promising alternatives to spraying are using biological controls (like natural predators or boosting the plant’s natural immune reactions) and genetic engineering. The new RNAi GM pest control is a really clever method of enabling plants to turn away normal pests without needing to produce anything more than a secluded double-stranded piece of DNA that inhibits the development of only the target insects. If the organic movement is really concerned about environmental sustainability, then this type of GM should be considered for admission.

From the EPA

3. Pesticide use has not increased with the increased use of GM crops

Everybody knows that the United States is the biggest adopter of genetic engineering worldwide, with the majority of US corn carrying glyphosate resistance. If you listen to anti-GM people, they’ll tell you pesticide use has skyrocketed since the introduction of GE crops, but this simply isn’t supported by data.

The use of Bt crops have actually reduced pesticide spraying, which is something that’d be easy to miss if you spend a lot of time in the blogosphere. The pesticides we use today are less toxic, and are sprayed in lower concentrations, than yesterday’s. Still, optimally we’d grow our plants with limited logistics.

4. Most pesticides can be removed through scrubbing with warm water

Seriously, you can remove most pesticides by simply washing and scrubbing your produce with warm water. The story going around about vinegar is, ironically, an unncessary logistical step that does not increase pesticide removal.

5. Pesticide levels are routinely tested, and the vast majority of samples are within limits

Pesticide levels of conventional and GM crops are routinely tested for pesticide residue. Ironically, organic crops that also use pesticides are not tested, nor is data about their useage levels published anywhere. A recent analysis by Europe’s Food Safety Agency (EFSA) found that 97% of samples had pesticide residues within limits, and a little over half (54%) had no detectable levels of pesticides at all, and 27% had detectable residues of more than one type of pesticide.

Conclusion

I’m not a fan of spraying anything onto crops, because applying anything in an excess onto a wide area will have a greater impact on the soil and the water than other methods. There are indications that our chemical use (specifically endocrine disruptors) is increasing birth defects. We can only improve the system if people are informed enough to demand meaningful change and regulation.

The post 5 things everyone should know about pesticides appeared first on Exposing The Truth.

The toll from the four-year civil war in Syria is clearly visible even from space, with satellite images revealing that 83 percent of the lights have gone out in the country since 2011.

The satellite data – which compares Syria’s night landscape in 2011 to that of 2014, from 800 kilometers above earth – reflects a grim picture of the situation on the ground in Syria, according to researchers from China’s Wuhan University.

“These satellite images help us understand the suffering and fear experienced by ordinary Syrians as their country is destroyed around them,” the lead researcher on the project, Dr. Xi Li, said in a statement.

The study was supported by 130 international NGOs, and its results were presented simultaneously with the launch of a new campaign under the hashtag #WithSyria, a solidarity movement with the Syrian people on the ground.

The images show that 97 percent of electricity has been cut off in Aleppo province, and 96 percent went out in Raqqa, a region under the control of the Islamic State (IS, previously ISIS/ISIL).

The lights across Syria have been slowly dimming since the civil war began in 2011. The fighting has destroyed schools, hospitals and homes.

The Syrian government has been struggling with supplying electricity in light of the damages caused by violence, as well as the level of demand. The Syrian Ministry of Electricity and Energy in Damascus has condemned the “terrorist acts” of opposition militants that have damaged electricity infrastructure, including power stations.

In February, Syrian Prime Minister Wael Halqi said the government will continue to subsidize electricity. “The government continues to subsidise staple food products, as well as the electricity sector,” Halqi told parliament.

A resident from western Aleppo told Al Monitor this past summer: “We are fed up with the continuous power outage. It is no longer possible to rely on electricity from the grid…Despite the cost of subscription to generators, these remain the only solution for the moment, and we don’t have another choice.”

The Syrian war started with an uprising that broke out in the spring of 2011, following the Arab Spring protests and high-profile nationwide demonstrations against the government of President Bashar Assad. The conflict then grew into a full-blown war. Some of the radical Islamist groups that fought in the ranks of the opposition – backed by the West and Gulf States – have split to pursue their own agenda, hostile to both the Assad government and the so-called ‘moderate’ opposition.

The conflict has claimed the lives of up to 295,000 people, according to February estimates from the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that almost 380,000 Syrians are in desperate need of resettlement. Meanwhile, Amnesty International projects that 5,000 people flee Syria every day under desperate circumstances – 75 percent of whom are women and children.

A separate UN-backed study released on Tuesday showed a drastic decline in life expectancy, from 76 years in 2010 to less than 56 last year.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres said in February that Syria’s humanitarian crisis is the most dramatic the world has encountered for a long time.

Originally from an article on RT.com

The post Syria has lost 83% of its light since 2011 appeared first on Exposing The Truth.