Don’t know how I missed this back when the old man was with us and singing it. Amy Goodman played it today on her Democracy Now one-year review of the Gulf Oil disaster.
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Archive for the ‘Water’ Category
Don’t Go Near the Water — Johnny Cash
Wednesday, April 20th, 2011Water, Cool Clear Water
Thursday, April 29th, 2010
FORGET expensive machinery, the best way to purify water could be hiding in a cactus. It turns out that an extract from the prickly pear cactus is effective at removing sediment and bacteria from dirty water.
Many water purification methods introduced into the developing world are quickly abandoned as people don’t know how to use and maintain them, says Norma Alcantar at the University of South Florida in Tampa. So she and her colleagues decided to investigate the prickly pear cactus, Opuntia ficus-indica, which 19th-century Mexican communities used as a water purifier. The cactus is found across the globe.
Desalinization Innovation
Monday, August 4th, 2008From the University of New Mexico comes an intriguing idea for desalinization. By placing two 30 foot tall cylinders near each other, one with salt water the other with fresh water, and a connecting pipe at the top, a small amount of heat applied to the salt water side will create enough of a vacuum at the top for vaporization to take place below the boiling point. The fresh condensate moves to the fresh water side replacing that drawn out at the bottom for irrigation, washing etc.
While clever, there are several problems. Keeping the water columns at the necessary height with shut off valves and intake valves can presumably be done automatically. The automation will have to be rugged and simple. 30 feet however, is fairly high, and likely not suitable except in rural areas. The amount of water, however, is not so insignificant. A 30 foot column with a 4 foot diameter can hold about 3,000 gallons of water. As I understand the scheme, the fresh water side has to be primed almost to the top, meaning the primer water has to be found or transported to the spot before the device works, perhaps not easy in water stricken areas. The article does not mention the evaporation rate possible, thus the gallons per hour transformed and the return on investment. Finally, there is the matter of the brine left on the saline side. How often does it have to be drained, and how? Where does the brackish water go — and at what cost to the environment? It will be interesting to see where UNM takes the idea.
The heat requirements are said to be so low that small solar, or even the exhaust from other household or industrial appliances, such as air conditioners, may be enough to create the vacuum.
Then for another approach to desalinization and energy usage there is the PX Pressure Exchanger which recaptures energy in the waste product, brine, of reverse osmosis.
State-of-the-art desalination plants suck in seawater and then use electricity-driven pumps to put it under pressure. This salty stream is then slammed against filters designed to let the fresh water bleed through while sequestering the high-pressure brine – a process called reverse osmosis.
“It takes a lot of pressure to get the pure water to go away from the salt, and it takes a lot of energy to pressurize the water,” Stover said.
That’s where Energy Recovery comes into play. The company designed its pump to capture the pressure trapped in that left-behind brine and recycle its energy into repressurizing the next batch of virgin seawater destined to be slammed against those reverse-osmotic filters.
Water Windmill
Monday, August 4th, 2008An eccentric inventor in the parched plains of Australia has come up with this idea for a water windmill. Based on the behavior of an African beetle which extracts water vapor in the desert from the wind moving through its carapace this is beyond ingenious. Would it really work to provide any substantial amounts of water? Tests will tell. But check it out.
If that weren’t enough Max Whisson, the inventor, has another idea to water the deserts. He calls it a Water Road: Seawater brought inland in black covered surface pipes, allowing the sun to heat the water and at certain points near delivery going to full vapor condensation, leaving the salt behind and being collected to water crops and gullets.
Source: CleanTechBlog
More about Whisson, here.
A Precipitous Rise in Extreme Rainfall
Monday, July 21st, 2008Global warming has been expected to bring not only droughts, but also floods, because what rain you get comes hammering down harder. And the downpours of the future now look to be even more drenching than expected.
A new Nature Geoscience paper (subscription required) considers the intensity of precipitation measured hour by hour for a century in the Dutch town of De Bilt. Theoretically, it’s thought that the intensity of rainfall, including the biggest cloudbursts, should rise by 7% for each degree Celsius that the temperature goes up. That’s based on a thermodynamics equation called the Clausius-Clapeyron relation – and it’s what you see if you look at extreme rainfall on the scale of days.
But it’s the rainiest hours, not the rainiest days, that interest the paper’s authors, Geert Lenderink and Erik Van Meijgaard of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. That turns out to make a difference.
Looking at the intensity of those rainiest hours, they find that although the 7% scale holds in cold weather, it tips up to about 14% once the temperature hits 12 degrees Celsius.
36,000 Homeless in Iowa
Sunday, June 15th, 2008“About 36,000 Iowans in 11 counties are homeless, Gov. Chet Culver said Sunday. In Cedar Rapids, 25,000 people were forced from their homes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is taking applications for disaster assistance.
“This is far over record flooding. It is of historic proportions,” David Miller, administrator of the Iowa Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said at a briefing. Eighty-three of Iowa’s 99 counties have been declared state disaster areas. Three deaths were attributed to flooding.”
“…the state’s worst damage to date was in Cedar Rapids, where early estimates put property damage at $736 million, said fire department spokesman Dave Koch. He said about 9.2 square miles of the city was affected by flooding.
The immediate concern there had switched from the water flowing in the streets to that flowing out of people’s taps.
Three of the city’s four drinking water collection wells were contaminated by murky, petroleum-laden floodwater, leaving only about 15 million gallons a day for the city of more than 120,000 and the suburbs that depend on its water system. Officials warned that if people didn’t cut back on nonessential uses, drinking water would run out within a couple of days.”
Glaciers, Water, The Andes
Thursday, April 24th, 2008I don’t care if it’s called Global Warming, Global Weirding, Climate Change or Xifurteling, something big is happening. Life is changing for tens of thousands. Common sense evaluations, let alone science, says these changes are connected to an enormous, moving system. Inertia alone, even if the driving forces could be diminished, would keep it going for years. And not enough is being done either to lessen the energy in, or to deal with the consequences.
Throughout the Andean mountain range, high altitude glaciers are melting faster, altering eco-systems, and turning countries such as Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia into test cases for climate change. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that rising temperatures could melt most of Latin America’s glaciers by 2022. And as temperatures rise, some experts predict the disappearing glaciers will create water shortages and social unrest.
Edson Ramirez, a hydrologist at San Andres University in La Paz, predicts the Tuni-Condoriri glacier system – which includes Chacaltaya – will be gone within 20 to 30 years.
“There’s no doubt we’re facing a crisis,” he said. “And what’s worse, we simply don’t have the capacity to deal with it.”
The effect of diminishing glaciers is most evident in El Alto, an indigenous community of 800,000 people perched above the capital of La Paz. Waves of mostly Aymara immigrants – the satellite city is growing at between 5 percent and 10 percent a year – arrive daily, fleeing the poverty of their native highlands. With the disappearance of glacial water supplies and a decrepit and poorly managed water company, the city could soon suffer a severe water shortage, experts say.
