All In One Boat

From 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.

Desal Pump

An 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.

Global 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.

Climate Feedback on Rainfall

“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.”

Iowa Homeless

“…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.”

Incredible Destruction

“California just came through its driest March-April rain period - 2.3 inches of precipitation in the Sierra - since records began being collected in 1859. The biggest reservoir in the state, Lake Shasta, is at 75 percent of its average capacity for this time of year. The second-biggest reservoir, Lake Oroville, is at 59 percent.

State officials warned today that widespread water rationing was a very real possibility this summer. Another few years like this, experts say, and we might start running drastically short of water.”

And the options are not pretty.

I 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.

Glaciers, Water, The Andes

Lester Brown writes:

The world is now facing a climate-driven shrinkage of river-based irrigation water supplies. Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau are melting and could soon deprive the major rivers of India and China of the ice melt needed to sustain them during the dry season. In the Ganges, the Yellow, and the Yangtze river basins, where irrigated agriculture depends heavily on rivers, this loss of dry-season flow will shrink harvests.

The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia.

From Jeff Masters at his wunderground.com blog

“Are storms getting more extreme due to climate change? That is a difficult question to answer, since reliable records are not available at all in many parts of the world, and extend back only a few decades elsewhere. However, we do have a fairly good set of precipitation records for many parts of the globe, and those records show that the heaviest types of rains–those likely to cause flooding–have increased in recent years. According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report, “The frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most land areas”. Indeed, global warming theory has long predicted an increase in heavy precipitation events. As the climate warms, evaporation of moisture from the oceans increases, resulting in more water vapor in the air. According to the 2007 IPCC report, water vapor in the global atmosphere has increased by about 5% over the 20th century, and 4% since 1970. Satellite measurements (Trenberth et al., 2005) have shown a 1.3% per decade increase in water vapor over the global oceans since 1988. Santer et al. (2007) used a climate model to study the relative contribution of natural and human-caused effects on increasing water vapor, and concluded that this increase was “primarily due to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases”. This was also the conclusion of Willet et al. (2007).

Read more….

“Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

Utility officials say such shutdowns probably wouldn’t result in blackouts. But they could lead to shockingly higher electric bills for millions of Southerners, because the region’s utilities could be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other energy companies.”

Southern Drought

From East and West of the US come these ominous water stories.

In Florida:

South Florida’s Strictest Water Rationing Ever

For the first time in the agency’s history, the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) declared last week an extreme District-wide water shortage and ordered the strictest rationing ever across South Florida.

”We’re not in any old drought. We’re in what I like to call the biblical drought. This is an enormous state of emergency.”
-Shannon Estenoz, a member of the South Florida Water Management District’s governing board

”We are facing Armageddon. I think we are going to see massive crop losses we have never seen before.”
-Malcolm ”Bubba” Wade, a board member and vice president of U.S. Sugar Corp., one of the region’s largest growers.

In California:

L.A. must dump water from two reservoirs

In the midst of a drought, Los Angeles officials announced Friday that 600 million gallons of water must be dumped from two reservoirs that supply a swath of the city because an unexpected chemical reaction rendered it undrinkable.

As rising temperatures and shifting rainfalls continue to exacerbate water problems for growing populations, desalinization of sea water, long a grail for water starved localities, will come into serious play. Marin County, dependent on rain-fed reservoirs and water piped in from the diminishing Russian River, is taking a serious look.

The desalination plant would take San Rafael Bay water and subject it to various forms of treatment to produce drinkable water through reverse osmosis technology.

The plant would be situated on MMWD-owned land near Pelican Way in San Rafael. Bay water would be piped from an intake at the end of a newly refurbished Marin Rod and Gun Club pier near the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.

The desalination process would convert about half the volume of water taken from the bay into drinking water. The remaining water, or brine, would have a dissolved solids concentration about twice that of raw water. Brine would be blended and discharged back to the bay through an outfall operated by the Central Marin Sanitation Agency, which treats municipal and industrial wastewater generated in central Marin. Pretreatment of raw water to remove solids would generate sludge. This sludge would be hauled for disposal to the Redwood Landfill, according to the report.

Desalinization in Marin

Not everyone thinks a big plant is a great idea.

At a district board meeting Wednesday, about a half dozen people spoke against the plant proposal, criticizing everything from the purity, or lack thereof, of bay water, to the cost of the project - about $115 million.

Critics

You can read the whole report here, and see a chart of rain fall at Lake Lagunitas since 1850, here

The American Museum of Natural History in New York has a fabulous new exhibition.

Water: H2O=Life

Read Edward Rothstein in the NY Times has a review

The Sacramento and the San Joaquin rivers flow west out of the Sierra Nevada forming the Delta, the labyrinthine skein of water and wetlands that have for centuries of centuries been the living source of the San Francisco Bay. Now no more.

The freshwater yield of the Sierra’s snowmelt once surged through the delta and out the Golden Gate, creating a fluctuating brackish zone that sustained a vast food web, from plankton to the once-ubiquitous, now nearly extinct delta smelt, to salmon and steelhead. But with the completion of the government projects, the water went through home taps and San Joaquin Valley irrigation canals instead; the essential biological productivity of the delta wavered, and then dipped.

Through the years, the decline steepened, ultimately becoming a free fall. Adding to the stress of fresh water diversions were other factors: the maceration of fish by the huge pumps that send water south from Tracy; the introduction of exotic fish, mollusks, crustaceans and plants that competed with native species; and toxic runoff from agricultural operations.

The delta is now in its endgame. It is no longer, in fact, a true delta. Two great rivers still meet east of Suisun Bay, but the phenomenally rich wetland they created is, for the most part, gone. A maze of “islands” bordered by stagnant sloughs and canals exists in its stead. Buttressed by frangible earthen levees, these agricultural tracts have subsided from decades of compaction and soil oxidation; on some of the islands, tractors churn the peat soils 20 feet below houseboats and water skiers plying the sloughs just beyond the levees. One good quake on the nearby Hayward Fault and the levees would liquefy, during the region into a great inland bay.

Read Glen Martin’s fine report in the SF Chronicle Magazine.

“For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought, climatologists said Monday, creating an emergency so serious that some cities are just months away from running out of water.”

“Officials in the central North Carolina town of Siler City estimate that without rain, they are 80 days from draining the Lower Rocky River Reservoir, which supplies water for the town’s 8,200 people.

In the Atlanta metropolitan area, which has more than four million people, worst-case analyses show that the city’s main source of water, Lake Lanier, could be drained dry in 90 to 121 days.”

Dought in the South

“In Northern California, the cities of San Francisco, South San Francisco, Pacifica, Sausalito, American Canyon, Manteca, Stockton and Watsonville reported exceeding their permits to discharge pollutants into local rivers, creeks or the bay during at least six of the 12 reporting periods in 2005, according to U.S. PIRG.”

Water Pollution

“[Canadian] Government forecasters are projecting that Lake Superior, the largest of the five Great Lakes, will fall to its lowest level for September since modern recordkeeping began nearly a century ago. The amount flowing out of the lake at its outlet, the St. Mary’s River, has plunged too, and would have to rise by a staggering 50 per cent to reach the average of the past century.

Levels on Lakes Michigan and Huron are also sagging, Ontario is down, as is Erie – although the latter, the smallest by volume, has been the least affected.

What’s going on? While there is no scientific certainty about what’s ailing the Great Lakes – which together form the world’s largest interconnected body of fresh water – some fear global warming is at work, causing them to shrink. ”

Globe and Mail: Great Lakes Disappearing

And it’s not just changing beach front property or diminishing sport fishing….

“Record-low water levels in Lake Superior have forced shipping companies to reduce their cargoes, shrinking deliveries of coal and iron ore to manufacturers across the Great Lakes of the U.S. and Canada.

“In a normal year in August, we should be setting our best cargoes,” said Glen Neksavil, vice-president of the Cleveland- based Lake Carriers’ Association. Instead, “our vessels have been losing as much as 10 percent.”

A lack of precipitation and winter ice cover as well as insufficient dredging have reduced safe operating depths near locks and shallower waterways. Lake Superior feeds the four other Great Lakes which together hold a fifth of the world’s fresh surface water and are vital for delivering ore and coal from Minnesota and Wyoming to Detroit and Chicago.

The lower water levels, combined with an already softening economy, contributed to a 5.1 percent decline in cargo carried by U.S. vessels on the Great Lakes in the first eight months of the year, according to the Lake Carriers’ Association. The trade group represents 18 shipping companies that carry as much as 125 million tons of coal, iron ore, limestone, sand and cement a year used to make electricity and build cars and houses in the region. ”

Shipping Down

The NY Times is doing a series of impressive reports on China and the environment. This one is on water.

SHIJIAZHUANG, China — Hundreds of feet below ground, the primary water source for this provincial capital of more than two million people is steadily running dry. The underground water table is sinking about four feet a year. Municipal wells have already drained two-thirds of the local groundwater.

Water Disappearing

An environmental catastrophe is threatening central Turkey, once the country’s breadbasket, where farmers are depleting the water table after the hottest summer in living memory. …

The drop in water table levels – averaging 27 metres across the plateau in the last 25 years – has had disastrous effects. Dozens of lakes have disappeared, taking their wildfowl with them. Others, including the 1,500sq km salt lake that lies in the centre of the plain, are shrinking fast.

“If things go on as they are now,” Mr Nalbantcilar said, “the whole plain will be a desert within 30 years.”

Climate change is part of the problem. Always low, rainfall over the plateau now appears to be decreasing.

Tukish Disaster

Caught my eye…

In “The Blue Death,” Dr. Morris, a Seattle epidemiologist and leading water expert who has taught at the Harvard University School of Public Health, tracks the history of waterborne illness from 1827 to the present. And while casual readers don’t generally pick up public health books expecting to stay up late turning pages, Morris manages a neat trick - he provides an in-depth medical history that at times reads like a mystery.

The Blue Death

Elizabeth Shogren has an interesting short piece on Weekend Edition today. It’s about water. Water and drought. 740 years ago.

We’ve all seen pictures of the Anasazi ruins in Colorado. Perhaps you’ve been there and wondered — both at the magnificence of the structures, and at their abandonment. Researchers think the answer is the problem coming around again….

… the reason was climate change. A major drought hit the area in the 1270s. …research from one of the villages, Sand Canyon Pueblo, shows that the drought destroyed the people’s ability to grow corn to feed themselves and their turkey flocks. They were forced to revert to hunting and gathering.

Research done by others, examining tree-ring chronology — wide rings mean wet years — tells a cooberative story.

They sampled the oldest trees they could find — dead and alive — and used them to estimate stream flows all the way back to the year 762. Their results show that the droughts over the last hundred years weren’t as severe or as long as earlier droughts. And in fact, the first part of the 20th century was unusually wet.

“Not only was it wet in the context of 100 years, but there was not a wet period like that for at least 400 years,” Woodhouse says.

That has major ramifications for modern people who rely on the Colorado River for water. The laws that are used to divvy up the river assume that the extremely wet period was normal.

Woodhouse says the lesson from the tree rings is that longer dry spells, like the one that chased the pueblo farmers from their villages, could return.

Some experts believe they already have.

Water and Lives

Quite apart from CO2 abatement, energy-use reduction and other “slow it down” ideas and actions, major changes are on the way; in fact have arrived in many parts of the world. Americans will not escape. Per usual, those with certain psychological profiles will find ways to turn misery to profit, ensuring their own comfort and safety at the expense and suffering of others. It’s up to those of us with a different persuasion to find mutual ways to recognize the risks, getting out of the way when we can — leaving our own, not quite as graceful ghost towns — reshaping public attitudes and policies to be ready, to share the burden, and the joy of lives still possible, in the coming trials.

[The Climate Connections link is one worth having in your favorites.]