When Fresh Water Goes Away

(And It Will Because It Already Has)

Earth Change Report Dec 05 08:

Want proof that conscience has no place when it comes to politics and profit?

Ever wonder how much pollution it takes on land, in the oceans, in the atmosphere – and in this case, in what’s left of the world’s domestic and industrial water resources - to leave no doubt that humanity is a self-exterminating species?

For the scientist concerned (Dr Anthony Turton, right) , it may have been career suicide, but for those of us who read what politicians and bureaucrats don’t want us to know, his speech (abridged below) is an absolute warning bell which we can either listen to, or ignore...because it has implications for all of us.

An online petition tells us that South Africa’s “Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has suspended a leading and highly respected water researcher, Dr Anthony Turton over a presentation he was to deliver about South Africa's water crisis at a high level conference in Pretoria.

“The council executive of the CSIR … suspended Dr Anthony Turton, an acclaimed political scientist, with immediate effect, charging him with insubordination and bringing the CSIR into disrepute.

“His keynote address, A Clean South Africa, was to be presented at the CSIR's 'Science Real and Relevant' conference in Pretoria … but he was forbidden from delivering it because it contained ‘unsubstantiated’ facts, according to the executive, as well as photographs of this year's xenophobic attacks, which, the executive added, ‘may disturb people…’

“In his presentation, Turton was to have said that South Africa had run out of surplus water, with 98 percent of it already allocated. And because most rivers and dams were highly polluted, they had lost the ability to dilute effluents.”

It also features several great speakers on the subject of how we can prepare for an uncertain future of earth changes by understanding and using some positive techniques to face these coming challenges. Challenges which in fact are here right now....................................

In the paper itself (available here in .pdf format) Dr Turton says “three of the most economically developed countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) mainland region – South Africa, Botswana and Namibia – are all on the ‘wrong’ side of … the global average rainfall belt.

“South Africa has a paltry 497 mm/yr, marginally better than Botswana with 400 mm/yr and somewhat better than Namibia with a mere 254 mm/yr.

"This has led me to conclude that water scarcity is a fundamental developmental constraint, not only to South Africa, but also to the entire SADC region

“An important implication of this fundamental fact is that South Africa has lost its dilution capacity, so all pollutants and effluent streams will increasingly need to be treated to ever higher standards before being discharged into communal waters or deposited in landfills.

“The global norm is for large cities to be located on rivers, lakes or the seashore.

"But not so in our part of the world, where we have Johannesburg/Pretoria as one massive urban conurbation (an aggregation or continuous network of urban communities/urban sprawl – Ed.) in South Africa, Gaborone and Francistown as smaller cities in Botswana, Windhoek as a sizeable city in Namibia and Bulawayo and Harare in Zimbabwe – all located on, or very close to, watershed divides.

“The significance of this fact is twofold:

“It has taken major engineering and technology to mobilize the water needed to sustain these industrial and urban conurbations.

Citing South Africa’s legacy of extreme violence (he mentions “the gross injustice of the Scorched Earth Policy that targeted non-combatants, and the resultant squalor of the British Concentration Camps, in which Africans, women and children died of dysentery, cholera, starvation and despair,”) Dr Turton notes “the propensity to resort to mass violence when expectations exceed the capacity of the government to deliver.”

To prove the point, he intended to show a picture of recent xenophobic attacks in which people were literally stoned to death or burned alive. Such violence, he said, can be expected from a culture in which “a majority of citizens … are mired in endemic poverty, with little prospect of escaping that trap.”

He also intended to highlight the so-called “revenge effect” (the backlash or downside of technology) by saying

*“We develop antibiotics to counter infection and over time we breed drug-resistant bacteria.

*"We manage water scarcity by engineering dams and inter-basin transfers and over time we create an ideal environment in which toxic Cyanobacteria bloom.

* "We apply chemicals to kill mosquitoes and we reduce the potency of human gametes and create urogenital defects in unborn infants."

"But these have caused second-order problems – the so-called revenge effects – such as loss of ecological integrity in aquatic systems arising from inter-basin transfers and increased levels of pollution from radionuclides, heavy metals and sulphates arising from mining.

“…we need to prevent the unchecked growth in numbers of babies being born with urogenital defects and counter the loss of male fertility, in both cases the result of endocrine disruptors caused by the use of chemicals to control malaria in some of the poorest communities in this country.

“It is precisely these rural areas that are most likely to be affected by the deteriorating water quality arising from eutrophication in rivers and dams.

“It is also these local authorities that are the least capable of adapting water treatment processes and plant to remove Microcystins, Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs) and Anti-Retroviral medication (ARVs) that are likely to arise from a population with a heavy burden of AIDS-related diseases.

"South Africa, already highly water constrained, is now also faced with levels of eutrophication that are almost unprecedented globally. Left alone this will slowly poison our waters, rendering them useless for future economic development plans and driving up production costs for various industries, further undermining the South African economy.

"This also has major implications for a national population that already has a high level of people with compromised immune systems.

“South Africa has a microcystin load in our water storage impoundments that is amongst the highest in the world.

“Given our high HIV/AIDS rate, South Africa has a growing anti retro-viral (ARV) load, which passes like any other medication, through the body in partly metabolized forms.

“This means that we are going to be seeing higher levels of ARV in our rivers, which by implication means that these complex chemical compounds will be entering the human population over time, either through the drinking water stream or via produce that has been irrigated with contaminated water.

“This specific South African issue is nested in a bigger technical problem known as Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCP’s), which is a growing global concern, but is sufficiently unique to warrant strategic attention on its own. We need to develop the science to understand this better, because nowhere else in the world is there a coincidence of loss of dilution and high levels of ARV use as in this country.

“As a result of more than a century of largely unregulated gold mining, we now have a legacy of heavy metal and radionuclide contamination in rivers flowing out of most gold mining areas.

"We also have a high population density living in close daily contact with dust and sediment arising from mine tailings dams (large portions of SOWETO and the East and West Rand residential complexes are located on land that in most developed countries would be considered to be contaminated).

(Ed. Note: According to a South Africa Blog, “For each ounce of gold produced by Harmony Gold Mining, 2.1 tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. Yes, read it again, 2.1 tons of CO2 for an ounce of gold.”).

“Given that our water resources have already been fully allocated, and in many cases over-allocated, we have no more buffer capacity.

This means that global climate change has very specific implications for us as a ‘nation’ to which we have not yet developed an adequate response.

“While Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” tells us to be afraid of sea level and temperature rise in the future, our own science is showing us that we are being threatened by toxic microcystins produced by cyanobacteria at present to which we have no known solution.

“Given that South Africa has lost its dilution capacity we need to understand exactly what climate change will do to our national water resource that is so vital to our economic and social survival.

“More specifically will future coal combustion, in the face of reduced precipitation, mean an increase in acid rain?

"What will this do to our agricultural production capacity?

"How will this change soil chemistry?

"What will the impact be on rivers and wetlands already under stress?”

...............

Is it any wonder that Dr Turton's political superiors hung him out to dry? Which is exactly what happens to those who tell the inconvenient truth.

All the points that Dr Turton raises are deep and important questions, not only for South Africa, but in reality for the entire world – and for each of us individually, because what Dr Turton says about water pollution in South Africa is exactly what is happening globally.

Add to that the fact that glaciers around the world are melting at an alarming rate (and that’s where most rivers and cities are fed from) and you have two options: be aware and prepare, or be a future victim of social unrest, chaos, anarchy…

….

Water Footnotes …

Reuters reports that “A cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe has infected more than 6,000 people and killed 294 in the country whose economic collapse has caused many hospitals to close, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday.

MANILA, one of Asia’s most populous cities (12 million people), is sinking and may go the way of Venice unless its people stop pumping ground water for bathing and other needs, experts have warned.

CNN reports that Scientists have identified new rifts on an Antarctic ice shelf that could lead to it breaking away from the Antarctic Peninsula” according to the European Space Agency.

“Scientists say the western Antarctic peninsula -- the piece of the continent that stretches toward South America -- has warmed more than any other place on Earth over the past 50 years…”

Ed Note: Antarctica holds most of the world’s fresh water in the form of ice and snow. Some of it is two miles deep and it acts as a balance weight at that end of the planet. At the other end, Arctic ice is in retreat, and so is the Greenland ice cap. What happens when a planet gets out of balance? Does it wobble like a car with bad steering?

Have you fastened your seat belts?

Sleep well.

Sincerely.

Michael Knight.

That subject - along with many questions from subscribers about Earth Changes - is well covered in this ebook. You can download an ebook and be reading it within minutes.... check it out right here.