Buy Water-Stocks NOW !

Here's some fun news from those radical leftists at the Financial Times:

More than a third of the world’s biggest aquifers, a vital source of fresh water for millions, are “in distress” because human activities are draining them, according to satellite observations.

Scientists from Nasa, the US space agency, and the University of California, Irvine, analysed 10 years of data from the twin Grace satellites, which measure changes in groundwater reserves by the way they affect Earth’s gravitational pull.

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“Over a third [13] are so bad that they are experiencing exceptionally high levels of stress.”

The problem is most serious in regions where rainfall and snowmelt cannot make up for water extracted for agriculture, industry, drinking and other human purposes.

The scientists determined aquifers’ overall stress rates on the basis of their depletion over 10 years of satellite measurements, together with their potential for replenishment, taking account of regional climate and human activities.

The results, published in the Water Resources Research journal, show that the Arabian Aquifer System, an important water source for more than 60m people, is the most “overstressed” in the world.

It is followed by the Indus Basin aquifer of India and Pakistan and the Murzuq-Djado Basin in northern Africa. California’s Central Valley, currently at the centre of a political battle over water rights, was classed as “highly stressed” and suffering rapid depletion — mainly for agriculture.

Although many of the world’s great aquifers are being drained rapidly, there is “little to no accurate data about how much water remains in them,” the researchers added.

Not that we acknowledge there's a problem at all, because it's all God's will, and this is clearly a false Satanic conspiracy by those evil liberals, but surely the answer is more prayer, more oppression of the gays, more discrimination against the browns, more dismantling of whatever may remain of the social safety-net, and more bombs landing on those heathen Muslim hordes, huh ?

And we....are the...civilised ones...of course...?

Blue State California

No, this isn't just about California, but it's drought-ridden California in the headlines currently (Talking about the US; No I didn't forget about the existence of Australia), what with the recent headlines about the state only having a year's worth of water-supply remaining.  And what with the scientists telling us that historically the nineteenth and twentieth centuries actually represented an abnormally wet period for California, the news isn't likely to get better any time soon.  Still, always helps to get, a little perspective...

By now, the impacts of California’s unchecked groundwater pumping are well-known: the dropping water levels, dried-up wells and slowly sinking farmland in parts of the Central Valley.

But another consequence gets less attention, one measured not by acre-feet or gallons-per-minute but the long march of time.

As California farms and cities drill deeper for groundwater in an era of drought and climate change, they no longer are tapping reserves that percolated into the soil over recent centuries. They are pumping water that fell to Earth during a much wetter climatic regime – the ice age.

Such water is not just old. It’s prehistoric. It is older than the earliest pyramids on the Nile, older than the world’s oldest tree, the bristlecone pine. It was swirling down rivers and streams 15,000 to 20,000 years ago when humans were crossing the Bering Strait from Asia.

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“What I see going on is a future disaster. You are removing water that’s been there a long, long time. And it will probably take a long time to replace it. We are mining water that cannot be readily replaced,” said Vance Kennedy, a 91-year-old retired research hydrologist in the Central Valley.

Time to short Almond stocks ?