Seca na Califórnia

[Dilath Larath]

Para colocar o problema numa perspetiva mais vasta, deixo também o documentário "Green Gold", onde se focam diversos projetos para restaurar ecossistemas degradados, tanto em África como na Ásia, Médio Oriente e América do Sul.


Green Gold - Documentary by John D. Liu

"It's possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems." Environmental film maker John D. Liu documents large-scale ecosystem restoration projects in China, Africa, South America and the Middle East, highlighting the enormous benefits to people and planet of undertaking these efforts globally.

International Permaculture Day is an ongoing celebration of all things permaculture happening around the world, culminating in a global day of celebration on the first Sunday in May annually. The next global day will take place on Sunday 5th May 2013.

And we've only just begun to recognize the real value of natural capital. Surely investing in the recovery of damaged environments is a cost-effective way of solving many of the problems we face today.

The source of wealth is the functional ecosystems. The products and services that we derive from those are derivatives. It's impossible for the derivatives to be more valuable than the source. And yet in our economy now, as it stands, the products and services have monetary values but the source, the functional ecosystems are zero. So this can not be true, it's false. So we've created a global economic institution, an economic theory based on a flaw in logic. So if we carry that flaw in logic from generation to generation we compound the mistake.

(...) Wealth is being happy, living in nature, listening to the birds, breathing clean air. Not having chemical pollution throughout everything. Not having these horrible problems. So we need to redefine and revalue our belief systems. We need to understand that money is a belief system.There's nothing wrong with money, it turns out. The problem is, what is money based on? If money is based on functional ecosystems then the future will be beautiful. If money continues to be based on production and consumption of goods and services we'll turn everything into a desert! What is the future for our children and our children's children and generations to come in the future?

É uma frase um pouco vazia. Não se compreende sequer o que quer dizer, na prática.
 
O conceito de dinheiro estabelece um crédito de uma produção qualquer, e fungibiliza as produções. Na frase vazia não se compreende por que é que isso seria substituído.
 
(de resto os países mais desenvolvidos são aqueles que mais árvores plantam - não é linear que transformem algo em deserto)

A frase é cheia de significado, na realidade. E é muito clara e inteligível.

tal como dizes

O conceito de dinheiro estabelece um crédito de uma produção qualquer, e fungibiliza as produções.

1. É um conceito. É conceito que só é eficaz se as pessoas crerem nele. Quando as pessoas deixam de crer na capacidade do dinheiro, traduzir e fungibilizar a produção de bens e serviços, o dinheiro perde a sua utilidade. ninguém o quer, ninguém o aceita. É de facto um 'belief system'.

2. O que o Liu diz é bastante claro (talvez devesses ver o video de uma ponta à outra). A tese dele é a seguinte:

Todos os bens e serviços produzidos no planeta são derivados, em última instância, do ecosistema em que vivemos. Se o ecosistema falha, não há produção porque não há sequer vida. Se o solo deixa de produzir, se os sistemas hidrológicos colapsam, se o bioma (a massa viva, o conjuntos dos organismos vivos) morre, não vale a pena pensar em prudção de bens e serviços. Porque estaremos todos mortos.

No entanto o dinheiro é baseado na sua capacidade de traduzir e fungibilizar a produção e stock de bens e serviços.
Sendo que a produção e stock de bens e serviços é baseada (não existe sem) num ecosistema funcional.

O que o Liu quer fazer notar é que apenas os bens e serviços são traduzíveis em capital
Não há um sistema económico / monetário que traduza a funcionalidade de um ecosistema.
O Liu diz que há uma falha lógica e de base no sistema monetário.

O dinheiro traduz e fungibiliza o stock e a produção de bens e serviços.
O dinheiro não traduz e fungibiliza a capacidade funcional de um ecosistema.

Os derivados do ecosistema - a produção de bens e serviços - são monetarizáveis. Mas a sua fonte, a capacidade funcional de um ecosistema, não é.

Como não é, não há grande incentivo para o defender e melhorar.
Quando passar a ser, haverá um incentivo objectivo para a conservação e recuperação dos ecosistemas.

E isso é vital para o futuro da humanidade.


D

O GDP da california é de 1,958,904,000,000 USD - escala americana 1,9 quadriliões USD, escala europeia 1,9 biliões USD.
Se fosse um país independente seria a 10ª economia mundial.

De que vale isto tudo se a seca que assola a califórnia obrigar a sua população a emigrar?

se o ecosistema da califórnia colapsar e a população tiver que migrar para outros estados, ficamos a saber que pelo menos o ecosistema da califórnia vale 1.9 quadriliões.
pelo menos.

é isto o que o Liu quer dizer.

D

um pequeno pormenor.
o ecosistema da california vale pelo menos 1.9 quadriliões AO ANO!
e ainda teria de se lhe adicionar uma taxa de crescimento razoável (3%? mais?).

ao fim e ao cabo o valor do ecosistema californiano  é o valor de uma obrigação perpétua que paga anualmente 1.9 quadriliões com uma taxa de crescimento de 3%.

alguém sabe como calcular o valor de uma obrigação perpétua?

dá uma perspectiva diferente do valor da preservação ecológica, não dá?

D

Ele não colapsa, basta atacar o problema pelos dois lados. Pelo lado do consumo tornando a água mais cara para quem a consome, especialmente para quem consome muita. E pelo lado da oferta com essa água mais cara financiar operações de dessalinização (o que aliás acontece naturalmente se a água for cara o suficiente).

[Dilath Larath]

trouxe estes posts para aqui porque o problema é mesmo grave.

não esquecer quantas empresas, tecnológicas e outra, têm sede na california.
e que a califórnia é a horta dos US.

D

[Dilath Larath]

Last week, Governor Jerry Brown made water conservation mandatory in the drought-stricken state of California. "As Californians, we have to pull together and save water in every way we can," he said.

THE TWO-WAY
California Governor Issues 1st-Ever Statewide Mandatory Water Restrictions
But if the four-year drought continues, conservation alone — at least what's required by the governor's plan — won't fix the problem.

Across California, communities are examining all options to avoid running out of water. Some, like the coastal city of Santa Barbara, are looking to the past for inspiration.
This may be the most severe drought in recorded history in California, but it's not the longest. The last big drought started in the late 1980s and lasted seven years.

Sheila Lodge was Santa Barbara's mayor back then. "You don't know with a drought if you're in one until a few years have gone by and, 'Oh! You know, this is really serious!' " she tells NPR's Arun Rath.

To cope with the drought, Santa Barbara's city council banned watering lawns and hired water police to enforce restrictions. Some residents painted their brown lawns green.
"In the meanwhile," Lodge recalls, "we had to do something to find other water supplies."

California's long-term drought has significantly dropped the water level at Lake Perris in Southern California. According to local fishermen, all of this sand used to be covered in water.

City officials considered and rejected various options, including trucking water down from Canada — it was too expensive. One proposal envisioned dragging an iceberg all the way down the coast from Alaska. "Somehow," Lodge says, "nobody was ever able to tell us how they would get the melting water from the iceberg into the water system."

In the end, they decided to build a desalination facility to turn seawater into drinking water. But just as the $35 million desalination plant was nearing completion in 1991, heavy rains known as the "March Miracle" made it unnecessary.

"We had over 30 inches of rain in one month," says Lodge, "and 30 inches is twice as much as we get in a whole year, normally. And we were on our way to being safe."

By the time the city's Charles E. Meyer Desalination Facility was ready to come online in 1992, the drought was over. The facility ran for six weeks, just to make sure it worked. Then it was shut down. The city mostly forgot about it.

Until now.

Santa Barbara is reopening the plant and Joshua Haggmark, the city's water resources manager, is in charge of getting it back online. Much work lies ahead.

Entering the control room and seeing its big computers with tiny memories — and floppy disk drives — feels like stepping back in time to 1992. This is "about as sophisticated as it gets for this old facility," says Haggmark.

The intake, where ocean water first enters the desalination system, is about half a mile off the beach. Once it gets to the plant, the water flows through gravel and sand filters and finally, when all the debris is gone, into the reverse osmosis membranes — salt removers.

Two gallons of ocean water go in; one gallon of drinking water comes out. The leftover gallon contains super-salty brine. This doubly salty water is mixed with the city's wastewater and then piped back out to sea and spread around, about 30 miles offshore.

That briny waste is one of many concerns raised by environmentalists and other critics of desalination plants like this one and others that are being planned and built along the California coast. "The biggest concern about desalination is that it is expensive, it's energy-intensive and it has a lot of side effects — a lot of unintended consequences to marine life both from the intake and the discharge," says Marco Gonzalez, the executive director of the Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation.

Right now, the sources of electricity available to run desalination plants are not environmentally friendly. "Really, it's going to require us to find alternative energy sources to power these plants. So as we put more renewables online, it will become more environmentally friendly and more cost-effective," says Gonzalez.

Cost effectiveness is important, because desalination is expensive. To get the Santa Barbara plant back online, the estimated cost of water for the average resident will increase by about $20 each month starting this July, even though the plant won't open until 2016.

Gonzalez says that before money goes into desalination projects that may hurt the environment, water conservation needs to become a bigger priority. "The first thing I say to someone who says that we need to do desal[ination] now is, 'Turn off your sprinklers.' We don't even know how much we need because we waste so much; we live in a total artificial world of water use and water supply."

"We don't even know how much we need because we waste so much; we live in a total artificial world of water use and water supply."
- Marco Gonzalez, executive director of the Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation.
But others insist that conserving water will not be enough. The drought is too severe, they say, and the state has been using too much water for too long.

"I don't think we can really conserve our way out of this problem, this problem being a combination of drought and of incredibly high water demand by a growing population and climate change," says Jay Famiglietti, the senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

Almost everyone agrees: for a drought this severe, you need a multifaceted approach.

Despite California's Drought, Taps Still Flowing In LA County
"Desal[ination] is part of it and sewage recycling is part of it," Famiglietti says. "More efficient irrigation, better water pricing, better crop choices — there's all sorts of things we need to include in our portfolio to bridge that gap between supply and demand."

But here's what scares a lot of people: Even an all-of-the-above strategy isn't going to be enough.

Even after factoring in the water that the desalination plant is expected to produce, plus recycled water and what's called "extraordinary conservation," Santa Barbara is projecting a significant water shortfall in 2017.

Haggmark says the city hopes to be able to buy water to make up the shortfall — but with other thirsty buyers in the region, finding an affordable source could be a problem.

npr

[Dilath Larath]

O GDP da california é de 1,958,904,000,000 USD - escala americana 1,9 quadriliões USD, escala europeia 1,9 biliões USD.
Se fosse um país independente seria a 10ª economia mundial.

De que vale isto tudo se a seca que assola a califórnia obrigar a sua população a emigrar?

se o ecosistema da califórnia colapsar e a população tiver que migrar para outros estados, ficamos a saber que pelo menos o ecosistema da california vale pelo menos 1.9 quadriliões AO ANO!

e ainda teria de se lhe adicionar uma taxa de crescimento razoável (3%? mais?).

ao fim e ao cabo o valor do ecosistema californiano  é o valor de uma obrigação perpétua que paga anualmente 1.9 quadriliões com uma taxa de crescimento de 3%.

alguém sabe como calcular o valor de uma obrigação perpétua?


D

[Dilath Larath]

How long can Calif. farmers dodge water restrictions?

As California enters its fourth year of drought, the governor is not backing down from his mandatory water cutbacks. But critics say the new measures don't focus on the biggest water users in the Golden State, and the $46 billion farming industry is getting a pass -- for now.

California's Central Valley is home to some of the richest farmland in the world. It is where nearly half of all the nation's fruits, vegetables and nuts are grown. But while agriculture accounts for just 2 percent of the state's economy, it accounts for roughly 80 percent of California's usable water, reports CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy.

"I don't think that we can sustain agriculture at the level that we have been. The water supply just isn't there," NASA's senior water scientist Jay Famiglietti said.

Famiglietti recently made headlines around the world when he warned that California has just one year's supply of water in its reservoirs. He said the issue is no longer just about California's nearly empty reservoirs, but it's about farmers pumping out massive amounts of groundwater to try to keep their crops alive.

"Over the last few years we've lost about five and a half trillion gallons of water per year just in groundwater, so it's a huge amount of water," Famiglietti said.

Yet last week when Gov. Jerry Brown ordered an unprecedented and mandatory 25 percent cut in water use statewide, agricultural use was exempted. Brown defended his actions Sunday, saying farmers have already left nearly half a million acres unplanted and need access to water to survive.

"Of course we could shut it off if you don't want to produce any food and import it from some other place. Theoretically you could do that, but that would displace hundreds of thousands of people, and I don't think it's needed," Brown said on ABC "This Week."

The mandatory 25 percent cuts to water use will hit urban areas hard. Some people are draining their swimming pools, letting their lawns die and counting how many times they flush the toilet. But in reality, just 12 percent of the state's water is used by Californians at home.

If the drought continues, Famiglietti said farmers will no longer be spared.

"Restrictions on agriculture because of the dire situation we are in are inevitable," Famiglietti said.

cbs

[Lark]

Graphene opens up to new applications

Effective separation membranes could be created by etching nanometre-sized pores in two-dimensional materials.

The explosion of research interest in two-dimensional materials such as graphene and molybdenum disulphide has, to a large extent, been dominated by their physics, and in turn the exploitation of their electronic and optical properties. Researchers have, of course, also explored the chemical and mechanical properties of these materials — and sought applications that principally utilize these attributes — but the results have, arguably, received less attention. One intriguing line of research in this regard is the use of graphene as a nanoporous separation membrane. Here, through a combination of sophisticated fabrication and characterization techniques, unique membranes could be developed for use in critical applications such as gas separation, water purification, and desalination.

Graphene is an attractive material for the development of membranes due to its atomic thickness, mechanical strength and chemical stability. Pristine sheets of graphene are thought to be impermeable to all atoms and molecules. However, by forming nanometre-sized pores in the material, it can potentially act as a filter, allowing molecules smaller than the pores to pass through while excluding larger species. A number of theoretical studies have suggested that the selectivity and permeability of such membranes could be vastly superior to the polymer-based filtration membranes that are typically used today. And in the past few years, experimental demonstrations of the potential of nanoporous graphene membranes have begun to emerge.

It has, for example, been reported that oxidative etching can be used to create pores in single and bilayer graphene, and the resulting membranes used to selectively transport gases4. Alternatively, layered graphene and graphene oxide membranes have been shown to separate carbon dioxide from nitrogen, suggesting that the approach might be of value in carbon capture applications. Similarly, membranes made from two or three layers of graphene oxide can separate hydrogen from carbon dioxide and nitrogen.



A key challenge in the development of these membranes is the fabrication of pores with precise dimensions, and last year it was reported that subnanometre pores can be formed over macroscopic areas of graphene through a combination of ion bombardment and chemical etching. With this approach, it was possible to create membranes that can selectively transport ions in solution. Furthermore, it has been shown that a focused ion beam can drill pores with controlled diameters in double-layer graphene. The resulting membranes exhibit gas, liquid, and water vapour permeances that are orders-of-magnitude greater than current state-of-the-art membranes.

Reporting in this issue of Nature Nanotechnology, Ivan Vlassiouk, Shannon Mahurin and colleagues have now shown that a single layer of nanoporous graphene can be used to desalinate water. The pores are created in the graphene layer by exposing the material to short bursts of oxygen plasma, a process that allows holes of precise dimensions to be controllably etched in the layer. By finding just the right plasma conditions — and with the help of aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy to characterize pores that have sizes of only 0.5–1 nm — membranes can be fabricated that exhibit a salt rejection of nearly 100%, as well as high water fluxes.

As Dong-Yeun Koh and Ryan Lively note in an accompanying News & Views article11, there are many challenges to be addressed before such membranes could be of practical use, including issues related to mechanical stability and membrane fouling. However, these proof-of-concept experiments are an encouraging illustration of the potential of atomically thick membranes.

Although pore size is critical for desalination, pores might not be required at all for other applications of graphene membranes. Recently, it has been reported that protons can, in fact, be transported through pristine monolayers of graphene9. (Other two-dimensional materials were also examined, and it was found that protons can pass through monolayers of hexagonal boron nitride, but not through monolayers of molybdenum disulphide.) The result suggests that graphene might also, therefore, be of use in the development of proton exchange membranes for fuel cells.

Whatever the intended application, graphene membranes provide a fascinating system in which molecular transport can be studied and controlled at the ultimate limit. And through such fundamental studies, practical devices, which might, for example, help to address the increasing global demand for fresh water, could be realized.

fonte

[deMelo]

Quem gosta de Grafeno é o TG.

[Thunder]

http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

[Incognitus]

Um artigo que está relacionado com esta seca e a famosa Hoover Dam:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3239646-a-catalyst-in-search-of-a-stock