*Or, when the Anthropocene runs out of water.
*You'd think even the Chinese would worry about this issue, much less Al Jazeera. "Hey wait a minute – how will we go to Vegas?"
*People always talk about the fate of towns in droughts, but if the towns take all the water, the forests will dry out and burn off, leaving bare watersheds. Then what?
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/2011127125429770306.html
"Santa Fe, New Mexico - Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust and heat that have made life unpleasant and dangerous from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: the biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), the biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), and the all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres).
"The fires were a function of drought. By the end of the summer, 2011 was the driest year of the 117 years on record for New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat. It was also the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states.
"Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented temperatures, with Phoenix, Arizona, as usual, leading the march towards unliveable conditions. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the Sun set a new record of 33 days when the mercury reached a shoe-melting 110 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. (The previous record of 32 days was set in 2007.)
"And here's the bad news in a nutshell: If you live in the Southwest or just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and grandchildren could soon enough be facing the "Age of Thirst", which may also prove to be the greatest water crisis in the history of civilisation. No kidding.
"If that gets you down, here's a little cheer-up note: The end is not yet nigh...." (((I wonder why they always say that. Look, if you were in Bastrop and your house burned, that was the end of your house. It's never about sudden absolute apocalypses – that's like thinking that a defeated army gets killed to the last man. The climate crisis is about the percentage of people whose situation becomes untenable. There are always some climate-disaster victims around, but the issue is, what happens when that's most of us.)))
