Water News. January 2025
Rising sea levels driven by the climate crisis will overwhelm many of the world’s biggest oil ports
Scientists said the threat was ironic as fossil fuel burning causes global heating. They said reducing emissions by moving to renewable energy would halt global heating and deliver more reliable energy. Thirteen of the ports with the highest supertanker traffic will be seriously damaged by just 1 metre of sea level rise, the analysis found. The researchers said two low-lying ports in Saudi Arabia – Ras Tanura and Yanbu – were particularly vulnerable. Both are operated by Aramco, the Saudi state oil firm, and 98% of the country’s oil exports leave via these ports. The oil ports of Houston and Galveston in the US, the world’s biggest oil producer, are also on the list, as are ports in the United Arab Emirates, China, Singapore and the Netherlands. The Guardian.
Fluorinated drugs, a type of PFAS, are widely contaminating US drinking water
New research suggests that fluorinated pharmaceuticals — a category that includes well-known medications such as Prozac and Flonase — are showing up in the water supply of millions of people. These drugs and their breakdown products are technically classified as being per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as “forever chemicals,” which as a chemical class is the subject of worldwide health concern. The New Lede
LA Firefighting Effort Harmed by Outrageous Misinformation about Water
A billionaire couple was accused of withholding water that could help stop Los Angeles’ massive wildfires. Democratic leadership was blamed for fire hydrants running dry and for an empty reservoir. Firefighters were criticized for allegedly using “women’s handbags” to fight the fires.
Those are just a few of the false or misleading claims that have emerged amid general criticism about California’s water management sparked by the fierce Los Angeles fires. Much of the misinformation is being spread “because it offers an opportunity to take potshots at California Democratic leadership while simultaneously distracting attention from the real contributing factors, especially the role of climate change,” said Peter Gleick, senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit he co-founded that focuses on global water sustainability.
Water Scarcity is Widespread in the US
About 27 million people live in parts of the U.S. where water availability is limited, according to a first-of-its-kind federal assessment reported in Politico.
The analysis from the U.S. Geological Survey compared water supply and demand from 2010 to 2020. It found “severe” limitations on the amount of available water in groundwater and surface waters in California, the arid Southwest, and much of the Great Planes and Texas. Other regions facing slightly less severe water constraints include Florida and eastern Washington state and Oregon.
The report is the most comprehensive federal study to date on whether the U.S. has enough water to power the economy, researchers said.
Water and AI
We think of AI as being an energy glutton. We fail to consider that it takes a big hit on water resources as well. In 2022 alone, tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Meta consumed over 2 billion cubic meters of water for server cooling and electricity use, more than double Denmark’s annual consumption. Water: The Unsung Hero of the AI Boom.
Natural Global Water Cycle Is Shifting
In a recently published paper, NASA scientists use nearly 20 years of observations to show that the global water cycle is shifting in unprecedented ways. The majority of those shifts are driven by activities such as agriculture and could have impacts on ecosystems and water management, especially in certain regions. Technology Networks.
PFAS and Wastewater Sludge
US regulators added to growing concerns about the long-standing practice of using sewage sludge to fertilize farmland, releasing a report warning that chemicals contaminating the sludge pose heightened human health risks for cancer and other illnesses.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said two types of hazardous per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) widely found in sewage sludge, a byproduct of wastewater treatment, can contaminate the milk, eggs and meat that come from farm animals raised on agricultural land where the sludge has been applied. Those “exposure pathways” are among multiple ways in which people can be at risk, the EPA said. New Lede.
The President’s Magic Water Valve
Newly sworn President Donald Trump once again spoke of a mysterious water valve at some unspecified location that will solve California’s water issues if California officials will simply turn it on. According to ABC News, “Trump claimed Los Angeles limits residents to just 38 gallons of water a day, and referred to some mythical “valve” that could bring limitless water to L.A., but that officials instead diverted to the ocean.”
“They have a valve, think of a sink but multiply it by many thousands of times the size of it, it’s massive. And you turn it back toward Los Angeles. Why aren’t they doing it? They either have a death wish, they’re stupid or there’s something else going on that we don’t understand,” Trump said.
The president has spoken of this valve several times, but he never gives a source for his information or a specific location for the valve. A kind interpretation of his insistence on the big valve is that he is in fact speaking theoretically about some far-fetched scheme he read on a social media post that involves redirecting water from Northern California to the LA area. People who understand how the laws of nature work have tried to explain that California isn’t like a tall building with Northern California being up and LA being down.
Peter Gleick, hydro-climatologist and co-founder of the Pacific Institute: “[Trump’s order on California water policy] is what you get when you mix bluster, ignorance, and disinformation. There are no ‘enormous amounts of water’ that can be redirected legally, economically, or environmentally to different users in California ….”
The President later reported that he had the military enter the state and turn on the water. The presumption is that soldiers at his command simply turned on the big valve giving the state water to fight its wildfires.
“The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water, California!!!” he added.
But the California Department of Water Resources responded that the military never entered the Golden State and that the state continues to have plenty of water resources. (Fox News.)
