HOLLY NOTE: Whoever thought a major city like Atlanta could be without water. . .
With drought concerns growing, people may be forced to get water from less than ideal
sources. Know what you can do to make it drinkable.
If you live in a region that has ever seen drought, now is the time to learn about home
water catchment, DIY water filtration and purification. With climate changing right
before our eyes, areas that have never experienced drought may get a taste and those
already prone to such, may see much worse.
October 21, 2007
By Joe Gertner
New York Times
Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because
global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady
decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide
the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of
dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of
the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far
more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada,
which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic
climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent