Posted on 07/30/2003 4:31:33 PM PDT by blam
Satellite shows dramatic Aral loss
By Ivan Noble
BBC News Online science staff
These two images from space show how unsustainable water use in Central Asia has caused a dramatic retreat in the Aral Sea.
The Aral Sea in 2003 and 1985 Images courtesy Esa and Nasa
In the 18 years which separate the images, the sea has virtually split in two and a great white expanse of salty desert has claimed the seabed revealed by the contracting waters.
The most recent image was taken this month by the European Space Agency's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (Meris) on board Envisat, the world's most powerful environmental monitoring satellite.
The older image is from 1985 and was taken by the US space agency Nasa's space shuttle crew.
Thirsty cotton
The Aral Sea lies on the border between the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, but the waters which feed it rise thousands of kilometres away in the Pamir Mountains.
The European Space Agency's Envisat imaged the sea in July 2003
Enlarge Image
The great Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers were known in history as the Oxus and Jaxartes. They flow through much of Central Asia before they reach the Aral.
Along the way much of their water is taken for the irrigation of thirsty cotton crops.
Large scale irrigation began in the 1960s and has led to the Aral losing half its area and three-quarters of its volume.
Former fishing villages are now dozens of kilometres away from the shoreline.
Sands laden with salt and pesticide residues are whipped up into storms by a climate no longer subject to the sea's moderating influence.
The independent states of Central Asia are now joined in an association to manage the waters that feed the Aral but in practice there is little agreement among them on how best to share the resource.
The cotton irrigation systems are old and leaky, so much of the water is wasted.
Watching the seas
The Meris instrument's primary mission aboard Envisat is to monitor sea colour.
A Nasa space shuttle took this image of the Aral Sea in 1985.
Enlarge Image
"It essentially sees the world the way we see it, though it can also see into the infrared," explained Peter North, lecturer in geography at the University of Swansea, UK, and member of the Meris validation team.
"What it's good at is spotting changes over time," he told BBC News Online.
Meris can observe how plankton spread through the Earth's oceans, providing a valuable insight into the way the seas act as a counterweight to global warming by storing carbon dioxide.
Meris' field of view means that it can provide an almost daily view of any given point on Earth.
Its host satellite, Envisat, was launched on an Ariane 5 in 2002. The satellite is the biggest and most expensive Earth-observation spacecraft ever built by Europe.
Umm, weren't these communist countries when these irrigation projects started? |
Doing just fine. It is the deepest lake in the world
Where are the enviromentablists (as Mike Tyson would say on Rush)?
And a bunch of academics and researchers of various ilks looking for research grants are seeking a way to blame it on Global Warming.
Along with a bunch of displaced socialists who are desperately looking to any excuse to become the "Worldwide Commissariat of Energy Usage".
There you go...being all logical again.
I don't know. Check post #15, maybe your answer is there. I saw a documentary a few years ago about the locals complaining about being ill from the dust off the old lake bed.
The Salton Sea in California is a similar situation except that water sprinkling systems have been installed to hold down the dust.
“We got environmentalists and told them, ‘Capitalists spend any amount of money even if it does destroy your precious nature.’ Well, at the time, the Soviet Union was the most polluted country in the world,”
Oleg Danilovich Kalugin. Major General. Soviet KGB1
It's The Tragedy of the Commons, writ large.
The Tragedy of the Commons is what happens when you have "Group rights" or "collective rights" rather than individual rights.
The classic example of a Tragedy of the Commons is in Africa, where two or more tribes "share" a common hunting area given to them by their government.
Well, the financial incentive for each tribe is to hunt as much as possible, under the theory that whatever their tribe doesn't kill and sell, the other tribes will get.
So these common lands are hunted into oblivion, and once the animals are all gone, then there is no more hunting in that common land, and no more food and income for any of the tribes.
To cover up this fundamental flaw of socialism (i.e. the government gives land to groups to be shared), leftists around the world use such phrases as "sustainable development" and "sustainable growth" and "sustainable grazing" along with the classic "sustainable hunting". Thus, the socialists claim that if these tribes are limited and restricted well-enough by the government, that the activities in these common areas can be sustained rather than exploited until nothing is Left (pun intended).
But the "sustainable" policies are merely band-aids. The core problem is that individuals don't have property rights in the areas that are being exploited into oblivion.
A rancher who owns his own spread won't go wipe out all of the game animals on his property as fast as he can kill and trap them, for instance. This is because the rancher, as a **property owner**, knows that it's far better to have viable herds on his property over the long term than to kill them all right now for a single "good" year at the market.
But the African bushman who is given access to a shared area is placed into a hyper-competitive race to see who can get the most, or even anything at all, before all of the prizes (read: natural resources) are taken by the others who also have access to that common area.
Ditto for common grazing areas, and as this article notes (and as I quoted above), so too for common access to lake water for irrigation. All of the nations that share access to the Aral are exploiting as fast as they can, lest someone else take their water first and leave them with nothing.
Of course, The Tragedy of the Commons means that they will eventually receive nothing, anyway. In fact, it will happen sooner, rather than later.
And it will happen because Socialism in particular, and Leftism is general, is a **flawed** ideology.
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I don't understand how this could happen. I thought this sort of "rape of the environment" was caused by corporate greed. The newsman on TV said that turning land over to the custody of the state is the only way to Save The Planet.