The Ocean is the source of fresh water (evaporation).
The lakes and streams are the source of the oceans salt.
Running out of fresh water?
What retards.
Posted on 03/20/2005 7:05:12 PM PST by NormsRevenge
GENEVA (AFP) - Hundreds of activists appealed for a global tax on water and the creation of a "world water parliament" to protect its distribution, at the closing of the Alternative World Water Forum.
The two-day forum's goal is to "promote the creation of a world public service for water" through a series of concrete measures, said Bastienne Joerchel of a Swiss charity group.
The forum proposed introducing a one-cent tax on water worldwide, which would avoid having to use private funding for the distribution of water.
A global water parliament -- expected to hold its first meeting in Brussels next year -- would establish the rules to assure the equitable distribution of the vital resource.
About 1,200 people from around the globe and 150 non-governmental organizations participated in the forum that opened Friday, including the former Portuguese president Mario Soares, co-chairman of the meeting held ahead of Tuesday's World Water Day.
The United Nations (news - web sites) will launch Tuesday its global campaign called "Water for life," which aims to cut by half the number of people worldwide who do not have access to drinking water by 2015.
The forum also adopted an action plan for the recognition of water as a human right, its use for the common good, and called for public financing and democratic control of the resource.
Riccardo Petrella, a professor at Lugano University in Switzerland, called for water to be excluded from the negotiations at the World Trade Organization (news - web sites) on the liberalization of services, and said the World Bank (news - web sites) should stop requiring the privatization of water as a condition for granting loans.
The future of the West -- self-appointd ninnies who serve no purpose telling others what to do. When the revolution comes in about 1000 years, I hope these people are the first one up against the wall.
In other words, this over-educated jerk wants to end private land ownership.
These people are insane.
WHY IS THE SEA SALTY?
Everyone who has been to the beach knows that seawater is salty. Everyone also knows that fresh water in rain, rivers, and even ice is not salty. Why are some of Earth’s waters salty and others not? There are two clues that give us the answer. First, “fresh” water is not entirely free of dissolved salt. Even rainwater has traces of substances dissolved in it that were picked up during passage through the atmosphere. Much of this material that “washes out” of the atmosphere today is pollution, but there are also natural substances present.
As rainwater passes through soil and percolates through rocks, it dissolves some of the minerals, a process called weathering. This is the water we drink, and of course, we cannot taste the salt because its concentration is too low. Eventually, this water with its small load of dissolved minerals or salts reaches a stream and flows into lakes and the ocean. The annual addition of dissolved salts by rivers is only a tiny fraction of the total salt in the ocean. The dissolved salts carried by all the world’s rivers would equal the salt in the ocean in about 200 to 300 million years.
A second clue to how the sea became salty is the presence of salt lakes such as the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea. Both are about 10 times saltier than seawater. Why are these lakes salty while most of the world’s lakes are not? Lakes are temporary storage areas for water. Rivers and streams bring water to the lakes, and other rivers carry water out of lakes. Thus, lakes are really only wide depressions in a river channel that have filled with water. Water flows in one end and out the other.
The Great Salt Lake, Dead Sea, and other salt lakes have no outlets. All the water that flows into these lakes escapes only by evaporation. When water evaporates, the dissolved salts are left behind. So a few lakes are salty because rivers carried salts to the lakes, the water in the lakes evaporated and the salts were left behind. After years and years of river inflow and evaporation, the salt content of the lake water built up to the present levels. The same process made the seas salty. Rivers carry dissolved salts to the ocean. Water evaporates from the oceans to fall again as rain and to feed the rivers, but the salts remain in the ocean. Because of the huge volume of the oceans, hundreds of millions of years of river input were required for the salt content to build to its present level.
Rivers are not the only source of dissolved salts. About twenty years ago, features on the crest of oceanic ridges were discovered that modified our view on how the sea became salty. These features, known as hydrothermal vents, represent places on the ocean floor where sea water that has seeped into the rocks of the oceanic crust, has become hotter, and has dissolved some of the minerals from the crust, now flows back into the ocean. With the hot water comes a large complement of dissolved minerals. Estimates of the amount of hydrothermal fluids now flowing from these vents indicate that the entire volume of the oceans could seep through the oceanic crust in about 10 million years. Thus, this process has a very important effect on salinity. The reactions between seawater and oceanic basalt, the rock of ocean crust, are not one-way, however; some of the dissolved salts react with the rock and are removed from the water.
A final process that provides salts to the oceans is submarine volcanism, the eruption of volcanoes under water. This is similar to the previous process in that seawater is reacting with hot rock and dissolving some of the mineral constituents.
Will the oceans continue to become saltier? Not likely. In fact the sea has had about the same salt content for many hundred of millions if not billions of years. The salt content has reached a steady state. Dissolved salts are being removed from seawater to form new minerals at the bottom of the ocean as fast as rivers and hydrothermal processes are providing new salts.
They are out of their minds BUMP!!
the cost of desalinized water is a third of what it was a decade ago. imho the cost of desalinized water will drop by another third in a decade--and that without any major break throughs in energy research.
However, I also think in the next ten years there will be some major break throughs in energy research that collapse the cost of energy to well below current levels.
This stuff makes me so mad I can't hardly read the articles.
When I travel, I often find 1 liter bottles of Fiji Water in the coolers at convience stores. These bottles typically sell for $1.50 or so.
see: http://www.fijiwater.com/site/index.html
You can have as much water from Fiji as you are willing to pay for. Further, you can go on Federal Express' web site and look up what it costs to ship 1 liter of bottled water to just about anywhere in the world. The most remote village in the Middle East that Fedex delivers to costs about $75 for next day air freight.
For less than $80, you can put a liter of bottled water from Fiji in the hands of water starved Middle Eastern citizens, the very next day.
There is no shortage of water, just a shortage of water they can afford.
My domestic water costs about 1/2 cent per gallon. The Israelies are desanlinizingsea water for less than that. One of their new plants (Ashkelon) is projected to produce potable water for a cost of 0.50 US$/cubic meter. That is amazingly inexpensive.
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:0J4AsbCezSAJ:www.pwcglobal.com/uk/eng/about/svcs/pfp/Case%2520Study%2520Ashkelon.doc+Israel+desalination+sea+water+cost++contract&hl=en
The question is not that there is a "shortage" of the stuff the oceans are still full of, it is why most people around this world have been kept in such poverty by their governments they cannot afford to buy what should be the least expensive and most readily available of life's necessities.
BTTT!!!!!!!
" What's next... some nutters wanting to taxing the air I breathe?"
Kyoto.
IIRC, they want meters on all new private wells.
Socialism is a legal means whereby artificial shortages can be created so that investors can cash in at the expense of the little people.
Yeah, and exactly HOW many people is that? Also, how are they distributed around the globe (i.e. WHICH countries that have been too busy not maintaining their own infrastructure and have been too busy 'coup-ing' themselves every other week and, generally, ignoring the population-at-large)?
I vote the latter. Discuss.
By the logic applied to Terri Schiavo, let them die of dehydration. They're bound to die eventually, anyway, and "death by dehydration is peaceful and serene".
Bite your tongue!
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