Water Conservation Tips

Nearly 60% of a person's household water footprint can go toward lawn and garden maintenance.

Climate counts  ::  where you live plays a role in how much water use especially when it comes to tending to a yard.

The average pool takes 22000 gallons of water to fill and if you don't cover it hundreds of gallons of water per month can be lost due to evaporation.

Diet ::

The water it takes to produce the average and approximately 1000 gallons per person per day---- is more that the global average water footprint of  900 gallons per person per day for diet, household use, transportation, energy, and the consumption of material goods.

That quarter is worth more than 30 average showers of the easiest ways to slim your water footprint is to eat less meat and diary. Another way is to choose grass-fed, rater that grain-fed,  since it can take a lot of water to grow corn and other feed crops .

A serving of poultry cost about 90 gallons of water to produce. There are also water costs embedded in the transportation of food (gasoline costs water to make). So consider how far your food has to travel, and buy local  to cut your footprint.

On average, a vegan, a person who doesn't eat meat or diary,indirectly  consumes nearly 600 gallons of water per day less that a person who eats the average diet.

A cup of coffee takes 55 gallons of water to make, with most of that water used to grow the coffee beans.

Electricity, Fuel Economy and Airlines Travel  ::

The water footprint of you per day electricity use is based on state averages. I you use alternative energies such as wind and solar, your footprint could be less.

Washing a car uses about 150 gallons of water, so by washing less frequently you can cut back your water use.

A gallon of gasoline takes nearly 13 gallons of water to produce. Combine your errands, car pool to work, or take public transportation to reduce both energy and water use.

A across country airplane trip (about 6000 miles) could be worth more than 1700 standard toilet flushes.

Industry ------ Apparel Home Furnishing, Electronics, and Paper  ::

Accordingly to recent reports, nearly 5% water withdrawals are used to fuel industry and the production of many of the materials goods we stock up weekly, monthly and yearly.

It rakes about 100 gallons of water to grow and process a single pound of cotton and the average person goes through about 35 pounds of new cotton materials each year. Do you really need that additional T-Shirt ?

One of the best ways to conserve water is to buy recycled good and to recycle your stuff when you're done with it. Or, stick to buying only what you really need.

Recycling a pond or paper, less that the weight of your average newspaper, saves about 3.5 gallons of water. Buying recycled paper products saves water too, as it take about six gallons of water to produce a dollar worth of paper.


With the courtsy of National Geography.

Shibaji Mitra

CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE EARTH/PLANNET

Our planet's climate is anything but simple. All kind of factors influence it, from massive events on the Sun to the growth of microscopic creature in the oceans, and there are suitable interactions between many of these factors.

Yet despite all the complexities, ever growing body evidence points to a clear picture ------ the world's is warning , this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of   greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emission continue unabated the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences.

Yes, there are still big uncertainties in some prediction, but these swing both ways. For example, the response of clouds clouds slow the warming or speed it up.

Though was not only the first to predict that human-induced global warming might be a problem.The calculation would take 3000 years for industrial emissions at 1896 levels to double curbon dioxide, and that this would not happen because the oceans would absorb most of this extra curbon dioxide(CO2).

Few years later some scientists came up with another objection. Their test tube experiments suggested that adding more curbon dioxide to the atmosphere would not trap any more heat.

Curbon Dioxide absorbs only certain frequencies of infrared radiation (heat), and in the atmosphere were already high enough to absorb 100% of the radiation at these frequencies. The experiments also appeared to show that the frequencies absorbed by curbon dioxide largely overlapped with those absorbed by water, another reason to think that adding more curbon dioxide to the atmosphere would make no difference.

So by the 1950s, it was starting to become clear that human activity was causing curbon oxide levels to rise and that this rise and that this rise would reduce the loss or heat into space. The implication seemed clear : provide all the other factors affecting the climate did not change, the Earth  would warm.

But it was a conclusion scientists were reluctant to draw. There were many uncertainties and complexities involved. And at the same time other climate factors has changed : : the earth had cooled slightly after 1940. It was only in the late 1970s that a handful of scientists, began to warn that global warming was an imminent problem..

To non-scientists, these arguments can sound very persuasive. Why do carbon dioxide levels only start of interglacial period for instance ?

Why ? Because time running out. We need to be debating how to achieve the drastic cuts in curbon oxide emission that are required to reduce our impact on the climate, not wasting time endlessly rehashing a debate that was largely settled half a century ago.

Shibaji Mitra

With courtsy from New Scientist Environment (Science Journal)