An Encounter with Jean de la Vitesse

A cold fog drifted down the small street. He slowly emerged like a ship sailing on foam crusted seas, his face like a mask of cold indifference but in the portholes of his eyes one could see a storm distant and powerful.

He extended his hand and in the most polite, correct and proper speech inquired if all was well and to the family. After a few brief pleasantries the conversation lapsed into silence. One sensed that he was deep in thought and far away. It was not unpleasant to walk slowly on this way, even conforting somehow, for in his melanchioly absorbtion one's own problems seemed smaller somehow. There was a hidden bond, like brothers preparing to meet some impending crisis.

The fog deepened and swirled around and he asked if the coat was sufficiently warm. Seeing that he wore only a light mack the reply was affirmative.

Abruptly he began to explain the reason of our meeting. Because of the  tragedy of which we would not speak, he intended to embark on a journey. The destination was not important, just to prepare in haste and in secret as to arouse no notice. He assured me that his associates would hardly be concerned or inquire too much into his disappearence although I suspected otherwise.

Why would someone who had all that one might desire and the respect of his peers wish to let it drift away for an unknown future? One could only guess that the attention he had received of late was deeply discomforting and he sought the solace of new acquaintences without the burden of his past.

Is Sustainable Development of Deserts Feasible?

Original Article

by Yuriy S. Polyakov, William B. Eimicke, Ibrahim M. Musaev, Sergey V. Polyakov

(Posted by Yuriy Polyakov)

Hot deserts cover about one-fifth of the Earth's land area (1). They are usually characterized by the lack of moisture and the abundance of sunlight. Both factors generally make hot deserts unsuitable for living. One of the key global environmental problems is the rapid expansion of deserts into arable lands. According to UN estimates, one-third of the Earth's land area is at risk of turning into desert wasteland (2). By 2025, two-thirds of the arable land in Africa is expected to disappear, along with about one-third in Asia and one-fifth in South America. Over 30% of the land in the United States is affected by desertification. Over 250 million people are threatened by desertification, and more than half of them are at risk of being displaced to other parts of the world. The major desertification causes are overcultivation, overgrazing, deforestation, poor irrigation practices, sloppy conservation, overtaxed water supplies, and soaring population. The continent most affected by desertification is Africa with its Sahara desert, which is the largest hot desert in the world. To fight desertification, provide food, water, and other humanitarian aid, and reduce poverty in Africa, UN yearly spends billions of dollars.

On the other hand, desert is now considered as a potential solution to energy crisis, another key global problem today. Every year, each square kilometer of hot desert receives a solar energy equivalent to 1.5 million barrels of oil, and about 57 million TWh of solar energy falls down on all hot deserts of our planet (3). In contrast, the worldwide energy consumption in 2005 was as low as 135,000 TWh (4). The Sahara alone, with an area of 9.1 million km2, receives about 20 million TWh of heat per year, which, even with the today's 10-15 % solar energy/electricity conversion efficiency, is ten times more than the overall energy consumption in the world (3). This gave a rise to a lot of projects aiming at utilizing solar energy, ranging from photovoltaic batteries to power plants with sunlight concentrators. However, the direct implementation of these sun-powered technologies as separate processes is strongly hindered by the high expenses caused by the transportation of produced power, negative environmental impact on desert wildlife, and the absence of highly efficient power storage technologies, which are needed to supply power when the Sun is not shining. It should be noted that the implementation of these technologies alone is nearsighted because this solution cannot slow down desertification, bring deserts back to the stock of arable lands, and contribute to solving the problems of the growing deficit of water and food.

At the same time, desert is a system similar to the extremal habitats studied by space life support science since the mid 1950s, which are characterized by the availability of a powerful source of thermal energy and nearly complete absence of organic life and water (5, 6). Our analysis of numerous long-duration manned experiments in ground-based, closed-loop testing facilities, imitating the conditions of Moon and Martian missions – 3-month to one-year Russian experiments at the Institutes of Biomedical Problems (Moscow) and Biophysics (Krasnoyarsk), 3-month experiment at Johnson Space Center, "amateur" Biosphere 2 in Oracle, AZ (7), and the like – leads to a conclusion that the life in such habitats cannot be efficiently maintained by physicochemical life support systems for long time, even with unlimited supply of solar energy. The basic design principles for physicochemical systems, which include the highest productivity, least footprint, and production of desired components at the expense of waste generation, contradict the nature's principles.

In order to develop sustainable life systems for deserts, we need to use a solution that mimics natural processes. The design principles for such a system can be summarized as:

1. System's land surface area should be as large as necessary for consuming all wastes in due time (system should be wasteless) and generating enough electric and thermal power by solar-powered generators

2. The efficiency of the system can be increased by consuming the wastes (carbon dioxide, nitrogen compounds, and other nutrients and catalytic substances) produced by the units not involved in the regenerative processes.

3. The consumption of solar energy should be diversified: electric power by photovoltaics and power plants with sunlight concentrators, thermal power for photosynthesis, heat accumulators for dark periods, accompanied by the use of different power sources, such as hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells and the like.

4. Feedstocks and processes for biofuel production should be diversified: starch, cellulose, lignocellulosic biomass, fermentation, biorefinery, etc.

5. The processes to be integrated into the system should be able to use its wastes and/or products as feedstocks, with all the wastes, including the wastes of these processes, being completely processed by the system.

6. The rate of waste formation should not exceed the system's capacity of processing the waste.

7. The system should provide complete water recycling by collecting all the evaporated plant transpiration and soil moisture and the water contained in the gathered crop. The water vapors and collected water should be treated by methods as close to the natural treatment processes (electrostatic ionization, soil infiltration and percolation) as possible to provide its biological activity.

8. Foreign substances that can poison or slow down the regenerative processes are strictly prohibited.

9. All subsystems and units should be as close to each other as possible to reduce the transportation expenses and losses.

10. The system should be carefully monitored and controlled to achieve the highest efficiency.

Generally speaking, the above implies that the design of such systems should be based on a systems approach and closely mimic the basic nature's principles.

Some of these principles have been successfully implemented in ecological design, the approach that applies nature's principles to food production, generation of fuels, conversion of wastes, and repairing environments (8, 9). Eco-parks (floating wind turbines with specially cultivated microorganisms) were successfully used to revitalize the dead waters polluted by toxic waste from a local landfill and septage water dump in Cape Cod and decompose high-strength industrial food wastes in Brazil, Australia, China, Central Europe, and United States.

Let us examine how the proposed recommendations can be applied to deserts. The major problem with desert environment is water deficit. This problem can be solved if we remember that up to 90% (depending on the interplay between temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide concentration) of the water that entered the soil is given off by plant transpiration and soil evaporation back to the atmosphere. Greenhouses in which the transpired and evaporated moisture is collected and condensed, much like it is done in Russian and American ground-based biomodules for future space stations (for example, by using special moisture-absorbing sponges) instead of letting it go to the atmosphere, can be used to grow vegetables and fruits for food and crops and biomass for biofuel.

One of the critical wastes in many industrial processes is carbon dioxide. But at the same time, the increased concentration of carbon dioxide enhances the growth of plants. For example, a group of scientists at Weizmann Institute's Environmental Sciences and Energy Department found that the increased concentration of carbon dioxide led to the expansion of the Yatir forest, planted at the edge of the Negev Desert 40 years ago, into arid lands (10). This is attributed to the fact that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide make it easier for plants to consume carbon dioxide without giving off a considerable amount of water vapor through their pores.

In order to develop deserts and slow down desertification, we can build wasteless eco-industrial parks integrated with solar- and wind-powered generators of electrical power and greenhouses with closed water loop producing biomass and food. In these parks, the capacity of industrial plants should be limited by the capacity of greenhouses to consume their wastes as nutrients and/or catalysts (phosphorus, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, etc.) and the total capacity of power-storage facilities for the operation in dark periods. Carbon dioxide can be used for enhancing the growth of plants and the production of additional amounts of water needed for operating needs (Sabatier reactors, Bosch reaction). Consequently, the parks can reduce the emission of harmful gases into atmosphere. In addition to nature-like water treatment operations such as electrostatic ionization and percolation, the water can be treated in solar stills, which are powered by free solar energy. The industrial plants involved in the parks should be located as close as possible to the sources of electric power and the consumers of their wastes, such as greenhouses, Sabatier reactors, etc., and should not produce any substances that can poison the living organisms and plants in the greenhouses. Biofuel can be one of the products of these parks, which can be used to produce power for their operation in dark periods. A part of the absorbed sunlight should be used for the metabolic processes in the plants and the rest for the production of electric power and heating thermal accumulators. The high efficiency of such parks can be provided by their wasteless operation, the efficient allocation of their subsystems and units, the use of natural nutrients available in the desert and those contained in industrial wastes and produced in the greenhouses, the use of free solar and wind energy and the natural mechanisms of photosynthesis and respiration in plants.

Specific interdisciplinary scientific and engineering studies have to be performed to determine the feasibility and cost benefits of this approach to the development of hot deserts for different parts of the world. In particular, computer scientists should develop efficient monitoring systems to watch and control material balances and flows throughout the park; operations research specialists should develop the procedures for optimal allocation of facilities and efficient use of resources; biologists and ecologists should study and catalog various biological processes to determine inputs, outputs, and process rates; space technology specialists should apply their experience in life-support systems design to build closed-loop systems; engineers should apply structural thinking and their experience in chemical technology, alternative energy, and agricultural fields. The studies can be started with the Mojave Desert in California, the Great Basin Desert in Nevada and Utah, the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts in the US Southwest and Mexican North, the Arabian desert, and the Negev desert in Israel. Then, the results of these studies can be extended to the Sahara and other African deserts.

Some of the potential benefits brought about by the proposed approach are the slowdown and eventual reversal of the desertification trend; the migration of many industrial production facilities from mild-climate regions, where most people live, to deserts; the generation of biofuel for both industrial facilities and transportation devices in deserts; the increased availability of potable water and food in deserts. From the humanitarian viewpoint, billions of dollars spent by UN on desertification consequences and poverty in Africa may be used to develop infrastructures that will make poor African countries self-sustainable. The economic benefits may be the potential boom of investments in desert lands, which would help minimize the risks of economic crises such as the recent collapse of the housing market that contributed to the turmoil on Wall Street.

References and Notes

1. N. Middleton, D. Thomas, Eds., World Atlas of Desertification (United Nations Environment Programme, ed. 2, 1997).

2. "Media Brief for the World Day against Desertification and Drought" (United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, June 14, 2004); http://www.unccd.int/publicinfo/mediabrief/mediabrief-eng.pdf.

3. G. Knies, "Global Energy and Climate Security through Solar Power from Deserts" (Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation in cooperation with The Club of Rome, July 2006); http://www.desertec.org/downloads/deserts_en.pdf.

4. "International Energy Annual 2005" (U.S. Information Energy Administration, June-October 2007); http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/overview.html.

5. S. V. Chizhov, Y. Y. Sinyak, The Water Supply of Spacecraft Crews (Nauka, Moscow, 1973) [In Russian].

6. F. M. Sulzman, A. M. Genin, Life Support and Habitability (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Reston, VA, 1994).

7. T. Appenzeller, Science 263, 1368-1369 (1994).

8. N. Todd, J. Todd, From Eco-Cities to Living Machines: Principles of Ecological Design (North Atlantic Books, Berkley, CA, ed. 2, 1994).

9. M. Palmer et al., Science 304, 1251-1252 (2004).

10. J. M. Grünzweig, T. Lin, E. Rotenberg, D. Yakir, Global Change Biol. 9, 791-799 (2002).

Man vs. Nature and the New Meaning of Drought

Original Article

By Andrea Thompson, LiveScience Staff Writer

The Palmer Drought Index is updated weekly by the Climate Prediction Center. It is based on rainfall, temperature and historic data, and is computed based on a complex formula devised by W.C. Palmer in 1965. Although the Palmer is the main drought index used by the U.S. government, it is slow to detect fast-emerging droughts, and does not reflect snowpack, an important component of water supply in the western United States. Credit: NOAA

The Palmer Drought Index is updated weekly by the Climate Prediction Center. It is based on rainfall, temperature and historic data, and is computed based on a complex formula devised by W.C. Palmer in 1965. Although the Palmer is the main drought index used by the U.S. government, it is slow to detect fast-emerging droughts, and does not reflect snowpack, an important component of water supply in the western United States. Credit: NOAA

As of July 7, 2003 the Lake Mead's levels were 100 feet below normal, according the Bureau of Reclamations. Credit: Dr. Ken Dewey, High Plains Regional Climate Center

Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas. Credit: NOAA Photo Library, Historic NWS collection

Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. But wait—more than 60 percent of the nation now has abnormally dry or drought conditions, a climatologist says, and there is actually plenty to drink. In the United States the definition of "drought" has become watered down and muddied as policy makers fight over decades-old water rights and homeowners remain largely oblivious to the potentially severe shortages that loom.

Drought has been the standard forecast in the southwestern United States for the past decade, and as global warming dries out this and other regions around the world, and booming populations cause more water shortages, the word is likely to be tossed around even more.

"There is no single definition for drought," according to the National Drought Mitigation Center’s website. It is one of the planet’s most complex natural hazards, and exactly when a drought begins and ends is difficult to determine because it tends to develop gradually.

“Drought’s a matter of perspective,” said Tony Haffer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service (NWS) in Phoenix. “There’s just a whole bunch of different definitions.”

Meteorology's drought

The meteorological definition seems straightforward enough: a drought occurs when less rain falls in a given time period than usual.

But location matters. Below average rainfall in Miami might still be greater than the average rainfall for Las Vegas. A drought can happen in the semi-arid conditions of the desert when the region sees even less rain than the normal limited amount of precipitation it usually gets. This has been the pattern in the Southwest for most years since the mid-90s.

The average annual precipitation for Phoenix, Arizona, is about 8 inches, but since 1995, the city’s rainfall has been more than 20 inches below normal, according to the NWS.

In the East, where rainfall is generally much more plentiful, drought comes quicker and is declared when rain hasn’t fallen for a few months.

“When it rains, from [the East’s] perspective, the drought is over,” Haffer, the co-chair of Arizona’s Drought Monitoring Technical Committee, said.

By contrast, South Florida is currently in the grip of a severe drought due to less-than-normal precipitation. The region would need an estimated six weeks of steady rain for water levels to return to normal, according to the region’s water management district.

This quick recovery doesn’t happen in the West, where after years of precipitation deficits , one wet event or even one wet winter won’t be enough for reservoirs and ecosystems to recover.

All about us

In the Southwest, even after rains, major reservoirs may not return to their full capacity. An El Niño event during the winter of 2004 brought some relief to the region, “but it still left the big lakes, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, well below normal, and so from a hydrological standpoint, the drought really didn’t end at that time. It just stopped getting worse,” said Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

Because many urban areas in the Southwest, with the exception of Las Vegas, have multiple sources of water (from local reservoirs, the Colorado River and groundwater), residents sense that they are virtually immune to droughts.

“That redundancy of supply has gotten the major urban areas through a string of really dry years,” said Gregg Garfin of the University of Arizona, co-chair of Arizona’s Drought Monitoring Technical Committee.

But recent population booms in rural areas, where people often depend on a single source of water, are causing problematic shortages.

“You have this natural component, and then you have this human-induced component as well where you’re increasing the demand,” said Susan Craig of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

Urban areas may be more in danger in the future if global warming exacerbates the dry conditions and reservoirs—the lifelines for Southwest residents—fall even lower.

And drop they may. Allotments of water from the Colorado River, a major source of water for many Western states, were made during the 1920s, one of the region’s wettest periods this century. So now there are more claims to the water than there is water to go around. So far not everyone has cashed in on those claims, but if overall water levels continue to drop, somebody's going to come up dry.

Bigger changes coming

Water shortages will affect many areas of the United States and the world, leading to “water wars” between states and countries if global temperatures continue to rise throughout the next century, as predicted in reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change..

Droughts will especially increase in subtropical areas, like the U.S. Southwest, Australia and parts of Africa and Europe, as Earth’s warming causes more evaporation and shifts weather patterns, pushing the paths of storms that bring thirst-quenching rains further north.

According to a recent study, over the coming century the Southwest will essentially transition into a state of “perpetual drought” due to the effects of global warming. This prediction leads to the questions of whether the worsening arid conditions of the Southwest should be called a drought or whether the regional climate is changing.

“The climate has changed and it’s become even a little more arid than it was,” said Trenberth, the NCAR researcher.

Other scientists disagree. According to Garfin, records of the region’s past climate show that multi-decade droughts have occurred many times before.

“I think the fact that we have multi-decade drought and that we’re in one now is not unusual, but maybe the character of [drought] is changing,” he said, referring to massive die-offs of trees and earlier snowmelts (which the parched soil can’t absorb, reducing a critical source of water supplies).

Public perception

With the off-and-on droughts experienced in the past decade in the Southwest, Craig said that some people may weary of the term. At a recent local presentation, one audience member asked her, “When do we consider that we’re not in a drought, because we’re always in a drought?”

When others, especially in urban areas, hear repeated pronouncements of drought, they may not realize the full impact because they have not felt its pinch. For this reason, Craig said, it is important to educate the public not on exactly how drought is defined, but on what drought does.

“Maybe to some folks it doesn’t means as much when we keep saying it,” Craig said. “But I think if you focus on impacts, it doesn’t really matter what you say.”

Drought has no one meaning—it can be fit to specific places and situations. But no matter where it happens, what causes it or whether you’re tired of the topic altogether, in the coming century, some people will see less of one of our most precious natural resources—water.