What's happening to the water?

a reply to: Wanderer777

It could be that we are not meant to have huge cities in the Desert and that by doing so we use too much water. What do ya think?

originally posted by: grumpy64
What I want to know is where all the water has gone. It has not gone into the sea otherwise sea levels would have risen slightly.....It seems water is disappearing from the planet. That is a real cause of concern. Where I am here it has never been this dry in recorded history, even though we have just had a bit of rain. The rainfall here has become a joke. In the space of a couple of years in has suddenly dropped from 40" per year to less than half that and dropping. But nobody seems to care or try to work out what is going on. Strange and scary.

It's evaporating in these dry drought-stricken regions and then dumped by the buckets in other areas...such as the Midwest and Northeast where flooding is occurring much more than usual.

As far as the algae blooms, these are bad. Sure, they happen all the time and in some places, every year, but this year they are occurring much more than usual, say the Florida Gulf Coast, there is currently a 90-mile long red tide (bloom) just off the coast. This is happening all over though, just last week the weekly newspaper for my community had a front page story about what local officials are doing in regards to the blooms spreading into a popular tourist lake, the 3rd largest lake in Wisconsin. Also, you'll all remember the water crisis in Toledo a couple of weeks ago, that was from algae blooms on Lake Erie.

The blooms are bad because they create a breeding frenzy of bacteria, which in turn consumes all the oxygen in that particular lake or region of the ocean, which results in all of these massive fish die-offs, and puts other toxins (as the OP mentioned) in the water where we swim and play, or even the drinking water for certain communities. It's a bad deal overall. Do a Google search for the flesh-eating disease in the Gulf Coast. Pretty crazy stuff.

Bottom line...a warming planet is the causation for these toxic blooms and it's only going to get worse. Get used to it.

Here is a good article about it

Toxic algae blooms may be longer and more intese due to climate change

a reply to: Asynchrony

I know Fukushima is affecting the Pacific in certain areas, but why do you think it's causing the shortage all over the world?

a reply to: Rezlooper

Yeah I'm from the gulf coast originally and last year a man died from that flesh eating bacteria. A drop of water fell into a cut while he was fishing and 3 days later he died.