What I didn't mention in my last blog is that Agriculture uses 81% of the water actually consumed in the U.S. See 2nd link in previous blog. This obviously means that agriculture dominates water usage and even a 10% savings could more than double the water available for domestic use.

What are some ways water can be conserved?

According to the USGS,  FORTY EIGHT PERCENT of our water  (39% of fresh water) withdrawals goes to thermoelectric (nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas) power plants. See http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2004/circ1268/htdocs/text-total.html  and http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/ewr/water/power-gen.html for details. According to the 1995 statistics (how about some more recent statistics, folks!), about 3% is actually consumed through evaporation, the rest is returned to the source. Domestic water use is about 6 percent of actual consumption. .

Today I ran across a post quoting this Rolling Stone article. All I can say is it is a must read for anyone concerned with the continuance of human civilization. Read it and take action!

Global warming seems to be alive and well here in Douglas. Last Sunday broke the previous (recent) record by a few degrees. Yesterday the temperature soared to 81 degrees, beating the previous record by 2 degrees. It looks like today won't break the record, but still it will be within 2 or 3 degrees of the all time high.

Another amazing fact is that we didn't have our first hard frost here until Dec 10, 2007 this season! "Normally" our first hard frost is in late October.