Facing the Freshwater Crisis

Peter Rogers warns of the world’s impending water crisis in an article recently published in Scientific American. According to Rogers, a Harvard professor and senior adviser to the Global Water Partnership, freshwater scarcities could affect as much as three quarters of the earth’s population by 2050. By mid-century, that translates to as many as 6.9 billion thirsty people.

Future water shortages will be caused primarily by steeply increasing demand for water, the result of rapid population growth and increasing affluence around the globe. As demand increases, water resource stress will be exacerbated by climate change, which is increasing aridity and the incidence of drought worldwide, and by freshwater pollution caused by industrial contamination, agricultural runoff, and lack of adequate sanitation infrastructure in many communities.

Rogers argues that policymakers around the globe need to devise ways to ensure adequate and equitable distribution of water in coming years—and to do this without degrading the ecosystems that supply our water and sustain our societies. To this end, he proposes both low-tech and high-tech solutions to mitigate the water crisis. Water pricing, improved agricultural irrigation techniques, and sanitation systems decoupled from water supplies can all help to reduce the demand for water. Advances in desalination technology will complement these measures by increasing global freshwater availability.

But even if policymakers adopt all of Rogers' proposals, the best they can hope to do is mitigate—not avert—coming shortages. Consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton has projected that modernizing water infrastructure in the US and Canada alone will require investment of $3.6 trillion over the next 25 years. The bill will be much steeper in parts of the world where water scarcity is more severe, whether because of uneven global distribution of water resources, deficient infrastructure, weak water policies, or a combination of these factors.

Rogers notes that “because lack of access to water can lead to starvation, disease, political instability and even armed conflict, failure to take action can have broad and grave consequences.” Water resource management will be a critical, ongoing challenge for coming generations—the kind of crisis that should compel us to take the long view and act immediately. Policymakers from around the world can’t afford to wait to take action on water resource management. If they do, the consequences might be far greater than Rogers or anyone else can predict.

Gerhard Laschober Austria,

Submitted by on Wed, 08/06/2008 - 10:30am.

Gerhard Laschober
Austria, Europe
e-mail: gml@aon.at

Commentary on a global water crises
the innovative answer could be a production of drinking water through water condensation from the vast and inexhaustible sources of water present in the aerial humidity in surrounding air. The free cooling medium for chilling the condensation surfaces on the water cooling equipment is the free atmospheric chill originating in the cool air layers (3000-4000 meters above sea level) which, as per the invention, will be transported without using artificial energy to the water condensation equipment (on the earth’s surface).

The mechanism of the “Balloon shuttle” function
The transportation medium is the mantle of the balloon, further on balloon only, which will fill up with free hot utility waste gases produced by industrial plants for waste disposal, facilities for waste disposal, power stations, tourist facilities, agrarian farms, facilities for power consumption etc. These warm utility waste gases act in the balloon as per the buoyancy physical laws and enable a fast rise of the balloon, from the place of filling to the place of cool air offtake (3000 - 4000 meters above sea level). The balloon will remain connected to the filling and offtake places by a cable which will be kept in its variable length by a cable reel.
Fixating cables in place will prevent further rise of the balloon by opening an escape opening in the balloon to let the warm gases out. Due to now missing buoyancy power of the warm gases and countermovement of the cables being reeled in, in addition to the mass of the balloon, the warm-air balloon will now go down. During the first short phase of the process, the surrounding cold air is flowing inside to the balloon and through the balloon. In the second phase, after closing the outlet opening, the cold air continues to flow into the balloon which will, after a complete fill of air and slight inner excessive pressure in the balloon, force the cold air out once again. During the third phase, the balloon is quickly moved to a filling and emptying equipment (located on the Earth surface) where the chilled air is emptied into the condensation equipment to cool off the condensation surfaces.
Filling the balloon with warm utility waste gases, the balloon ascent, draining the waste gases out, cool atmospheric air filling, descent of the balloon down to the water production equipment and draining of the cold air from the balloon into the equipment are constant and cyclical processes.

The results of my experiments and calculations are showing that to cool of the condensation surfaces on the water condensation equipment, there will be about 24 million cubic meters of cold atmospheric air from +3ºC to 5ºC at disposal and that will fully satisfy the needs to produce a volume of several hundreds thousand liters of drinking water (always in relation to the air temperature and humidity).

Mechanism of the “Perpetuum mobile” function
The cooling medium – atmospheric coldness - is drained through textile pipes manufactured with light-weight materials. The cold air is carried from far air layers towards the water condensation equipment (located on the Earth surface).
The textile piping which is floating freely upright is held up by a giant warm-air balloon which is using warm air as a carrier medium from the continuously incoming warm air
from the water condensation equipment and is supplied by the textile piping.

The free atmospheric coldness, free aerial humidity, free incoming and outgoing transportation of the balloon as well as improving our living environment, are the key advantages of this new invention which is protected by patent rights.
There are also possibilities to obtain recycling rights and utilization rights.