For global water crisis, climate may be the last straw
Before man-made climate change kicked in -- and well before "Day Zero" in Cape Town, where taps may run dry in early May -- the global water crisis was upon us.
Freshwater resources were already badly stressed before heat-trapping carbon emissions from fossil fuels began to warm Earth's surface and affect rainfall.
In some countries, major rivers -- diverted, dammed or over-exploited -- no longer reach the sea. Aquifers millennia in the making are being sucked dry. Pollution in many forms is tainting water above ground and below.
Cape Town, though, was not especially beset by any of these problems. Indeed, in 2014 the half-dozen reservoirs that served the South African city's four million people brimmed with rainwater.
But that was before a record-breaking, three-year, once-every-three-centuries drought reduced them to a quarter capacity or less.
photo credit: Ballacorkish