Links!

* The headline reads, "Las Vegas Nervously Watches The Water Drop."

* More likely that not, there will no major international climate deal at Copenhagen.

* NJ-GOV '13: Cory Booker drops the murder rate in Newark.

* The Nation considers the Palin effect.

* New York, after the flood. Via io9.

The government of Brazil wants you to pee in the shower.

Good Magazine has a feature on how to reduce your water usage. It should surprise no one that the most effective single step to take is, as always, vegetarianism.

A few links I've missed over the last few days.

* xkcd discovers the secret origins of the Kindle.

* RIP, Philip Jose Farmer. More here, especially about Venus on the Half-Shell, the book he published under the name Kilgore Trout. It's not half-bad.

* 'Las Vegas Running Out of Water Means Dimming Los Angeles Lights.'

* Spider-Man is taking a job at McDonald's in these tough economic times.

* And Joss Whedon explains why DC Comics movies don't work. He's right and wrong about this; there's something to be said for the "pain" thesis, but mostly it's a failure of writing and directorial ambition, compounded by corporate cowardice...

Monday midday.

* Followup on the Google-search climate crisis: Google says it's just not so. (via)

* The top 11 compounds in your drinking water.

• Atenolol, a beta-blocker used to treat cardiovascular disease

• Atrazine, an organic herbicide banned in the European Union, but still used in the US, which has been implicated in the decline of fish stocks and in changes in animal behaviour

• Carbamazepine, a mood-stabilising drug used to treat bipolar disorder, amongst other things

• Estrone, an oestrogen hormone secreted by the ovaries and blamed for causing gender-bending changes in fish

• Gemfibrozil, an anti-cholesterol drug

• Meprobamate, a tranquiliser widely used in psychiatric treatment

• Naproxen, a painkiller and anti-inflammatory linked to increases in asthma incidence

• Phenytoin, an anticonvulsant that has been used to treat epilepsy

• Sulfamethoxazole, an antibiotic used against the Streptococcus bacteria, which is responsible for tonsillitis and other diseases

• TCEP, a reducing agent used in molecular biology

• Trimethoprim, another antibiotic

So gross. (Via Boing Boing.)

* Johann Hari in Slate considers environmentalism's great divide: the romantics vs. the rationalists.

* Bruce Springsteen is playing a free concert in DC one day before I get there for the inauguration. There is no justice.

* And Hendrick Herztberg notes in The New Yorker that the Bush years offer, for the first time, a precise measurement of the number of people who can be fooled all of the time: 27%.

The President-elect’s performance can’t fully explain the public’s welcoming view of him. Part of it, surely, reflects an eagerness to be rid of the incumbent. A gangly Illinois politician whom “the base” would today label a RINo—a Republican in Name Only—once pointed out that you can fool some of the people all of the time. We now know how many “some” is: twenty-seven per cent. That’s the proportion of Americans who, according to CNN, cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job. The wonder is that this number is still in the double digits, given his comprehensively disastrous record. During the eight years of the second President Bush, the unemployment rate went from 4.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent and climbing; consumer confidence dropped to an all-time low; a budget surplus of two hundred billion dollars became a deficit of that plus a trillion; more than a million families fell into poverty; the ranks of those without health insurance rose by six million; and the fruits of the nation’s economic growth went almost entirely to the rich, while family incomes in the middle and below declined. What role the Bush Administration’s downgrading of terrorism as a foreign-policy priority played in the success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be known, but there is no doubting its responsibility for the launching and mismanagement of the unprovoked war in Iraq, with all its attendant suffering; for allowing the justified war in Afghanistan to slide to the edge of defeat; and for the vertiginous worldwide decline of America’s influence, prestige, power, and moral standing.

(Via Matt Yglesias.)

If you want to know where the wars of the twenty-first century will be fought, just look at where the water is (and isn't). Via Andrew Sullivan.

Eco-Monday.

* "It's not as safe, it's bad for our planet and it's clearly more expensive": Why can't we just stop drinking bottled water?

* Climate change 'faster and more extreme' than feared.

* A specter is haunting American environmentalism – the specter of failure. All of us who have been part of the environmental movement in the United States must now face up to a deeply troubling paradox: Our environmental organizations have grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to go downhill, to the point that the prospect of a ruined planet is now very real. How could this have happened?

* And according to Peter Salonius, a Canadian soil biologist, "humanity has probably been in overshoot of the Earth's carrying capacity since it abandoned hunter gathering in favor of crop cultivation (~ 8,000 BCE)."

* This week's icon is eco-tastic too—it's a Greenpeace poster labeled "Stop the catastrophe" I found at grinding.be. The rejoinder in the tag is borrowed from Tim Morton: The catastrophe has already happened.

Monday night ecology.

* Starbucks has an official corporate policy of wasting a whole lot of water for no good reason.

* At least 25% of the world's mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to the first assessment of their status for a decade.

* Are we past the global warming tipping point?

John McCain is a straight-talking maverick who would never say one thing to one audience and a different thing to a different audience. Except, you know, when he does:

Yesterday during an interview with the Denver Post, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claimed, “I will not and have never supported renegotiating the Colorado River Compact,” an agreement that “governs how seven Western states, including Colorado and Arizona, share the Colorado River“:

MCCAIN: And by the way, whatever misinterpretation there may have been, I will not and have never supported renegotiating the Colorado River Compact. … Never, Never would I support a renegotiation of the Colorado River Compact. Please. No. Got it?

But less than a month ago, McCain did exactly that. He told the Pueblo Chieftain, that the compact “obviously, needs to be renegotiated“:

MCCAIN: I don’t think there’s any doubt the major, major issue is water and can be as important as oil. So the compact that is in effect, obviously, needs to be renegotiated over time amongst the interested parties.

This is an under-the-radar story for most of the people in the country, but as some smart folks noticed at the time, it could make a big difference in what's emerged as a crucial swing state.

Questions for John McCain:

* Did your "cross in the dirt" story really happen, or did you lift it from The Gulag Archipelago?

* Why was it falsely reported that you were at the Rick Warren faith forum in a "cone of silence" during Obama's question, when in fact you had not yet arrived at the venue?

* Do you really think a person making $4.9 million in income a year is not rich? Do you really not consider yourself rich?

* Did you just lose Colorado?

Candleblog hits back at Warren Ellis following his call for an end to linkblogs. I am mentioned, as is the sorely missed Gravity Lens. Meanwhile, Quark Soup is fed up with blogs altogether:

Stop and consider this in detail: someone afraid to even use their real name asks for an analysis of an extremely complex situation, decades in development, merely because Yglesias spent a few days in the west -- and in airy Aspen, at that.

RoboticGhost doesn't ask any journalist in the southwest who covers the water beat 40 hours a week, or any of a half-dozen writers who have written detailed and thoughtful books about the west and its water, or a thousand administrators whose job it is to ensure as smooth a water flow in the sw as possible. He asks a casual traveler.
And this casual traveler, who has spent his entire life living in apartments on the eastern seaboard, actually thinks he has something valuable to say, because a year ago he spent a few days in a Best Western somewhere in the southwestern US.

With no evident local knowledge whatsoever -- even admitting as much -- Yglesias nevertheless offers a solution to this enormous, complex problem, a solution based purely on some political theory he read in a magazine somewhere last year and which has absolutely no naunced understanding of the complexity of the true situation on the group or its many years worth of layered complexity or what privatizing water supplies would mean for hundreds of thousands of southwestern ranchers or the million living there facing ever rising water bills.

For what it's worth, Yglesias concedes the point:

The only thing I have to say to defend myself from those charges is that I don't think the post was really about why I suck, it was about why the punditsphere as a whole sucks with me just as a prominent example. And he's right. To gain any worthwhile information about any topic whatsoever, you need to be reading the work of someone with real expertise. To develop real expertise requires years of study, research, etc. And years of study, research, etc. can't be adequately condensed into a blog post. Thus, blog reading is a completely worthless exercise and nobody should really engage in it. I started writing this blog as a hobby; I thought it would be a fun thing to do. And I not only continue to enjoy writing it, but people pay me to write it. But the mere fact that I'm writing it doesn't make it a worthwhile thing to read, which is why the overwhelming majority of Americans have never read this blog and never will.

Frankly, this is exactly why I tend to restrict myself to linkblogging. Nobody should expect themselves to be able to come up with The Big Answers after ten minutes of shallow speculation; hell, it's taken me at least a decade and a half of trying to even start to get a handle on what the questions are.

Curiosity, generosity, honesty, and humility: these are the four pillars for all intellectual labor, and they're the keys for blogging too.

Is there life on Mars? Maybe, maybe not, but it looks like they found water.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a statewide drought after two years of below-average rainfall, low snowmelt runoff and a court-ordered restriction on water transfers.

The drought in the southeastern U.S. has abated somewhat over the last few weeks, though as you can see in the picture at right the situation is still fairly bleak, not only in the Southeast but across the country.

Nor is the water crisis limited to the U.S.

"The glaciers on the Himalayas are retreating, and they are the sponge that holds the water back in the rainy season. We're facing the risk of extreme run-off, with water running straight into the Bay of Bengal and taking a lot of topsoil with it," he said.

"A few hundred square miles of the Himalayas are the source for all the major rivers of Asia - the Ganges, the Yellow River, the Yangtze - where 3bn people live. That's almost half the world's population," he said.

Lord Stern, the World Bank's former chief economist, said governments had been slow to accept the awful truth that usable water is running out. Fresh rainfall is not enough to refill the underground water tables.

"Water is not a renewable resource. People have been mining it without restraint because it has not been priced properly," he said.

More on this pricing issue in a little bit at culturemonkey.

And of course, if it's not too little water it's too damn much: The president of the low-lying Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati said Thursday his country may already be doomed because of climate change.

That photo below reminds me of one of the best pieces on globalization to be found on the Internet, Arundhati Roy's essay on dams: "The Greater Common Good." I must admit I was completely naive about the realities of dam-building before reading this article; dams are actually a tremendously important site for what Marx called primitive accumulation in the contemporary moment and therefore an important location for class struggle.

In the fifty years since Independence, after Nehru's famous "Dams are the Temples of Modern India" speech (one that he grew to regret in his own lifetime), his footsoldiers threw themselves into the business of building dams with unnatural fervour. Dam-building grew to be equated with Nation-building. Their enthusiasm alone should have been reason enough to make one suspicious. Not only did they build new dams and new irrigation systems, they took control of small, traditional systems that had been managed by village communities for thousands of years, and allowed them to atrophy. To compensate the loss, the Government built more and more dams. Big ones, little ones, tall ones, short ones. The result of its exertions is that India now boasts of being the world's third largest dam builder. According to the Central Water Commission, we have three thousand six hundred dams that qualify as Big Dams, three thousand three hundred of them built after Independence. One thousand more are under construction. Yet one-fifth of our population - 200 million people - does not have safe drinking water and two-thirds - 600 million - lack basic sanitation.

Big Dams started well, but have ended badly. There was a time when everybody loved them, everybody had them - the Communists, Capitalists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. There was a time when Big Dams moved men to poetry. Not any longer. All over the world there is a movement growing against Big Dams. In the First World they're being de-commissioned, blown up. The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just conjecture. Big Dams are obsolete. They're uncool. They're undemocratic. They're a Government's way of accumulating authority (deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where). They're a guaranteed way of taking a farmer's wisdom away from him. They're a brazen means of taking water, land and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs displace huge populations of people, leaving them homeless and destitute. Ecologically, they're in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, water-logging, salinity, they spread disease. There is mounting evidence that links Big Dams to earthquakes.

Big Dams haven't really lived up to their role as the monuments of Modern Civilisation, emblems of Man's ascendancy over Nature. Monuments are supposed to be timeless, but dams have an all-too-finite lifetime. They last only as long as it takes Nature to fill them with silt. It's common knowledge now that Big Dams do the opposite of what their Publicity People say they do - the Local Pain for National Gain myth has been blown wide open.

For all these reasons, the dam-building industry in the First World is in trouble and out of work. So it's exported to the Third World in the name of Development Aid, along with their other waste like old weapons, superannuated aircraft carriers and banned pesticides.

* I refuse to believe that the new Indiana Jones movie isn't totally awesome, regardless of what people on the Internet have to say about it.

* Double-amputee Oscar Pistorius has won his appeal against the Olympic Committee and will be participating in the Beijing Olympics.

* Jesse the Body Ventura teases a third-party run in the Minnesota Senate race. I thought Franken would have this thing walking away, but his campaigning hasn't impressed me so far. I have no sense of whether Ventura helps him or hurts him.

* Los Angeles may be forced to turn to sewage to meet its water needs.

* How to get out of serving on the R. Kelly jury, via Kottke.

I blame R. Kelly for Sept. 11. When the judge asked one prospective juror about his feelings regarding Kelly, he cryptically answered: "R. Kelly may have led the Taliban in attacking us on 9-11, but you can't prove it." You're right, we can't. In fact, we're fairly certain that no one has ever tried.

* What went wrong: TNR reports on how Clinton blew it.

* And in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan calls 2008 for the Democrats.

Things that are guaranteed to totally wig me out: AP probes that find trace amounts of drugs in our drinking water.

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

Monday morning environews:

* Pentagon to Bush: climate change will destroy us.

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

Worse even than the boogeyman! Too bad we've sat on our hands for the last seven years.

* Meanwhile, in local news, Tennessee and Georgia get ready to go to the mattresses over water rights to the Tennessee River.

* And the "They talked about global cooling in the '70s!" meme officially bites the dust.

Lake Mead, the water source for nearly 8 million people (including both Las Vegas and Los Angeles), could go dry by 2021.

The study’s findings indicated that there is a 10 percent chance that Lake Mead could be dry by 2014 and a 50 percent chance that reservoir levels will drop too low to allow hydroelectric power generation by 2017. There is a 50 percent chance the lake will go dry by 2021, the study says.

Researchers say that even if water agencies follow their current drought contingency plans, those measures might not be enough to counter natural forces, especially if the region enters a period of sustained drought or if human-induced climate changes occur as currently predicted.

"We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us," said study coauthor Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California at San Diego. "Make no mistake, this water problem is not a scientific abstraction, but rather one that will impact each and every one of us that live in the Southwest."

In the pictures left and up top, the white level on the rocks indicates where the water level used to be.

Here's another striking photo, courtesy of National Geographic:



At Lake Mead National Recreation Area, for instance, a barren landscape has replaced a harbor that once attracted campers and boaters.

It is December 12, 2007. The temperature outside is 67°, with a projected high today of 79°. Yesterday's high was 75°; Monday's high was 80°. 2007 is shaping up to be one of the hottest years on record, vying with previous heavyweights 2005 and 2006, and, well, every year since since 1997.

Climate change is a myth.

P.S. There are 45 days of water left in Lake Michie and Little River. Everything is fine.

Slouching towards idiocracy: an energy drink company will be putting out Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator as an actual product, while the Pur water filtration company puts out a new version that will put a lot of flavored crap back into the water you just filtered.