Salt Water in Your Tap? Hidden Climate Change
Time for a national reality check
Hurricanes, fires, and floods are the common signs of climate change’s destructive force. But southern Louisiana, that Achilles Heel of the Deep South, is once again facing a climate-related threat and this one is invisible.
Imagine turning on your tap and tasting salt. Now imagine an entire region, the Mississippi delta, threaded everywhere with water, gradually converting from fresh drinkable water to undrinkable salt water.
The area, so known for storms and floods, is now in a major drought, limiting the Mississippi river’s ability to push ocean salt water back away from the land. The freshwater is retreating without the flow needed to hold back the ocean.
And that ocean water now threatens the major city of New Orleans and there’s no quick fix, other than praying for rain. This is another nail in the coffin for a place where large numbers of humans can no longer live. As usual, the locals want to be rescued from yet another calamity.
And this is a new one, which once again brings up that ‘rebuild or leave?’ question. The rebuilding in this case would be constructing an entire water system based on desalination plants and huge pumping systems, costly and inefficient projects that are likely only temporary…
