Climate Change: Long Term Effect on Water Supplies

The American Water Works Association gives a less than perfect picture of the effects of shifting global weather conditions on the United States and the world.

Some of their findings include:

· Precipitation will be less frequent but more intense, leading to increased flooding

· Periods of drought will increase, leading to increased risk of forest fires.

· Increased drought, flood and forest fires will negatively affect water quality. Drought increases sediment in reservoirs, while floods and forest fires can overwhelm downstream water sources with an onslaught of debris.

· Changes in snow pack, the melt season and run off will aggravate storage capacity deficiencies. This will then push water utilities to invest in increased storage capacity.

· Rising sea levels will cause salt water to intrude upon freshwater aquifers.

The report recommends that we create new water sources through recycling and desalination, cutting greenhouse gas emissions, encouraging conversation, and factoring the effects of climate change into long term planning.

Everyone just needs to pitch in with the many ways one can help our environment. We can make a difference

Go Green with LED Christmas Lights

Now that Thanksgiving is over, our thoughts turn to decorating for Christmas. If you are like me, you have a few old tangled Christmas light sets packed away. Each year I would have to unpack each strand and plug them in to see if they're still working.

This year my home will be going 'green'. My old incandescent lights are not only old, but inefficient and bad for the environment. My choice this year will be to purchase LED Christmas lights. These lights will use less energy than the standard incandescent lights and last more than 50,000 hours.

They are constructed to be more durable, don't break as easily and don't contain that filament as my other lights do. I won't have to be concerned with over loading my electrical circuit breakers or worried about any fire issues because these LED lights are cool to the touch. The way incandescent lights work is electricity runs through the filament. Because the filament is so thin, it offers a good bit of resistance to the electricity, and this resistance turns electrical energy into heat. The heat is enough to make the filament white hot, and the "white" part is light. The filament glows because of the heat -- it incandesces

I also learned that if 20% of households switched to LED Christmas lights for the holiday period (averaging 30 days) it would conserve enough energy to power 200 households for an entire year. That is an amazing stat.

The famous Rockefeller Christmas tree in New York City will also be going green.This year, the tree will be decked out with 30,000 LED lights as opposed to the traditional incandescent bulbs to save energy and our environment.

Our environment issues cannot be ignored and with these small changes, we all can do our part to help save our environment. Join me and go green this year.