Drip Irrigation May Not Save Water, Analysis Finds

NY Times ^ | November 18, 2008 | HENRY FOUNTAIN

[BMiles2112]

Your point is that government mandated conservation has encouraged conservation. I agree. My point in all of this has been that the government should remove itself from arbitrarily regulating markets where it need not regulate. If this had been an article about government forcing more stringent electricity limitations on refrigerators, I would have made the same fundamental arguments.

[ansel12]

You don’t know my point, my post was in response to post 16, water exists on the planet and will stay constant in that way, but that has nothing to do with water regionally, or nationally, or locally, or much of anything else, or in the design of mechanical devices that use water.

By the way I suppose everyone supports the government getting involved in the design of ballcocks, that is something related to toilets that I definitely wanted government to involve itself in and they did.

[SunkenCiv]

Scientists Show That Vegetation Conditions Drive The North Africa Drought
ScienceDaily
November 24, 1999
Adapted from materials from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

William Lau, a Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, Md.) atmospheric scientist... along with UCLA atmospheric scientists Ning Zeng and David Neelin, found that the addition of vegetation to climate computer models proved to be the missing link in what was driving the drought... changing sea surface temperatures couldn't account for much of the drought at all... another factor -- soil moisture -- ...was only enough to account for a drought half as severe as what actually happened in the Sahel. Finally, the team added natural vegetation to the model and found that the natural vegetation interacts significantly with climate, and in the case of the Sahel drought, caused enhanced drying... Also, since plants transpire by losing water through their leaves, less vegetation decreases humidity. The loss of a direct moisture supply means less rainfall, which causes weaker circulation, dampening the monsoon season... Lau said that the new model including natural vegetation changes is a much better reflection of what the Sahel region actually experienced. And it suggests that without the addition of man-made landscape changes, the climate system is fully capable of generating this devastating type of drought.