In the news this week…

Just a short one. Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States of America. This divisive result will have numerous effects worldwide, but what does it mean for the future well being of the planet?

In 2012, he wrote on his twitter account, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”. Essentially, we now have a climate change denier as the leader of the second most polluting country on Earth. More recently he claimed that he would “cancel all wasteful climate change spending”. As far as our efforts to decrease carbon dioxide emissions in order to slow global warming go, this is not good news.

Just over a week ago, National Geographic released their documentary ‘Before the Flood’. This film explores the real issues threatening the planet such as melting ice caps, massive deforestation and rising sea levels and all in all paints a rather forbidding picture, as well as stressing how the USA is one of the biggest culprits. It ends on an optimistic note, with Johan Rockström, a professor of Environmental Science at Stockholm University, saying he thinks ‘we have tipped the world towards a sustainable future, the fear is are we doing it too slowly?’. Four years of Trump in power will be a stumbling block to any progress that has been made. Not only is he proposing a move back to coal-fired power stations (although the low price and abundance of natural gas due to fracking may end up making this an empty promise), but he has vowed to renegotiate the Paris agreement (there is nothing to stop him just ignoring it anyway) and wants to eradicate the Clean Power Plan which aims to reduce emissions from existing power plants by 30% by 2030.

This will have consequences that reach far beyond the US, as it effectively rules out any remaining hope of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees above pre-Industrial levels. 20% of the carbon emission reduction agreed to in the Paris agreement is set to come from the US, so them dropping out may set a precedent for the other most polluting nations.

This blog is focussing on water, and it is worth pointing out that Earth is not the only planet in the solar system with water on. There might not be as much liquid water on Mars as there used to be (de Haas, 2014) but actually there is an abundance of water ice below the surface as the following video explains:

Only time will tell whether we damage our planet so irrepairably that many parts of it are uninhabitable, but with 2016 set to be the hottest year on record (breaking the previous record set in 2015) maybe we shouldn’t be too hasty in ruling out a trip over to our red neighbour! And if we’re still in need of water we could consider this:

http://www.trump.com/merchandise/trump-natural-spring-water/