Maybe I am dense, but I am unconvinced by the Watch's arguments. I fail to see why telling someone that technology is untested should deter them from exploring that technology?

Additionally, the arumentation that the author of the response letter uses leads me to believe that the author holds some ties to the water district, or another biased party. Maybe I am just cynical, but... touting pledges made by the district as reasoning not to adopt a new technology screams of D.C. style lobbying.

What are the other options? The underground water resources are limited by the amount of runoff produced in a given year. If the fossil water has been mined, then it doesn't matter how much energy it costs to produce water from the ocean - you need to do it. The other option is to stop growth in large cities and try to put population into areas that have enough water. Both of these options are ones that Food & Water Watch seems to prefer.

And, there is the claim that the Tampa Bay desalination plant is a failure. Since March of 2003, the plant has produced nearly 5 billion gallons of water. This is about 3 million gallons per day. Of course, the rated output should have been 25 million gallons per day. In comparison, it is a failure. But, 3 million gallons of water per day is nothing to sneeze at. One might ask why the plant has failed? The contractor made mistakes, and it went bankrupt trying to fix the mistakes. So, what was the water authority to do? Throw away the plant when the problems that lead to the plant's construction were still around? No. They have contracted to fix the issues.

Ultimately, the complaining group has an agenda. And, this colors their view of what is best. Food & Water Watch is not objective no more than a neocon is objective about the war in Iraq.

Mr. Corrigan's thinking seems similar to those who argue against buying a hybrid car because you will not be able to recoup your financial investment. This argument simply ignores the economic losses that will be suffered if nothing is done and we continue business as usual.

However, Food and Water Watch does make one point that I find compelling. They claim that they "campaign to keep water under public control." Given some of the recent revelations of the lack corporate ethics and a propensity in the business community for ignoring the public good in favor of profit, I find it hard to argue for privatization of a such basic human need.

... or, 5 years ago it was to become one.

In the underdeveloped world nuclear and desal, with public procurement and operations, is seeing the greatest investment vis a vis cane and corn - climate change be damned. So you can feel good, as usual, with your head ...

India Announces Offshore desalination Plant Operational

April 19

The Hindu/Deccan Herald reports that India's Minister for Science and Technology, Kapil Sibal, has announced the successful start of operation of a 100,000 gallons per day floating desalination plant located about 40 km east of Tamil Nadu coast. The plant will be upgraded to 1 million gallons per day by 2008. The project was under the aegis of India's National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT). This plant is the first of its kind in the world.

This plant, presently sitting on an anchored 65 by 16 meter wide barge. The barge is located in deep sea. The salient features of the plant includes bringing in saturated hot steam generated in a nuclear power plant for flash heating the water in a vacuum chamber located on the barge. The freshly generated water vapor passes into an adjacent chamber where cold water drawn from 600 meter depth of Bay of Bengal, east of the Coromandal coast, by pipe, and wrapped around the cooling chamber converts the water vapor to clean potable water. NIOT said the total dissolvable solid in the desalinated water is 10 parts per million, as opposed to the national limit of 2,000 ppm.

Fresh water is then towed in a specially developed 50,000 gallon containers by barges for getting pumped into the water distribution system on shore.

The capital cost of the project so far had been Rs. 220 million (about $5 million). This cost would rise as the size of the plant becomes larger. The cost of water produced, including bringing it to the shore, is about $5.50 for 1,000 gallons --well within the defined limit.

In designing the project, one of the main objectives was to keep down the number of movable equipment offshore. The biggest challenge to the NIOT in designing the system was to draw ice-cold water from a depth of 600 meters keeping the pipe vertical. Using weights and various types of submerged guides, the problem was solved. NIOT points out that the designers are looking at how to "save" such offshore plants in case of tsunami or very major earthquakes, not uncommon in that region.

As for the IPPC:

Vice Chair of IPCC Breaks Global Warming Consensus

April 19, 1500EDT

The much-vaunted consensus over global warming shattered like ice yesterday, when the Russian vice chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) penned an op-ed for Ria Novosti news agency questioning the "panic over global warming."

"I think the panic over global warming is totally unjustified. There is no serious threat to the climate," wrote Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yuri Izrael in a commentary published by RIA Novosti April 18. Academician Izrael is the head of the Institute of Global Climate and Ecology in Russia, and one of three vice-chairmen of the IPCC, the international body whose reports have claimed that human-induced global warming is a scientific certainty.

"There is no need to dramatize the anthropogenic impact, because the climate has always been subject to change under Nature's influence, even when humanity did not even exist," Izrael wrote. He does not dismiss that there are changes in climate going on, but writes that "we are more threatened by the cold than by global warming."

If it becomes necessary to deal with warming, Izrael argues, controlling human use of CO2 is not an effective means. "Instead, it makes sense to decrease solar radiation by 0.3%-0.5%." This can be most effectively done using stratosphere-based aerosols, and Russian scientists are now studying how to do this, Izrael says.

Reducing CO2 emissions will both take much too long, and be extremely expensive-- about $18 trillion this century. "The method of aerosol impact on the stratosphere is much cheaper, hundreds of times faster, and, if need be, can be easily stopped," Izrael argues.

"Way back in 1974 Russian scientist Mikhail Budyko came up with an idea that may resolve the global warming problem in several years," Izrael wrote. In 2005 Izrael proposed an article with concrete proposals along the same lines. Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen ignored his article, but made the same proposal a year later, Izrael wrote.

The idea is to change the "'meteorological sun constant'" by introducing into the lower stratosphere (at an altitude of 12km-16km) fine dispersed aerosols of sulfuric acid, for instance. This will decrease solar radiation on the Earth's surface and reduce the temperature in the troposphere by the required number of degrees. This is an instrument of climate change. "It goes without saying that this method should be approved by the world community. For the time being, Russian scientists are working at home - making detailed calculations for further tests," concludes Academician Izrael.