At http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/emmotts-big-wet-mac/ … is a guest post by one Alex Cull, based on Stephen Emmott's odd book, Ten Billion, where reference is made to the amount of water required to produce food. In this instance, beef from cattle (or in easy logistics, per beefburger, on the assumption lots of the population eat lots of beefburgers, although why that should be so is not disclosed). It claims 3000 litres of water are consumed to make a single beefburger – and incredibly, 27,00 litres are required to make a bar of chocolate. However, only 100 litres are needed to make a cup of coffee.
As we don't make a lot of chocolate in this country anymore, courtesy of the stockmarket and the City slickers, the beefburger factoid is what seems to have grabbed the attention of the author. It is true – cattle do drink lots of water, which is why fields have cattle troughs (piped in nowadays). Water determined the routes of the Welsh and Scots drovers in the 17th and 18th centuries, bringing roast beef to the table of the newly industrialised towns and cities. For example, when crossing the dry chalk country of the Chilterns they kept to the valleys where chalk streams existed – such as the Gade, Ver, Misbourne and Wye. Hnece, Emmott's emphasis on how much water is used to produce a beefburger, probably an exaggeration as Cull notes, does have a point – but is that water use worth fretting about? The streams and reservoirs are fed from the sky – precipitation. Also, cattle consume a lot of grass. Rain falls out of the sky and the grass grows and the cows eat it. If they did not eat the grass shrubs and trees would grow and they would drink the water instead. You can't grow cucumbers on a Welsh hillside. Not only that – rain water is free. What is the guy fretting about?
Well, it seems he is not the only one that frets about water – over in Germany Spiegel Online has a post by someone extremely bothered by the recent flooding there – even though no one has actually been killed. He ascribes the overflowing water in the rivers of central Europe to CAGW rather than the position of the Jet Stream – and thinks it is a disaster. It seems Germany is getting a taste of what we had last year, the cool weather (not warming, mind you) causing changes in the Jet Stream (which commonly would fall over northern Scotland or even further to the north) – go to http://notrickszone.com/2013/06/11/maxeiner-miersch-and-magdeburg-supers…