Iowa Already Faces Massive Problem In Nitrate Pollution In Water; Warming is Making That Pollution Even Worse

[hatrack]

When pollution gets bad enough in the rivers supplying Iowa’s largest city with drinking water, it costs Des Moines around $16,000 a day to run a special system to filter out dangerous nitrates. It’s a fact of life in the agriculture-dependent state — and climate change is making the water quality problem even worse.

The nitrates come from fertilizer and pesticides that make their way into the soil and then waterways like the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers. It’s not usually a problem in winter, but this year Iowa’s capital had to filter in January and February — just the second time that’s happened in more than 30 years. That’s likely going to mean higher water bills for people who live in a state with some of the nation’s waterways that are most vulnerable to nitrate pollution.

Experts blame weather conditions, including warming winters, for a costly problem they say will only grow across farm country. When it comes to winter nitrate pollution events, “We are more apt to see these in the future. Are they going to occur every year? No. But the ingredients are there for them to potentially occur more often,” said Justin Glisan, Iowa’s state climatologist.

The fertilizers and pesticides that farmers use leave nitrogen and phosphorus in their fields. Rain or snowmelt then carries the chemicals into drinking water, which is dangerous. Ingesting too many nitrates can cause health issues like cancer or blue baby syndrome, low oxygen levels in infants. As Earth warms due to human-caused climate change, the ground isn’t staying frozen as consistently in many places, and snow is often melting or falling as rain on thawed ground. That all adds up to more winter days when nitrates are likely to reach unhealthy levels.

EDIT

https://apnews.com/article/iowa-nitrate-pollution-nitrogen-phosphorous-agriculture-water-d5c6659ec2a3758ef60da4f1bc8a2340

[OC375]

1. Too many people, enough with the people

What we do to the land to feed our relatively unchecked growth is killing… well, just about everything, even us. We need to pause and figure this out. What worked with a few billion doesn’t scale well to feed tens of billions, which is coming sooner than later.

[delisen]

2. Joni Ernst making Iowa air dangerous to human life

then tells her constituents they are all going to die anyway.