Experts Predict California Droughts Will Increase
PAWELSKI: Welcome back. Each year, the Worldwatch Institute gives the planet a checkup and reports on how Earth is holding up.</s>PAWELSKI (voice-over): The digital divide goes global, world population hits a new high, and alternative energies power up. Those are among the trends detailed in Vital Signs 2000, an annual report card for the planet from the environmentally minded Worldwatch Institute.</s>MICHAEL BENNER, WORLDWATCH INSTITUTE: The key finding is that we find enormous disparities among the world's people in terms of their wealth, the power, the opportunities, and even their survival prospects.</s>PAWELSKI: That divide extends to the wired world, too. Worldwatch says more than a quarter billion people went online for the first time last year. But whether you can log on often depends on where you live.</s>MOLLY SHEEHAN, WORLDWATCH INSTITUTE: Here in the U.S. we have about 40 percent of our population online. The digital divide is actually much starker in global terms where you have about 4 -- 4 percent of the world's people online.</s>PAWELSKI: Earth got 77 million new residents in 1999. That's like adding another Philippines. Among the new arrivals, symbolic person No. 6 billion, born in Bosnia, visited by the United Nations secretary-general. With growing populations, governments have a much harder time getting basic services to people. And also on an environmental front, more people means -- means basically more stress on the planet.</s>PAWELSKI: On the other hand, Earth's growing population reflects the fact that people are living longer lives than ever before. On the energy front, Vital Signs 2000 details a 39 percent jump in wind power capacity around the world.</s>BRENNER: You're finally seeing the beginnings of a process where over the next 10 to 20 years the alternative energy sources will provide a very substantial source of the total energy mix.</s>PAWELSKI: In many ways, Vital Signs 2000 is a tale of two worlds: one getting richer and more powerful, the other growing poorer and less self-sufficient. Worldwatch argues that's no way to run a planet. They say it never rains in Southern California, and for the next few decades, that may be close to correct. Jim Hill explains.</s>JIM HILL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The land of natural disasters -- wildfires, flooding and earthquakes -- may face yet another menace. Experts say California is entering a dry period, which could last for 30 years, thanks to newly discovered large-scale shifts in the Pacific Ocean temperature.</s>BILL PATZERT, JET PROPULSION LABORATORY: These are big, and when these changes lock in, they often persist for decades: 10, 20, 30 years.</s>HILL: The long-term prediction comes from analysis of satellite images. It was part of a discussion of drought weather patterns, which could be especially critical for California.</s>PHILLIP PACE, METRO WATER DISTRICT OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: The problem is the water's up north and the people are in the south.</s>HILL (on camera): Californians drink, bathe in and otherwise use up to 40 million acre feet of water each year: more than half of it coming from mountain snow-melt, which is channeled to dry areas like Los Angeles, which receive only a desert-like 15 inches of rainfall each year. (voice-over): Many Californians remember how vulnerable they are: withering lawns, strict water conservation, or the disastrous 1960's Bel-Air fire, which broke out midway through a 30-year dry cycle. Now there's the possibility of global warming.</s>PETER GLEICK, WATER POLICY EXPERT: What we now have to be concerned about is that on top of those natural variations we're beginning to see evidence of climate change.</s>HILL: Even though 60 percent of the water for 15 million Southern Californians is channeled in from someplace else, state water officials say the system can handle dry years.</s>JEANINE JONES, CALIFORNIA WATER RESOURCES DEPARTMENT: Statewide reservoir storage is a little bit above average and ground-water storage is in pretty good shape.</s>HILL: At least for now. For CNN EARTH MATTERS, I'm Jim Hill.</s>PAWELSKI: Coming up, troubled waters and the high-tech attempt to fix them. Also ahead...</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Death to all termites and beetles and soon.</s>PAWELSKI: Why some men of the cloth are less than charitable to some of God's creatures.