It's Chinatown, Jake.

In years to come, one suspects, the water wars will make the current oil wars seem like a mere distraction. In this fascinating Guardian article, it seems clear that European water shortages are not so much caused by climate change (for which, as we've previously discussed on this blog, there is little in the way of hard evidence) as by increased consumption

: Ricardo Torres, a Spanish environmental activist living in London, puts it a different way. 'When you eat a Spanish watermelon or an iceberg lettuce in Britain, you are really drinking our water,' he says. 'You could say that your demand is partly responsible for our land turning to desert.'"

In our modern lifestyles, we all use much more water. Personal hygiene, for example, is far better than it was 30-40 years ago. When I was growing up, I can honestly say I only had a bath once a week (!), whereas my kids are in it every day. I can remember scraping layers of dirt off my skin in the bath at home after a two week camping holiday, when I was a pre-pubescent 12 year old. Shortly thereafter, I became a germ-free adolescent, but there never seemed to be any urgency to have a bath before I reached puberty. What's with all the washing now?

So there's that, and our awareness of food hygiene - washing salads and all that, and our increased wealth and desire to go and live in hot countries. It's obvious that all these new builds in Spain are sucking water out of the ground in a chronic way - the land really can't support that level of population, along with their swimming pools and golf courses.

One of the most obscene things, in a world in which farmers are forced to halve the amount of land they grow crops on, is to see a lush green golf course in the middle of a desert. The Americans have been doing this kind of thing for years. And worse: the great plains, of course, scene of the 1930s dustbowl, are kept artificially fertile by pumping water. Cities like Phoenix, Arizona, and Las Vegas simply couldn't exist without vast quantities of water being pumped from elsewhere.

We've known about this sort of thing for many years. That movie, Chinatown made reference to the scandal of water rights in Los Angeles - another city that simply couldn't exist in its present form without pumping vast quantities of water.

So don't come to me with your stories of climactic apocalypse: think of all the water you waste and learn to think of it as something precious and valuable, in increasingly scarce supply.