Water

Water is life. Scientists claim we are "carbon based" life forms. I beg to differ. All life on this planet is based on hydrogen, period. The most common hydrogen molecule in, on, or around us is of course water. I have heard humans described many ways, but the most physically correct description is "bags of dirty water". It makes up in pure form 55 to 60 percent of our bodies, and if you break down the fats and other hydrocarbons the percentage is of course higher.

For our planet water is the core of our cooling system. The suns heat/light is absorbed by the oceans directly, reflected by our snow/ice fields, and re-radiated back to space by evaporation/condensation in the water cycle by storms of all kinds save dust storms. These storms also bring life giving water inland for use by plants which make food from it, sunlight (we are all solar powered), and carbon dioxide.

Life uses water to cool itself, dissolve needed chemicals, move them around, and manufacture food in one of it's most basic forms (sugars plants make from water and carbon dioxide).

Everything, and I do mean everything, living on this world depends on water. Everything further depends on water "doing it's job" so to speak and arriving in predictable quantities for the area any given life form is adapted to. Too little water and you have drought. Too much water you have floods and glaciers forming depending on what the season is, etc. When the water cycle is disturbed, it is BAD for life. Period. No politician can declare it otherwise. No life can hide from the effects. Smoke and mirrors don't work because as grandpa said, the weather don't care.

Global warming isn't making beach life nicer by making it warmer further north on the coasts. It is warming our oceans. El Niño and La Niña are the most obvious results of this. The ocean cooling currents are changing to throw this heat into space. Since storms are the method that the oceans use to cool themselves, they change the weather. Wetter some places, drier others, it is a shift in the basic atmosphere/ocean patterns we call weather. Now I will state the obvious, this is bad. When you change the predictability of the water cycle in any way you make it hard for life to survive almost everywhere. It doesn't matter if you irrigate, because drought dries up lakes and water tables. Doesn't matter if you build levies, because flooding is happening in places that aren't predictable.

Places like China are losing crop land to drought and desert every year.  Places in the west and midwest that caused the 30's dust bowls are again in sever drought. Western Canada's grain lands haven't pulled off a crop in a long time due to epic drought. South of the equator, Australia (which is a dry place at best) is having a epic drought. I'm not making this up, google it.

Water is of course mostly fluid. You say "Hello Mr. Obvious, nice of you to tell me that.". Understand that is key to the next issue. Rising sea levels. The oceans are rising, and flooding the land. It is displacing people. You look at LA and New York and say "Really?". I say look to the equator.

The earth is spinning, this gives us that nice day night thing. It also tends to flatten out the planet into a nice oblate spheroid (sphere squished at top and bottom). The earth is mostly fluid, so tends to bulge around the middle as it spins. This is also where most of the "extra" water from global warming is going. Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal was one of the first to go. The interesting part is you can google this, but instead of ocean rising you have to look it up as "sinking islands". The islands are NOT sinking. Around the tropics and equator the oceans are rising far more and faster than in the northern hemisphere because of the simple rule plumbers follow when laying sewer pipe, water flows down hill.  Because of the earths spin and centrifugal force on a planetary scale, that huge expanse of ocean around the globes equatorial bulge is "down hill". Thus, the equator water will get deeperest fasterist. No excuses, no buts, physics. That is also where we are losing islands.

I personally think there are other farther reaching consequences. You change ANYTHING on a balanced spinning ball and there are always consequences. Period, physics, no mercy, no buts. Do I know what all of them are? Nope, not even close, dunno. That said, I can put on my tinfoil hat and get all weird on you by making a couple educated guesses.

First, it could change the very length of our seasons. Over a long period of time it could even out some of the wobble our planet goes through. Long term thing likely, but spinning thingies display some interesting behavior. Anyone who has played with gyros knows that one which is wobbling (precessing as the science folk call it) can with little warning suddenly straiten out. Suddenly for a object as relatively large and slow as the earth can still cover quite a few years, but the process would be very disturbing for us living on the outside of the dirtball none the less. Quakes, volcanoes, you know... bad things.

The next and more subtle change all that water (read also "weight" and "pressure") could do is break things. The earths crust and oceans are relatively thin compared to the overall planet. They basically float on the gooey center of the earth. The moon pulls a bulge of water (and to a lesser extent land) up as it orbits us causing a effect called tides. The moon roughly orbits mostly around the equator. The most water is also around the equator. The weight of all that melted water is (once again physics, no mercy, no buts) around the equator. That weight shift by my humble estimation, assisted by the moon's tides, is going to mess up the earths already cracked up crust. Apocalypse? Likely not. But the ring of fire volcanoes and faults all over the planet should get far more active. Oops, look around! Faults and volcanoes HAVE been going nuts all over the world in a increasing manner for over a decade!

So, water... that stuff that makes the highest mountains tremble with fear because only it can bring them down with it's relentless nature... the very staff of life... bringer of flood, feast, famine, plenty, civilization, and social collapse throughout mankind's history. I could write a whole (big) book just on the planetary social, political, physical, and environmental yin and yang of water. For now however I will leave you with this small snippet to mull over.  Let the migraine begin.