Send us water and we'll let you use the pound again, as long as you promise not to make it collapse.

i thought we had enough water but it was all up north and couldn't get to the over populated south east

its probably also a problem when germans,aussies,french own your water companies becuase why would they care to invest and not just cream

not enough water and a long hot summer would mean carnage and riots in merry old england,no doubt about it :D

i meant households with the higher water consume excluded industry. sure industry is another point which is maybe much more important but the number i was talking about was only households.

i just found this in german, on the right site you see the chart with daily consume per capita but numbers are a little bit old:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasserverbrauch

i read it in the newspaper or so with actual numbers which were a little bit lower.

i think people in countries like england, germany or france could easily reduce the consume 30 litres per day or so (if we would really try even more). usa much much more like everything they could reduce a lot if they just would care more about... if this would be the case in england alone you would consume 1.5 billion litres water less per day. in germany 2.5 billion.

i know industry is using much more but this would still help and i think the industry would have a big potential as well to spend less water.

I guess I did not think of that because I am from a place where the river is the water supply.

LOL. More likely Europe will freeze over completely due to change of ocean currents.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05mar_arctic/

I've done a bit of reseach into this as I'm applying for a job in the water industry. Water is mainly obtained from ground water and resevoirs. I't's not taken directly from rivers due to the enviromental impacts. Also the UK is one of the most densly populated countries. Over 10% of the UK's population lives in London alone.

Fresh water is one thing that Finland will never have lack of (we have almost two hundred thousand lakes....). Fresh water will be our big export good in the future!

Westerlies will still blow regardless if the gulf stream sinks mid atlantic due to the greater influx of fresh water. It's the very rotation of the Earth, instead of local climate, that makes temparate latitude landmasses have far warmer winters in ther western half than their eastern half. Compare Labrador to British Columbia, or Kamtchaka to Great Britain (of course Labrador is a bit too far since the foul weather of the Greenland icecap reaches far and wide. No wonder some of the northernmost treelines lie as far as possible from Greenland; Tamir peninsula, over 70 N).

Still you get the picture. To even think Europe will "freeze over completely" even should the GS collapse right now is a bit, well...

OT - anyways I must confess the OP made me laugh a bit. I mean, "England on drought, is the world facing a water crisis?" sounds a bit 1900 to me... but alright, I know he didn't mean it, no need to pick up on that one. Just adding everything's fine here on Brazil, just as we were once in drought and will be in the future. It's just the way climate works.

Still I wonder when mankind will realize how silly it looks when they flush their own shit and piss on tons of fresh water and still have the nerve to whine about water shortage. You all want a livable planet? How about start acting on it for real, for once?

Ireland never use the pound. It was the Irish Pound (Punt). In general , the euro has a better exchange against the Pound sterling than the Irish Punt ever did.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_pound