According to an article in this week’s London Independent, Britain’s Defense Secretary John Reid predicts that in the near future wars will not be fought for oil. They will be fought for water.

And the leading cause of diminishing water supplies everywhere? Global warming.

Right. Global warming, that scientific specter of oncoming doom that the U.S. government has made a business of doubting, is now a universally recognized reality everywhere but in the United States.

Water wars, far more serious than wars for oil because of their universal implications, are on the way tomorrow if we don’t do something about global warming today. Reid predicts that we can expect violent confrontation over water in the next 20 to 30 years. In fact, he ranks climate changes due to global warming alongside international terrorism, demographic changes and global energy demands as the major threats facing the world in future decades.

A new undertaking by Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens is even more disconcerting. Pickens has been acquiring acreage overlying the Ogallala aquifer with hopes that he could pump and sell the as much as 200,000 AFY of water to one of the state’s metropolitan centers – El Paso, Lubbock, San Antonio, or Dallas-Fort Worth. Ogallala is already severely depleted. The West Texas farmers rely on the aquifer for water. The aquifer’s minimal recharge rate of less then one AFY means that its users are mining fossil water that will not be replenished.