And while such water shortages are set to affect mostly poor, third-world countries the hardest, the U.S. itself is certainly not immune to shortages of water, the liquid that sustains every one of the 9 billion lives on planet Earth.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the western United States. According to a post at the TheEconomicCollapse blog site, scientists called the 20th century the wettest on record for the past 1,000 years, but "now things appear to be reverting to their normal historical patterns."