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You read over this book carefully, re-reading as necessary: The 'water-creating items' don't actually create water, they're little gateways which spew liquid forever thanks to being connected to the Elemental Plane of Water. You can control the flow rate; anything from stopping it entirely up to, hm, it looks like two and a half gallons per minute? But the drought covered most (if not all) of this world's inhabited regions, so one such gateway would be a pointless, futile gesture. You'd need lots of them, it's hard to say how many, but 'millions' seems like a good guess. And how do you create millions of dimensional-gate artifacts in a magic-based, pre-industrial civilization? The book provides the answer: Using a variation on the magic that golems are based on, a team of wizards created what amounts to a magical assembly line. The resulting artifact could turn out gateways at a rate of... convert to more-familiar units... about five of them every four minutes.
Okay: One-and-a-quarter gateway produced per minute, starting (you check one page) ten years ago, equals, about six and a half million gateways, by now, plus just under another two-thirds of a million every year until the assembly line is turned off. And if all six-and-a-half-million gateways run full blast for a solid year, they produce, hm, sixteen and a half million gallons, or... a tiny fraction of a cubic kilometer of water? But that would mean the gateways can't be what's causing sea-level to rise! But your instincts, your intuition, everything says the gateways are the root of the problem! You growl in frustation at this paradox.
Written by Catprog & Cubist on 02 October 2010