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Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric

latimes.com

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Re: Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric

#151

Post by yazaddaruvala »

sschueller wrote: post #64

Everyone keeps saying desalination is the solution but doesn't desalination cause an enormous amount of waste output (hyper saline slurry)? It seems like creating a new problem to solve another.

There are already salt flats in Utah that are basically "hyper saline slurry". Death valley (https://www.nps.gov/places/badwater-basin.htm) in California wouldn't be particularly worse if we dumped "hyper saline slurry" into it. We could also barrel it and put it into the ground.

There is also always the refinement approach to create 1. table salt (possibly even paying industries like restaurants, commercial cooking, etc to take it); 2. lithium mining.

This slurry might also turn into an asset at scale. Maybe for building roads. Maybe for concrete. Maybe for bricks. We will not really know until we have the surplus, and economic incentive to research it.

Re: Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric

#152

Post by wahern »

agomez314 wrote: post #3

entire regions being deserted is not a new thing (see mayan civilization). it's possible we'll see the cities of southern California (San Diego, Los Angeles) as remnants of an ancient culture in a few hundred years, left intact by the scorching heat and desert.

Environmental stressors can often be beneficial for organisms, including communities. Look at Singapore, Israel, or Ukraine, for example. Existential problems can help communities focus and cooperate. Nothing cuts through political punditry, rhetoric, and arm-chair policy opinions like bone fide emergencies.

Of course, a prerequisite is that the community and its institutions must be sufficiently functional. But I don't think California is so dysfunctional yet that it's doomed to economic and social regression. I think it's too early to say much of anything other than that California is barreling toward interesting times.

Re: Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric

#153

Post by cgreerrun »

danaris wrote: post #149
cgreerrun wrote: post #70

Collecting fog electrostatically is 2x more efficient than desalination. It works by ionizing the droplets in the air and collecting them on wire meshes: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aao5323 . The technique also doesn't produce tons of salt waste that you have to dispose of. It's a potential solution for towns/cities next to the ocean. Desalination is cheap enough already if we get desperate. It won't b…

The difference with this is it reduces the water available to fall further downwind, and could thus cause other issues: it's effectively zero-sum on moisture, while desalinating ocean water is positive-sum (though, yes, it has a waste issue).

Will it reduce the water available? I'm not sure either way. I've been imagining it like you're sucking the evaporated water out of the top of a half-full glass of covered water. The evaporated water is in equilibrium with the liquid water, and if you suck out evaporated water, then more liquid water evaporates. But that's just my dumb mental model.

Re: Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric

#154

Post by yazaddaruvala »

jrd79 wrote: post #69
datavirtue wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern tech also makes it possible to turn arid environments into forests. I would start there. When you do that water starts to collect/accumulate and the area gets cooler. On 99° days of unbearable heat and sun I can stroll under trees and be nice and cool in the 70°s. I do it all the time.

Do you have an example of this being done on a large scale? Sincere question. I've just never heard of it being done.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/regajha/auroville-india...

"Auroville has successfully reforested 5,000 acres of land and turned barrenness into a lush forest that acts as a massive pair of lungs for the region — so much so that the temperature within Auroville is measurably 3 degrees lower than in surrounding villages."

Re: Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric

#155

Post by wollsmoth »

rr888 wrote: post #102
wollsmoth wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's already happening in New Orleans. At least that was the impression I got when visiting. I think it can be difficult to insure a business or home affordably in the area. Seemed like a lot of storefronts were just empty. Perhaps I just went at a bad time of year (late nov).

> Seemed like a lot of storefronts were just empty. This is just normal everywhere in 2022 :)

lol, true!

Re: Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric

#156

Post by wollsmoth »

jriot wrote: post #148
wollsmoth wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's already happening in New Orleans. At least that was the impression I got when visiting. I think it can be difficult to insure a business or home affordably in the area. Seemed like a lot of storefronts were just empty. Perhaps I just went at a bad time of year (late nov).

What year did you go? If it was last year then New Orleans was still recovering from Ida.

Yeah it was. I wonder if I went back now if it'd be in full swing.

Re: Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric

#157

Post by skybrian »

pvaldes wrote: post #101
skybrian wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Diego seems to be doing pretty well at water management. The naysayers weren't able to block the desalination plant and they are doing other things too.

Desalination plants have been tried in Europe for some time, and they still are problematic. They use lots of energy. And then you need to get rid of hills of salt. Stuff that obviously can't be just put in any fertile soil or returned to the sea near the coast. A partial solution could be to use it in winter roads, but then you need to burn gas to move it to the North. At some time, you will cross the line where the…

The Carlsbad plant actually does return it to the ocean:

"The desalination process converts two gallons of seawater to one gallon of drinking water, and one gallon of water with twice the salinity of seawater. The concentrated seawater is diluted before it enters the ocean"

https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/environmental-faqs.html

Re: Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric

#158

Post by surfpel »

wildmanx wrote: post #124
surfpel wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you even arguing? People posting here need to made less ambiguous, seething comments and stop assuming that people reading already know what they’re arguing. - The poster above mentions desalination and says tech provides a solution. - You make some vague point about tech people depending too much on tech, but without actually discussing the point and why. - Then you go on to talk about the current problem,…

We humans have a terrible track record when it comes to using tech to try to counter environmental issues that we caused. It has essentially never worked. What _can_ work is to use tech to address the root cause, which in many cases resource overuse, just like this one. That is, using tech to reduce the use of that resource. Trying to replenish the resource while not curbing its use is doomed to failure.

> We humans have a terrible track record when it comes to using tech to try to counter environmental issues that we caused.

That’s a potentially valid criticism but it’s also a heuristic that, even if a valid one, draws on a very short history of generating solutions to man made environmental disasters. Things generally don’t work until they do, and there’s no inherent reason that humans can’t do well here.

> It has essentially never worked.

A large part of the reason for those failures was that up until recently, science was very dismissive of nuance in environmental systems, but now there’s certainly an abundance of caution, to the point where environmental engineering as a solution to climate change is heavily frowned upon, which is good.

I think desalination has more potential than just as to replace current water consumption, it even has the potential to make water an abundant resource, which is a very exciting prospect.

All of this should be approached with highly cautious and critical optimism however, since there isn’t a miracle solution to anything and it’s improbable that we’d stamp out all the possible consequences right off the bat.

Re: Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric

#159

Post by jdsully »

yellowapple wrote: post #129
thehappypm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pumping water from the California coast to Nevada is not a good idea. You’re basically describing a hydro plant, in reverse, carrying expensive water.

California's existing aqueduct system already moves water over greater distances. If Northern California can supply Southern California's water, then so can Coastal California supply water for Inland California and beyond. Hell... Lake Lahontan. Megalake. Barely alive. Gentlemen, we can refill it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic lake. Lake Lahontan will be that lake. B…

There's the small problem of it being much more difficult for water to go up a mountain than down it.

Re: Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric

#160

Post by TimTheTinker »

s0rce wrote: post #91
TimTheTinker wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> leave fields fallow Please no. We're facing intense inflation, and the solution has to involve supply-side improvements, not just demand-side tweaks. Subsidies for drip irrigation sounds interesting, though - as long as actual water usage reduction is part of the requirement.

It might be objectively better to pay someone to not grow alfalfa for export to the middle east then it is to waste water on growing it. In the end, this is likely cheaper than building desalination infrastructure to make up for the wasted water so you save money. Don't think this is a good long term plan though.

> pay someone to not grow alfalfa for export to the middle east

Or just add tariffs for anything we'd like to curb export of - that's the traditional solution, and it does work. Then turn around and use the tariff proceeds to further alleviate water issues.

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