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Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage

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Re: Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage

#51

Post by HPsquared »

XorNot wrote: post #40
HPsquared wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not staggeringly expensive, about 38 cents per day per person, apparently: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Costs Although that doesn't include irrigation.. EDIT: can even be economical for irrigation in some circumstances: https://www.fluencecorp.com/desalination-and-agriculture-les...

Kind of leaving out the main point there. People don't use a lot of water. Industry and Farming do. We depend on both of those for...pretty much our entire society.

Water-intensive industrial processes can move to where the water is. Farming is more of a challenge but some crops need more water than others; there's a lot of scope for substitution.

Re: Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage

#52

Post by NineStarPoint »

spenczar5 wrote: post #37
mynameisvlad wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, but never in enough volumes to be actually usable by us. It’s not like we can capture every single evaporated water droplet before it cools to form fresh water. So while technically it happens all the time, practically it’s as if it isn’t happening at all when it comes to the concerns talked about here, specifically the quantity of available fresh water declining.

I think you are quite wrong about that. The evaporated ocean water becomes rain. Evaporated ocean water is the source of over 80% of all rain on earth.

About 80% of that rain happens back over the ocean, and then about 25% of the rain that happens over land actually gets captured as ground water. Even that isn’t the main point though, the issue is we’re currently using water faster than rain replenishes it in many places. At worst as I understand it, in some places they’ve collapsed their aquifers by over-pulling from them, and that means less of the rainfall in those areas will be recoverable in the future. At some point we have to enter a mode where we only pull water in a way that is sustainable or we’ll suddenly find that we do indeed need desalinization to keep up with our use.

Re: Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage

#53

Post by ajmurmann »

flavius29663 wrote: post #47
xen2xen1 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're changing the weather with greenhouse gases and whatnot, and we regularly pump it out to go to our homes, or even use it to make electricity with dams.

Global warming means generally more water in the air and more rain, not less. Think of Jurassic Park, not Mad Max

Yes, more total rain. A steady steam from the mountains is a much better source of water though to keep lakes, rivers and our water supply going. The rain isn't evenly distributed through both space and time. We might get a drought for years and then torrential rainfalls. We are already seeing this. It's happened in California and Germany. Both places I'm most tide to. So maybe it's sampling bias. At my parent's in Germany, most fir trees are dead from the multi-year drought and then in June 2021 half the village was destroyed by a flood.

Re: Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage

#54

Post by tppiotrowski »

linuxlizard wrote: post #34
pier25 wrote: post #26

We're going to need a lot of desalination plants powered by clean energy.

When water gets in short enough supply, we will burn coal, garbage, tires, anything to power desalination plants.

Desalination cones should work in tropical climates.

[1] http://www.watercone.com/product.html

Re: Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage

#56

Post by NotYourLawyer »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #27
helge9210 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is incredibly hard to create a fresh water from salty one. Fresh water is created from the salty water by evaporation all the time.

I mean, sure, but never in enough volumes to be actually usable by us. It’s not like we can capture every single evaporated water droplet before it cools to form fresh water. So while technically it happens all the time, practically it’s as if it isn’t happening at all when it comes to the concerns talked about here, specifically the quantity of available fresh water declining.

This is where essentially all freshwater comes from.

Re: Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage

#57

Post by mywittyname »

wombarly wrote: post #25

Here in the Netherlands they decided to increase the water level of our lakes by 5cm to handle the drought season this year. Since the amount of snowfall in the Alps was lower than normal. https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/nieuws/archief/2023/04/hoger-...

It must be nice to live in a country that manages their natural resources with an eye towards long-term sustainability.

Re: Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage

#58

Post by bombcar »

RC_ITR wrote: post #44
linuxlizard wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When water gets in short enough supply, we will burn coal, garbage, tires, anything to power desalination plants.

Or (at least in the US), we will simply stop doing things like growing alfalfa in the desert to feed cows being raised in Texas. Sure beef will be a little more expensive but… You’re actually right. We’ll probably burn garbage and radio hosts will call people against burning garbage effeminate names.

Burning garbage may be one of the best things you can do with garbage - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-us...

As you can set it up to burn very hot and have all sorts of scrubbers on the outcomes.

Re: Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage

#59

Post by kzrdude »

linuxlizard wrote: post #34
pier25 wrote: post #26

We're going to need a lot of desalination plants powered by clean energy.

When water gets in short enough supply, we will burn coal, garbage, tires, anything to power desalination plants.

That's a damn good argument for making sure we don't go into overpopulation.

Re: Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage

#60

Post by time_to_smile »

pier25 wrote: post #26

We're going to need a lot of desalination plants powered by clean energy.

Problem is that everything needs X powered by clean energy, which means we need both a lot more clean energy and, if we want to slow/stop climate change, to massively reduce our use of fossil fuels... which requires a lot more clean energy.

We also, so far, globally have not shown any evidence of replacing fossil fuels with green energy, only supplementing them.

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