Wonder what it would be like 30 years from now with all the water problems.
Julian Simon: Bumping against any limit will increase the price of any resource in short supply, leading ingenious humans to find new supply sources or substitutes.
California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago
#32All of this reminds me of a trip I took about 10 years ago to Palm Desert. Even then I was stunned by opulence of their water use and the utter disregard for sustainability. It's a city built in the desert that regularly reaches 100+ degrees, and yet every house had a bright green grass with sprinklers running constantly. One of the main attractions was their huge amounts of golf courses, that were of course always k…
Palm Desert and portions of Southern California get their water from a local aquifer and the Colorado River, unlike the Central Valley and most of the state, and therefore are not directly affected by the drought in the same way as the rest of the state. Visible urban water usage like lawn watering is a small fraction of the water usage in California, and even if every lawn stopped getting watered it wouldn't come cl…
But it would help the issue. The idea is to reduce non-essential water use, regardless of source.
Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago
#33And South Dakota is injecting toxic chemicals into theirs because "we won't ever need that water anyways".
Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago
#34And this means that soon, many of us will be eating food grown with 20,000 year old water.
Yeah, they should really be using new water to water that new food.
/s
Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago
#35Water waste is everywhere. In deserts we water golf courses. In cities we hose down sidewalks to reduce dust and dirt. A huge percentage of the food we produce that uses water to generate gets disposed of. Then there's this: "Initial estimates are that when fully operational, the Utah NSA Data Center will use as much as 1.7 million gallons of water per day."
where does that water go? evaporated?
Yes
Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
if water in bottles expires in a few years i can't even imagine how bad this unpackaged water will have turned. this is totaly outragous
pretty sure water in water bottles only 'expire' because of the plastic leaching into the water over time. "Unpackaged" water has been sitting in the earth for thousands of years, as evidenced by this article, and is perfectly safe to drink.
I think your humor detector needs tuning.
Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago
#37One solution to producing water is desalination. You can effectively get unlimited amount of water, but you pay for it in energy. A quick Google search finds that there's a desalination plant under construction in Carlsbad, California.
Given that by far most of the water in California is used for growing food, an interesting question would be: at what point is it cheaper to grow the food somewhere else where water is more abundant? Of course the amount of sunlight, temperature etc. would factor in too. But with enough energy, you can simulate the conditions of California anywhere.
Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a good summary. A friend of mine is looking at putting a passive desalinator on the ocean floor off the coast of Monterey. Basically its a pipe with the permeable membrane surrounding the submerged collector. The pipe carries fresh water to the surface and as you pump out fresh water, the pressure of the ocean at depths of up to 1000 meters pushes in more water through the membranes, desalinating it in the pr…
What does all that extra salt do to the chemistry of the water in that area?
Well depending on rate it can be a pollutant or not. Most desalinating plants have a mixing pond where the mix fresh seawater with partially desalinated water (which has a higher salt content) to produce an effluent that is saltier than the unprocessed water but not so salty that it causes issues. That same mixing could, in theory, be done by ocean currents if the water motion was enough.
Re: California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Palm Desert and portions of Southern California get their water from a local aquifer and the Colorado River, unlike the Central Valley and most of the state, and therefore are not directly affected by the drought in the same way as the rest of the state. Visible urban water usage like lawn watering is a small fraction of the water usage in California, and even if every lawn stopped getting watered it wouldn't come cl…
But it would help the issue. The idea is to reduce non-essential water use, regardless of source.
> "regardless of source."
Why? Misery loves company?