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A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

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Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#161

Post by bsder »

abosley wrote: post #142
bsder wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please reread my statement: > the alfalfa is a soil restorer So, yes, the agribusinesses WILL grow that alfalfa even if they can't sell it. Now, you can factually dispute me since I am by no means a California agribusiness expert. However, it is my understanding that alfalfa is uniquely suited to the soil restoration required for the agribusinesses to cycle their fields more quickly. It is also my understanding that…

But the water. What about the water necessary to "restore the soil". The soil in question of course, was non-productive desert 50 years ago. We are doing input intensive farming in areas where the complex supply chain necessary to support is causing what some people call "externalities". Others, the tragedy of the commons. Well run societies try to use regulation to keep this from happening.

Those are two different and separate arguments.

"We shouldn't be growing anything out there." is an argument that the agribusinesses don't want to have.

"We shouldn't be growing alfalfa out there." is a nice distraction argument that the agribusinesses are happy to have because it concedes that we should be farming the area.

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#162

Post by augment_me »

arjie wrote: post #73
augment_me wrote: post #11

Who cares there is so much more to exploit. For example no-one has yet moved massive freshwater icebergs by boat, and its up for grabs!

Pretty clever idea. Sadly uneconomical when compared to desalination because I love the idea of iceberg calf hunting. Ripe for a novel Moby Dick - The target is already a large white object. Call me Icemael. Got a bit of a Cold War era pykrete like project feeling.

How bout a really big iceberg chunk, like massive. There has to be a trade-off at some size.

Also nice reference and funny in probably most ways to think about it thanks for a laugh :D

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#163

Post by dredmorbius »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #152
yreg wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it different with data centers?

I did some research on this matter. There are (at least) two uses for water by data centers. (1) If the data center is in a very low humidity environment, the data center is artificially humidified (is this a real English word?) to reduce the effects of static electricty. (2) Almost all data centers outside of cold regions (northern Europe, etc.) use water for evaporative cooling.

humidified

Yes, a real English word.

Machines that humidify air are called ... humidifiers.

(There are also dehumidifiers.)

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#164

Post by smcin »

tzs wrote: post #55
rayiner wrote: post #30

Why can't we work up the political outrage over water-wasting agriculture in California that we managed to gin up over data centers: https://finance.biggo.com/news/202508220112_Data_Centers_vs_... > Alfalfa irrigation (Colorado River): 1.6 trillion gallons annually > Google data centers (global): 6.4 billion gallons in 2023 > Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use EDIT: that page has a correction to s…

Because a lot more consumers care about the milk that comes from the dairy cows in California that consume something like 75% of that alfalfa and the meat that comes from the animals that consume the rest than care about data centers?

So, the other 25% does not all go to cattle, certainly not California. Some fraction of that alfalfa is exported in containers to China/Japan/Saudi, for their cattle. Doing that from a semi-desert during a declared drought (2020-3) seems like pretty obvious proof that the agricultural cost of water is distorted and too low. If any of that was artesian water, then it's even worse.

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#165

Post by smcin »

theshrike79 wrote: post #131
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farming is a necessary activity and in most countries, they are also a politically influential group. The case for data centers in the age of AI is weaker, and the only effects for the average person are noise, pollution, higher electricity costs, higher water costs, for the ultimate "benefit" of losing your job.

California farms some very non-essential things like Pistachios, that take insane amounts of water to grow. In what's effectively a desert.

Yes, and during the declared drought of 2020-3.

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#166

Post by AnthonyMouse »

lesostep wrote: post #129
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain. The heat issue is also widely misunderstood. The state of California gets on the order of a PWh of heat every day from the sun. A million GWh. Even a large nuclear plant doesn't make a dent in that. The issue is localized to the immediate area at the outlet, because the water temperature directly at the outlet is going to be highe…

>> Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain. No, not necessary to the same one. Every body of water has a catchment area, and through the bottom parts of some lakes/rivers water sips into the earth, filling underground water levels. Now, let's say you life on a coast with a regular winds in the ocean direction. You basin fills with water evaporated by you, your neighbors…

> Now, if you increase your evaporation, you could easily drain a lot of water from your land.

At which point we're back to the quadrillion watt hours of sunlight you get a day, which evaporates such a large amount of water that you have to be doing something pretty dramatic to move the needle. Which thermal power plants and data centers don't, but agriculture? It's pumping trillions of gallons of water out of the ground and into fields in that sun.

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#167

Post by AnthonyMouse »

yreg wrote: post #145
lesostep wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain. No, not necessary to the same one. Every body of water has a catchment area, and through the bottom parts of some lakes/rivers water sips into the earth, filling underground water levels. Now, let's say you life on a coast with a regular winds in the ocean direction. You basin fills with water evaporated by you, your neighbors…

Why can't they condense the vapor on site? Or simply use closed cooling loops? Would it be that much more expensive?

The premise of evaporative cooling is that the phase change absorbs an enormous amount of heat and carries it away. The heat is returned when it condenses back into water, so doing it on-site would defeat the purpose.

Hypothetically you could recondense it somewhere else, i.e. get a large land area and then capture the rainfall. Probably the big win there would be to take the water which is currently routed into the ocean from storm drains and recover it instead of doing that with it.

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#169

Post by AnthonyMouse »

nate_meurer wrote: post #160
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain. The heat issue is also widely misunderstood. The state of California gets on the order of a PWh of heat every day from the sun. A million GWh. Even a large nuclear plant doesn't make a dent in that. The issue is localized to the immediate area at the outlet, because the water temperature directly at the outlet is going to be highe…

> Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain. This is about as useful as saying "the water stays on Earth". The ecological damage entirely depends on the nature of the water source. The most poignant situation is non-rechargeable aquifers. When water is extracted, the mineral structures collapse and the storage capacity is forever destroyed. And as the other reply stated, e…

> This is about as useful as saying "the water stays on Earth".

That is actually an important distinction. There are many things for which this is not the case. If you fail to recover the helium extracted with natural gas deposits then it doesn't stay on Earth. If birds eat your crops, you can't undo it. If you burn coal then it turns into CO2 and heat and it's thermodynamically impossible to reverse the process without inputting more useful energy than can be recovered from burning it to begin with (which is why carbon capture is a sham and we instead need to stop burning fossil fuels).

Whereas you can evaporate and recondense the same water an unlimited number of times and whether it's a problem depends not so much on what you're doing as where you got the water to begin with.

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#170

Post by fragmede »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #156
kbenson wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If farms would choose to do solar instead of crops, I would assume that's because they can get more $/acre, but that could cause food prices to rise. At the same time, energy prices would drop if there was a surplus, so I wonder where it would level out. Lower energy cost could have a small affect in reducing the price of processed foods, but I imagine it would be very small (but I don't really know the energy cost o…

Yes, if farms went 100% from agriculture to solar we wouldn't have enough food :-) And we'd have anywhere from 100x to 1000x the entire power demand of the planet in energy. Solar has a $/acre value (which at the moment is pretty high in California) but as more Solar came on line that would go down. And like any crop they would figure out what they needed to maximize profits. It might also spur the development of 100…

Why not both? Agrivoltaics or dual-use solar has farmers putting solar panels on the fields, and sometimes finding it improves their yields!
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