21–30 of 197 posts
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Into the ocean. The ocean covers the majority of the Earth's surface. The ocean is full of salt. Water which rains out over the oceans is unusable as drinking or irrigation water without expensive processing (desalination). If historic rainfall patterns change, there is absolutely no requirement that the rain land anywhere useful for our existing infrastructure or human habitation. Yes, the water won't disappear, but…
>>it's that is is staggeringly expensive to do so. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and with Necessity also comes scale, and with scale comes less cost... Desalination has been expensive because it is not necessary, the second it becomes necessary I bet you will see the costs drop.. If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick
I doubt scaling desalinization is as hard as hurling stuff into space, but it may not be easy to scale either. There are plenty of places on earth which are very dry, adjacent to salt water, and extremely rich and yet no great desalinization technologies have come from them.
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Can somebody explain why is this downvoted? If 53% decline, what do the other 47% do? How about total storage?
So what did they want to say? Is it "Science, it works?" like in XKCD comic #54? Or are the quotes around science the actually important thing, casting doubt on it? It's hard to tell because they did not bother to spend a few seconds to actually write it out.
Beside that there is more to papers than just their abstract. If you are curious, you can check section "Global LWS trends and drivers" for the answers to your questions.
https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/nieuws/archief/2023/04/hoger-...
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> where you think the water will go, if not to other places on earth I afraid that a lot of fresh water is going to become an ocean water. Flooding theory creates the impression of transferring fresh water from one place to another where it will remain just as fresh. It is incredibly hard to create a fresh water from salty one.
> 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.
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.
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Can somebody explain why is this downvoted? If 53% decline, what do the other 47% do? How about total storage?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Earth is a closed system, so we should expect to see water storage decline in some areas and flooding increase in some areas. Of course, Earth is a closed system, but I am not sure it is that closed.
I don't mean this to sound snarky. I'm genuinely curious where you think the water will go, if not to other places on earth.
Without it, snowmelt-fed rivers dry out earlier.
As more ice melts there might be more liquid water available, but the ecosystems that would process that water into vapor are struggling. So you end up with a situation where the only source of water vapor in the air is the oceans.
As temperatures increase that'll again be a net increase in ocean-driven evaporation, but it'll be less evenly distributed than evaporation+transpiration was.
So the concern is that the only available water will be too salty to drink, or too destructive to capture.