I would guess rising seas. Water gets closer to you, literally.

Water supplies implicitly mean freshwater supplies. Sea level rising can't help that (seawater is not usable directly, and for desalination plants the bottleneck is their capacity and power usage, not amount of seawater available) but it can make it worse e.g. if certain aquifers become saltwater.

And, since most power-generation in South Africa is from coal, desalination - it seems to me - is only aggravating the problem (climate change) over the long run.

Yes, we should probably power those plants from some renewable/sustainable source, but that's a different discussion for another day.

> since most power-generation in South Africa is from coal

It's sad and crazy that this is still not changing. SA is a very sunny country.

Have you ever tried drinking sea water? It tastes salty. The short of it being: It makes you thirstier; drinking it is worse than drinking nothing.

Desalination is expensive in many ways. If it was a viable way of acquiring water (which it is in some places, like literal deserts) then these places would have already done it. Hence rising sea levels provide no additional access drinkable water.

But it has what plants crave.

Not sure if you're being facetious, but saltwater kills most plants, with a few exceptions.

And just yesterday, I was thinking no one here would need to explain who Mike Judge is to the general audience.

"It's got what plants crave" is a line from his movie Idiocracy. It is directly relevant the discussion at hand, but it's also a zero-effort joke that contributes nothing new.

Your presumption was half correct, but that movie might be my only blind spot in his oeuvre. Nonetheless I thank you for the clarification.

Well, Idiocracy was release over 11 years ago, so young adults might not have heard of it. Hope I haven't made you feel old :)

I for one got the reference. but HN comment style strongly discourages low-effort jokes. It doesn't add information. I'm not surprised that it was downvoted, whether people "got it" or not. This is fine, HN is not reddit.

God forbid somebody makes a joke! This is a professional website, grim attitude is required.

> a zero-effort joke that contributes nothing new

> low-effort jokes. It doesn't add information.

And then

> God forbid somebody makes a joke!

You're misreading what is being said.

Not sure why you were downvoted. You weren't the one making a facetious remark, simply explaining one.

> explaining one

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16176246

I don't get it. This is just a link to another attempt to explain the facetiousness of another comment which was itself also downvoted. Why don't we downvote facetious comments instead of the comments that try to redeem them?

I'm saying that it looks like an earnest explanation of a comment that was not facetious.

That's why the explanation as if it was facetious gets the downvote.

Especially since it's not at all baseless. Outside of the subtropics rainfall is expected to increase. But drought length can also increase. It's complicated.

More rainfall?