https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods
“in the recorded history [of the area] that we have since 1918, we have never had this much rain.”
Of course, Earth is a closed system, but I am not sure it is that closed.
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.
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.
You know, unless we build a massive “roof” of devices to capture all that rain. Literally covering the entire planet. At that point yeah it would dev a reasonable thing to bring up in the context of fresh water reserves falling.
So I very much stand by the point that while, sure, it happens all the time, that does nothing to actually help with the topic at hand.
How?
Rain is not predictable at the scale of a crop season. Rain is not scalable, it’s extremely localized.
Rain happens, and when it does your crops get watered, but you can’t in any way shape or form rely on that.
As I said in another comment, talking about farmers using rainwater for their crops:
> Rain is not predictable at the scale of a crop season. Rain is not scalable, it’s extremely localized.
> Rain happens, and when it does your crops get watered, but you can’t in any way shape or form rely on that.
So, congrats on being pedantic enough to miss the forest for the trees, I guess.
>someone points it out
>”you’re a pedant!”
Next time you decide to be pedantic maybe include the context in your pedantry so you at least have a semblance of a point.
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 if the effect is rainfall hits the ocean, or say, flood-prone regions even harder then it normally does, it's still going to be coming down somewhere not useful to us.
The problem is not that we can't solve these problems, 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.
You may have neatly (and politely) pinned down why we computer folks are so arrogant about how easy problems outside our direct field would be to solve, if only we were the ones “allowed” to solve them.
Why? Nestle just passes the cost on to the consumer, because where else are they gonna go?
Make it so.
There are more than a few places where desalination is necessary, and we still haven’t come up with a way to make it cheap.
The current issue is that there is just no way that we know of to reliably desalinate that isn’t super energy intensive, so it comes down to trading energy for water. That’s why desalination is expensive.
So maybe that will work out in the end if the economics make water expensive enough to trade energy for water.
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...
http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...
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.
Most resource problems are not about the quantity of some thing changing as a percentage of earth's matter. Most resources are about density and composition.
If all of the (non-ice) freshwater on earth was suddenly dumped into the ocean, we'd have the same amount of overall water - but little to no drinkable water.
Likewise, we're not really creating new carbon by burning fossil fuels. We're moving and re-distributing it. Compared to being deep underground, the form we create by burning captures much more heat, causing many problems.
Earth is a closed system, so we should expect to see water storage decline in some areas and flooding increase in some areas.
It’s all climate change stuff.