Slashdot Mirror
For Much of the World, Demand For Water Outstrips Supply
ananyo writes "Almost one-quarter of the world's population lives in regions where groundwater is being used up faster than it can be replenished, concludes a comprehensive global analysis of groundwater depletion (abstract). Across the world, human civilizations depend largely on tapping vast reservoirs of water that have been stored for up to thousands of years in sand, clay and rock deep underground. These massive aquifers — which in some cases stretch across multiple states and country borders — provide water for drinking and crop irrigation, as well as to support ecosystems such as forests and fisheries. Yet in most of the world's major agricultural regions, including the Central Valley in California, the Nile delta region of Egypt, and the Upper Ganges in India and Pakistan, demand exceeds these reservoirs' capacity for renewal."
Seriously, this is not news, nor is it some kind of revelation of the human condition. Where do I go to get money for such inane studies?
brb, need a 30 min shower
All the niggers and sand niggers cease killing each other, die of dehydration, and the world is that much more peaceful. Sounds like a win-win to me.
Our best estimate is that the ObamaCare will cost 11 to 14 cents per pizza, or 15 to 20 cents per order from a corporate basis. We're not supportive of Obamacare, like most businesses in our industry. But our business model and unit economics are about as ideal as you can get for a food company to absorb ObamaCare. If ObamaCare is in fact not repealed, we will find tactics to shallow out any ObamaCare costs and core strategies to pass that cost onto consumers in order to protect our shareholders best interests.
The restaurant industry is worried about ObamaCare. The National Restaurant Association notes that the law requires companies which have more than 50 employees to provide affordable health insurance or face steep penalties. McDonald’s reports that ObamaCare will cost each of its 14,000 franchises between $10,000 and $30,000 every year, and Burger King, Quiznos, and Dunkin’ Donuts are also expecting to be hit hard.
Don’t worry about the Obamas and the rising cost of pizza; they’re making enough money that Michelle can have two.
and then we all die.
"Demand outstrips Supply" is simply a restatement of "The price is too low."
That's not possible. As a matter of simple economics, demand can't outstrip supply. If supply diminishes, either demand decreases or prices go up, or both.
Technically, the only way for demand to outstrip supply is if supply couldn't meet the basic necessities for sustaining life, in which case demand would rapidly disappear.
Sam Kinison on World Hunger
There wouldn't be world hunger if you people lived where the FOOD IS!
You live in a desert! Nothing grows out here!
You see this, this is sand, you know what its gonna be hundred years from now, IT's GONNA BE SAND!
Get your kids get your shit we'll make one trip. We'll take you to where the food is!
We have deserts in America, we just don't live in them asshole!
(can't have food without water)
"People back then would use fresh groundwater for bathing and flushing their waste!"
This is one reason why the Great Lakes states have signed a compact... our massive fresh water supplies will be worth a lot...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
Thanks for that, National Geographic. ...d' I mean... Slashdot? Hey, waitaminute.
sig: sauer
What does seem obvious to me is the lack of concern.
So be it... may your children be dried husks cursing us until they die.
You seem to equate the matter with death.
Wouldn't most people just move from the region instead of dehydrating to a desiccated husk?
I mean, I guess people besides you since you seem so dead set on being a Water Martyr. We'll erect a statue to you before we leave. Or set up a stand for you to rest in as the end nears so you can make your own gruesome statue, somehow I think that your would prefer this option...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
a prCoductivity cuntwipes Jordan
Physics 101.
When you pump water out of the ground, it leaves a void. When you don't backfill, the void eventually collapses. The oil industry is aware of this problem (that and oil doesn't tend to want to just lift itself out of the ground once the initial pressure does its thing), which is why they use seawater to displace the oil: seawater is pumped in, oil flows out or is pumped out leaving the void which is then backfilled under gravity through a strategically placed hole or two.
Back to the topic: the stable system of rain=>aquifer is disrupted to greater or lesser degrees by human activity. That's obvious. The amount of rain remains constant (more or less), which means the amount of water removed from the aquifer is gone. Simple as. The global water industry has a few options to try and deal with this problem before we start seeing entire cities disappearing into sinkholes:
1. Backfilling. Something not currently done, but it begs the question as to what to backfill with?
2. Alternative sources. We have viable desalination technology (geothermal, solar stills, seat salt extraction plants(!))... we have made great strides in atmospheric water extraction to the point where a plant in the middle of a desert can turn sand into golf course. One option that I don't think has been properly explored is a wide area water grid, possibly national or international in scale. We have the technology, we have the capability, the chock under that wheel is politics.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
So the increase in temperatures by 2C is actually good - more evaporation from the oceans means more rain over the aquifers which means more aquifer replenishment!
Maybe those countries should oh, I dont know, control their populations? Or is the rest of the world going to have to scramble to assemble some sort of international relief for them as they blow past their sustainable population limits without hesitation?
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
...most of the world is busy either developing or buying smartphones and flat screens rather than investing in food/water/health technologies. Jeez, there is a country where 600M people were w/o electricity for a week and that same country is planning to send a mission to Mars.
1. Backfilling. Something not currently done, but it begs the question as to what to backfill with?
Oil, obviously.
Most of this planet is covered by water. We simply need to learn how to use it instead of our ground water. There are plenty of reasonable nascent technologies to provide that ability. There just needs to be an economic incentive to invest. Either it comes earlier through government/corporate sponsorship through policy and investment, or it comes later when ground water becomes economically unviable relative to the alternatives.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Assume there is a container of liquid and bacteria with exactly enough food in the solution to feed the bacteria for 30 minutes. Assume also that the population of bacteria doubles every minute.
At what time is half of the food remaining?
Should we start exporting water?
He is a long-term investor (in the Warren Buffet mold) who puts out a quarterly newsletter of investment advice. He just released his latest a few days ago, and it's highly bearish on the future because of resource demands.
http://www.gmo.com/websitecontent/GMOQ2Letter.pdf
The ones who say "don't worry about the future, science will take care of it" would probably consider jumping off the Empire State Building to be ok, because they did it and they've fallen 30 floors and nothing bad has happened, therefore jumping off the ESB is perfectly safe...
Alternately, the chock under the wheel is that it's much cheaper to use the groundwater. Of course, this might be disastrous in the long run, but it's easy to show that economics pays pretty much no attention at all to the long run.
I am officially gone from
I know lots of tech folks think we'll melt comets for water, but reality suggests otherwise. How many people are willing to give up the suburban dream of the house with a pool to help the species? You know, instead of *talking* about the species whenever a space story comes up, what are you DOING?
In some Arabic countries that's an actual option. It is said that the worst job in the planet is being a water well driller in Saudi Arabia. "Damn, it's oil again!!"
We're also polluting ground water at an alarming rate. With more droughts likely ground water is critical to agriculture in the US as well as drinking water. I used to live in LA and a disturbing number of wells were contaminated some even with radioactive waste, none from power plants it was industrial pollution. I'm in Phoenix now and the city is sinking due to the aquifer collapsing as the water is drained. That's capacity that is perminately lost. For every foot of settling that's the city a foot deep in water that's lost. The city has lost 74.5 million acre-feet in the last 70 years to give an idea what Phoenix is facing.
Ooo Ooo... made from Corn!
There are very cheap ways to recycle water that we don't use enough now but we must in the future. Desalinization is still too expensive but the costs are coming down. Solar/wind powered desalinization could work in poor areas for drinking water but probably not fast enough for farming. Ice mining is also an option we should consider since it is going to melt anyway.
If water has a market price on it, people will use it efficiently.
Unfortunately, most fresh water supplies are owned by governments that price is far below what a private owner would.
We live on a planet covered %70 in water. Salt is not difficult to take out of water, boy scouts can do it. I didn't go to Harvard but I know how to run a fucking pipe line of fresh water to where ever it needs to go. Seriously, this is fucking unnecessary to even complain about lack of water on this planet. Water water everywhere and if you put just a miniscule amount of effort you can drink to your hearts content.
The issue, of course, is not "water"; it's freshwater. We have a lot of water on this planet. Generally it can exist in 5 states: seawater, clouds, freshwater (or what I like to call "drinkable land water"), aquifer water (underground water), and snow/ice.
Around the world aquifers are being depleted. This is a problem because this is one of the most low-energy (and technologically well understood) ways to harvest drinkable land water. And humans are not the only living creatures that use aquifer water! If there is not aquifer water for plants then the plants are completely dependent on rainwater or flowing drinkable land water (rivers, creeks, etc., which are all on their way to becoming seawater again ASAP). This is a precarious state to be in, because on a macro scale, once plants start to be incapable of doing their job (providing ground shade, ecosystems for biomass, improving and retaining soil structure, etc.) a landscape can be on the road to desertification. What does this mean? That means that it's going to stop raining. This has happened, many times, because of human modification of the landscape and has led to the total collapse of multiple powerful civilizations (Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" talks about things like this).
So what are we supposed to do? Say you are an ecological steward (or policy maker) for a couple hundred acres of land that are on their way to desertification or that are already in a stable, but arid, water cycle. It is easy to think of water in terms of accounting and cash-flow, what is the big picture that will make the landscape profitable and growing in "financial" reserves?
The big picture is very simple: we are trying to make seawater into permanent land water. The more net land water the Earth has, the more stable and abundant the existence of terrestrial life on this planet, in general, will be.
(Just remember we're practicing for Mars!)
How do you do this? The input of "free" water we have (meaning no energy cost for the conversion from seawater to potential land water) is rain. We need to make sure that as much rain as possible stays as underground water... or the *sixth* form of water that I haven't mentioned yet: biomass! There is a lot of water in biomass. And it is a relatively closed loop (meaning that once some water becomes biomass it will stay in the biomass cycle for a long time). Insects, plants and *especially* soil biology are some of the greatest resources we have for storing water on land instead of losing it to the ocean.
And then of course, we are all technologists, so I think it is also worthwhile suggesting that we should be using renewable energy resources to desalinate saltwater and just pump it back (I don't know if these techniques have even been invented yet) into our aquifers and ecologies.
same NRA that does not pay the full cost of drivers useing there car to be delivering pizza much less auto insurance to cover pizza delivery.
You can get hit by a pizza driver and there insurance may not pay out as they don't cover pizza delivery or only cover it at a much higher rate.
Crack open a book sometime,
While you only cracked open the book, I have read them. In fact many.
In fact if you bother to open a history book instead of the comic books you apparently feast upon for your simplistic world view, you'd find that MANY past civilizations have migrated after conditions changed where they were - this was all pre-technology. Bays receded, rivers changed - the story of people migrating to other areas because water has moved is literally as old as recorded history.
Further, it takes a certain level of technology to make use of aquifers - the level of technology that would help to enable a migration... the poor still work off shallow wells or rivers the world over.
Most of the world is unlike the fantasy world you have constructed, people are far more practical and able than you can possible imagine.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Grandpa still thinks the three shells are a socialist invention.
Oil made from corn? You think we're dumb enough to turn water plants, then turn them into oil, so we can backfill wells for water?
Obviously we'd use oil made from coal.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I know this is /. where everyone is an expert on everything, so I'll buck the trend and ask a honest question; wouldn't desalination be the perfect use for the power supplied by sources such as wind and solar? (Solar especially I guess.) As it appears to the be perfectly suited to the variable power output that these generate?
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How dare these people hoard this water and remove it from the ecosystem. I'd also like to know where all these vast reservoirs of water are hidden, so we can raid them, and return our water to us. Oh wait - perhaps it's a case of... ahh yes, the USABLE, water, the potable water, the water that can be drunk by people and animals and crops, yeah that's in short supply. And it costs lots of money to turn all that urine - be it human or animal, or all that fertilizer and insecticide contaminated farm run-off - back into potable water.
So this is an economic problem, not a physical one. Well you know at some point you have to stop building stadiums and funding armies and buying fancy jet fighters, and actually spend money where it's needed. Otherwise you have to start sterilizing or shooting people. It's that simple. And if you do nothing, the problem will fix itself. Earth will always have water, and the water will be much cleaner when there are no humans left.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I imagine most of the water would be used for irrigation, and most of that would go down back to the aquifer.
That's OK, T Boone Pickens is working on correcting that.
All praise the invisble hand from which all blessing flow!!! whoops, broke the 1st commandment there
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"Back to the topic: the stable system of rain=>aquifer is disrupted to greater or lesser degrees by human activity. That's obvious. The amount of rain remains constant (more or less), which means the amount of water removed from the aquifer is gone. "
Because all that water is shot into space when we are done with it. it's gone forever....
Please learn about water and what a watershed is. when you do watershed management and wastewater treatment your FUD does not exist.
Only in poorly designed systems wher water is taken out of a watershed is when things fail. Bad designs like the middle east, africa, california have failures.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Governments have been manipulating weather for decades. It's only going to increase. http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Fell_to_Earth_(novel)
Same story, new setting.
Am I the only one who had to go back and read the thread to figure out why the National Rifle Association was allegedly not paying pizza delivery insurance?
well that NRA should stand up for drivers who get fired for useing a gun to fend off robbers.
I think that is what he is trying to say, that many of these systems are poorly designed. Water is being removed from an area of "ample" supply to areas with little or no supply. We are attempting to take the same volume of water and spread it out over a larger area, on a global scale.
Seriously... How stupid are we as an "intelligent" species that we don't rely on the massive oceans for our water supplies? Desalinate it, pump it, drink it. I'm really surprised that a multi-billion dollar industry hasn't popped up to make this happen all over to planet.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Thankfully Global Warming will increase evaporation of the oceans causing more cloud cover and rain.
Of course then the rain comes in the form of Category 5 hurricanes, but farmers will always find something to bitch about why their crops won't grow.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Aquifers, pssshhh. The best place to store water is in the body.
With these machines, the best water output is obtained at 50 to 70 per cent relative humidity and between 28-42 degrees Celsius. A lesser water output is produced even at 25 per cent relative humidity. Atmospheric water extractor units can be kept anywhere, but need access to fresh air, so they work best when placed by a window, or in the balcony or terrace.
Sounds to me like they'd be way expensive to run in a desert to me. Desert air rarely hits 50 percent humidity.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
We got two problems. Insufficient replenishment of fresh water (this article), and global warming (man-made or otherwise).
The latter problem will lead to an increase of evaporation of water. Consequently, this leads to an increase in rain. Which in turn increases the rate of replenishment of resh water.
Don't worry. This world is self-balancing. Else everything would have died ages ago.
Interesting, yet you would seem to be insane.
if everywhere cant support the people
Nowhere will.
And if everywhere can, then everywhere will!! Ha!
Think about that and get back to me.
You think about the inverse, but keep it to yourself.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All I have to say is:
Tank Girl
We always knew that in aggregate the people of California are among the stupidest in the U.S. Your figures merely supply further proof.
Although frankly wouldn't a nearly 80% on federal taxes seem rather high given that we have to have a decently sized army, and also care for the poor in every state of the nation? Seems like a state would be proud of helping others instead of complaining about it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hmm, no more California drivers, vs. living in a third world...
Still thinking. Can you get back to me on that?
Say, isn't Facebook HQ in California? I think I just made up my mind.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
millions of people in Africa might have shifted to considerably more human friendly areas in the past century
They have. Have you not heard of the masses of people fleeing Zimbabwe into places like South Africa?
No South Africa does not like it, neither can they stop it.
A truly mass migration of people cannot really be stopped, even when you are willing to gun many down.
The fact is most people stay where they are if they can live, even if conditions worsen. It's only when things get terrible fast that they move on en masse.
An aquifer going dry is a more gradual thing. Some areas will no longer be able to pull from it, water costs will go up.. over years, people will be squeezed out of a region, and easily absorbed elsewhere.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Talk about a waste of water: parts of north Texas (and many other areas obviously), have clay soil which moves in crazy ways if allowed to dry out too much. This moves you house in crazy ways, causing cracks inside and out. The solution? We're encouraged to water our foundations. Huge amounts of water go to this, which results in our lake levels getting low, which puts us into water restrictions where we can't water the lawn.
Better solutions would be (1) build the foundations to withstand the soil moving, (2) and/or use a different method to keep the soil stable. I'm skipping (3) move elsewhere because DFW is not going to sprout legs and go take over Oklahoma. Unfortunately (2) likely suffers the same problem as the current solution of watering the foundation with soaker hoses: it's basically impossible to do it evenly... so you end up with overmoist areas, and other areas that still move some.
Marc
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
You're adding a step where there doesn't need to be one: solar stills are basically greenhouses with pools in. The condensate runs off into side channels for utilisation, the salts and effluent are left in the pool to be scraped and disposed of.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
And this is why I'm glad I live in the Mid Western United States on the Great Lakes. Freshwater shortage whats that? Now if only we can keep company's from dumping hazardous chemicals into the lakes, and make cities keep up there water treatment facilities....
but it is a viable option in India because the infrastructure is cheaper to install than several hundred massive electrically-powered or oil-powered pumps across vast tracts of desert and upwards through several thousand feet - and from your quote, it does produce even at desert-level humidity.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Good point, so how can California be in this situation?!
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What is he talking about here? Do all the lakes, rivers, etc., only account for 1% of the unfrozen freshwater in the world? A couple of paragraphs above Gleeson's statements: Yet Famiglietti notes that the study, which focuses on quantifying the rate of groundwater tapping versus recharging, underscores the lack of data we have on the amount of water currently in the world's aquifers. “The only way to answer the sustainability question is to answer how much water we actually have,” he says.
So we don't know how much water we have in the aquifers. Yet, Gleeson is happy to state that 99% of the unfrozen freshwater is groundwater? Also, when did water-tables go out of fashion? I thought it was the water table which was being replenished by rainwater. I realise that the article is only an overview of the analysis. Nevertheless, considering its alarmist tone, I'd have expected mention of improvements in desalination technology.
Quillem : An India-centric mishmash of things.
Global Warming to the rescue!
Melt those icebergs! Melt, melt, melt! You can do it!
And the rising flood will bring the water to the people! How handy!
You think we're dumb enough to turn water plants, then turn them into oil, so we can backfill wells for water?
That depends, will the required subsidies get someone in a marginal state reelected next election?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A small percentage compared to those that would migrate if nobody was stopping them.
Global warming => higher evaporation rate from the oceans => greater precipitation => more water entering the aquifers. Problem solved!
I jest, but it's half serious. Just because something is undesired overall does not mean it cannot have some desirable effects.
Unless that extraction happens just before the air moves over a large body of water, it will have no net effect. All you're doing is removing moisture before it can turn into natural rain elsewhere. e.g. If California started extracting water from the air, it would mean more fresh water for California. But the states to the East (downwind) would experience a proportional decrease in natural precipitation as a result.
... because LA is leeching up a large percentage of our water supply.
A few years back we got put under 'drought warning' because it turned out more profitable for the water company running Folsom Dam to sell our water down to LA than to supply it to the locals, and the local government allowed it. Anyone who thinks that regional demands are outstripped supply should look at the areas supplying water, and the areas actually recieving water and see if perhaps the water is flowing towards the money rather than the citizens who support it.
By any means necessary but preferably passive means such as involuntary sterilization through bacterial of viral vectors, facilitating conflict, restricting medical technology and promoting genocide.
We love Gaea and we will not be happy until humans who will not live right cease to exist.
It's really not as simple as it sounds at first glance. But if it becomes a major issue it could happen.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Stop growing grains for cattle. That would decrease the amount of grains needed by factor "alot" and therefore decrease the water needed.
Stop eating ridiculous amounts of meat. 80 grams is enough for what you need. You will not have a bad life if you do so. Also you will not grow a beard and become a hippy.
Privacy is terrorism.
Won't a desalination plant like this be too slow/need an enormous amount of land preferably close to the sea?
heh... just heard on the radio that someone's gone started moaning about fledging a viable biodiesel industry in the States, claiming that it'd exacerbate the "food crisis". Like every other "crisis" we face, the cause isn't the amount we have but how it is DISTRIBUTED.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
1. As far as I'm aware desalination plants use pumps to move seawater into the evaporation plants.
2. There's your chock for desalinisation. People want clean water but they don't want to know where it comes from. Or they're ignorant of the process to the point where they think it magically falls out of the sky! (wait, what?)
3. Post treatment for turning distilled water into drinking water on a commercial scale adds mineral salts and gases to the distillate. I don't know where you got the FUD about distilled water being deadly from; hospitals use distilled water all the time in intravenous drips which might also contain salts, glucose, and drugs. I use distilled water from a homebuilt plant in my greenhouse. I also keep and use personal water treatment equipment which purifies water using filters, ion exchange resins and chemicals. That said, *too much* water (of any flavour or lack thereof) at once can be toxic - and it's a lot easier to recover from dehydration than from hydrotoxicity.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
No, yes. The larger the better, for obvious reasons (in case they aren't, one is the potential to capture more solar energy overall, another is to produce more water). Oman is probably the world's largest greenhouse desalinisation producer. For those without that kind of patience, there's reverse osmosis technology (as used in Spain), nuclear heat exchange distillation (Russia), cogenerative plants (which use traditional methods to generate their own power and the waste water is purified for circulation), vacuum distillation, multi-stage flash distillation (Bahrain), and freezing.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
erm.. .what?
My water supply comes from the Severn basin. My local basin is the Trent which drains into the Humber. Before the installation of the municipal water system, there were no flood plains where I live. Now there are hardly any floods in the Severn basin (which used to flood regularly), and the Trent breaches its banks several times a year. I think I know something about water.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Deforestation and the killing of wild animals faster than they can reproduce is the reason why water doesn't replenish quickly enough. Killing animals deprives their predators from food and so on, this affects the whole ecosystem in which these animals live. Deforestation prevents water from remaining in the soil and so on.
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California has some of the best farm land in the world. The only question is how to get water to it. You know, it takes more than water to grow food, right?
The problem you're having is that you're trying to solve a problem that's too big for the free market. It's like going into space (which is why you have Satellites and Internet btw). It was just too expensive for private enterprise to do. Socialism was needed. We got it, and it worked.
BTW, before you trot out the USSR and/or China (like your kind always does), they we not ever socialist. Canada is socialist. France is socialist. The USSR & China were fascist dictatorships that happened to borrow 'ole Karl's books. Christ, for want of a good (government enforced) copyright law...
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it's just that the ones that aren't are a very, very vocal minority. Most of them are fabulously rich, which helps make them more vocal. It's easy to be a vocal minority when you own the media, and the media is only liberal on social issues, not economics
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There is no water shortage. The earth is awash in the stuff. It is an energy shortage that makes reverse osmosis unprofitable. We should build more nuclear power plants.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Aquifer depletion has been known for decades
The central valley of California is practically a desert. Not as bad as LA, but still... An important source of water for the central valley has long been a pipeline from the Columbia River. Without this water source, one of the world's major food sources becomes ineffective. You can thank environmentalists when a dry central valley results in massive death by starvation.
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China is building a number of new dams up in the himalyas. And they are capable of diverting large amounts of water from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, etc. These do not look good since China denied that they were building dams, but then when shown the evidence from sats, they claimed that they are for flood control. Yet, the designs shows that they have NOTHING to do with flood control, but only as a diverting dams.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Again, the relative humidity is higher in India than it is in the Sahara. In my part of Arizona, a muggy day is like 30 percent humidity, when we get 'evaporain' during our 'monsoon season', 2 or 3 weeks every 6 months when the rain actually evaporates before it hits the ground. Most of the time it's under 20. A standing joke is our infamous '12 inch rain', where you get 1 drop every 12 inches. Needless to say, you'll still get something from the condenser, just not as much as you would in a wetter climate, all for about the same energy expenditure. Question is, would it support irrigation as well as drinking water for humans and animals? And if so, how many per unit?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Thanks, thats all been quite interesting. I always thought variable power sources such as wind would be quite well suited, I guess they are but maybe more in a pumping capacity than the actual process?
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Nope.
Future job ad: Exciting job opportunity lubing the backfill cornholes for water drilling.
Our water supply comes from Lake Ontario (which gets it's water from the other 4 Great Lakes in addition to watershed that makes it into Lake Ontario. As a result, I water my lawn like a mother fucker - and it's green - GREEN I tells ya after a hot summer with little precipitation. But people are all into this "water conservation" thing where I live so I'm living on a block of brown lawns because all of the tree huggers and bunny fuckers brainwashed everyone into thinking that using too much water is a bad thing - and as such we're stuck with 1.6 gallon per flush toilets that clog every time I drop a deuce and shower heads that give us a mere trickle of what we should be getting every morning.
But whatever - more water for me. No one wants to live here in upstate NY because it's too cold and snowy in the winter... so they'd rather live in a dry parched desert suburb outside Vegas instead. Dummies.
Reverse osmosis might come out cheaper - look into it.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
yes, pumping is an integral part of pretty much all desalination methods at some stage or another, and for active processes (pretty much all but solar distillation) a HUMONGOUS amount of energy input is required. If that input can be made from renewable sources or at least partially met by them then the running costs can be reduced drastically.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
depends on a few factors: among them, the cost of building the plant, the energy input required for the process to work, the amount of water produced, and the unit cost (usually per tonne or cu.m) of the final product which largely depends on the other factors. There's also the problem of obtaining the technology which for some regions may be the subject of US sanctions.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
As our environmentalists tell us there is more available water in the world now than in the last several hundred years. We are supposedly melting it, and the sea coasts are being absorbed in higher coast lines.
The problem is we don't have enough fresh (non-salty or contaminated) water where we want it.
Drilling is great, but with aquifers that are not refreshed sufficiently rapidly (this is happening in developed and under-developed countries too), live starts sucking if we can't find enough water for their needs, let alone desires.
We can use equipment to pull water out of the air, but that takes lots of capital and investments that we want to make.
We can handle it like oil. Pipe or truck it where we want it, but that takes more capital investments and fresh water doesn't go for $80/barrel for a long term, the economics aren't worth it.
People have from the beginning of time moved to where they CAN find fresh water abundantly. And we have figured out how to do with less. We just can't do with none.
It is just an economic exercise, those with the money will win, those without will loose. Life isn't fare. Life goes on.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."