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Heavier Rainfall Will Increase Water Pollution In the Future (nationalgeographic.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from National Geographic: If climate change continues to progress, increased precipitation could mean detrimental outcomes for water quality in the United States, a major new study warns. An intensifying water cycle can substantially overload waterways with excess nitrogen runoff -- which could near 20 percent by 2100 -- and increase the likelihood of events that severely impair water quality, according to a new study published by Science. When rainfall washes nitrogen and phosphorus from human activities like agriculture and fossil fuel combustion into rivers and lakes, those waterways are overloaded with nutrients, and a phenomenon called "eutrophication" occurs. This can be dangerous for both people and animals. Toxic algal blooms can develop, as well as harmful low-oxygen dead zones known as hypoxia, which can cause negative impacts on human health, aquatic ecosystems, and the economy. In the new study, researchers predict how climate change might increase eutrophication and threats to water resources by using projections from 21 different climate models, each of which was run for three climate scenarios and two different time periods (near future, 2031-2060, and far-future, 2071-2100).
Phosphates have already been banned in dishwasher detergents since 2010 (that's why your glasses have been getting so cloudy and scale is building up), and phosphates aren't in hand soap and shampoo. And high phosphate fertilizer is already being banned in the US. So there isn't additional phosphates going into the water system beyond today's rates.
So basically, global warming is no longer causing droughts, but now 20% more rain. Again, it all points to conditions for increased vegetative growth, which means higher food stocks and more CO2 processing. Sounds great to me!
Exactly this. The real problem is soluable nitrogen fertilizer used on lawns and crops. The lake near my house 70 years ago had good water clarity and supplied ice to the city, it was cut up and delivered to iceboxes. Now it's a green sludge in the summer and it's even pretty bad in the winter time (from all the dead algae). The only real difference is all the fertilizer used upstream. It's even worse in places like Florida where massive blooms from farming choke wildlife out as it washes out to sea.
That's 80+ years from now, in other words we have time.
I hear that the sea levels are rising.... at about a foot per century. We can adjust to that without getting all in a panic.
I've been told that the corn belt is moving north. Unless this happens in the span of a single growing season then I find it hard to get worked up about this. Farmers already rotate crops for reasons of keeping soil in good shape. If over a few decades the rotation of crops needs adjusting then they'll figure it out.
Rain this, droughts that, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, blah, blah blah. We got this figured out.
We've all been hearing this panic for decades now. All we are doing is getting the next generation stressed out over nothing. They are getting bombarded with climate change disasters in movies, cartoons, in the news, and on and on. Kids can't get away from this but when they grow up and have to deal with this on their own they will realize like I did that this is a big nothing.
A quick read of the comments on this article so far tells me that I'm not alone in how I feel on this. The climate change alarmists have been pushing the panic button so often for so long, with nothing to really show for it, that no one pays attention any more.
Here's the problem now. If this climate change that is coming is in fact a real problem then we're all screwed anyway because no one listens any more. Because the climate change alarmists would not police themselves and point out bad science when it came up no one can tell what is true any more.
Again, 80 years, we have time.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Carbon monoxide is rare
Not in regions of poor combustion.
NO2 is called "smog."
Clean your glasses. I wrote NO2-, which is definitely not smog.
Any other ESL questions I can help you with?
Any other chemistry (and reading comprehension) questions I can help you with?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I thought "climate change" was supposed to cause worldwide droughts? If you can imagine just any fear you want as being the result of "climate change", then the entire concept becomes meaningless.
Of course, it's meaningless to begin with. "Change" is what the climate DOES, always has, always will. The entire Gore-ful panic is designed to separate the people from their money and to allow the politicians to fun things forever.
And how is it that you know that climate has changed in the past. Do you really believe the scientists who told you this? They are the same scientists who you don't believe when they tell you that AGW is a problem. Are you just going to cherry pick based on what you want to believe?
I thought "climate change" was supposed to cause worldwide droughts? If you can imagine just any fear you want as being the result of "climate change", then the entire concept becomes meaningless.
The term "climate change" is a kind of short-hand, which refers to the changes that are caused by human activities on top of natural climate variation. The one thing that more than anything else defines man-made climate change is the increased energy retention in the atmosphere, that we can measure as an increase in the average temperature across the whole planet and smoothed out over a relatively long period of time, which is above what we would have expected to find from natural causes. But locally, on a day to day basis, there will be big variations in temperature, and secondarily in air pressure, wind speed, humidity, precipitation etc - the tendency is to make these variations stronger, so droughts may become worse, rainfall may become heavier, storms more violent, heatwaves hotter and more frequent, and yes, you will in places see much more snow and more severe cold snaps.
There is an experiment that I think most will have seen in school at some point, which explains a lot about this: You take a large glass tank with water, place a Bunsen burner under it, and drop a crystal of some water soluble colour over the flame; what you see is the colour rising up, then curling back down - ie turbulence. If you measure the temperature in different places, you will probably get high readings in the column over the flame, but low readings in an area around the flame, where colder water is being sucked in - and high readings near the top edges as well; this also happens to our atmosphere: the flame is hot near equator, the air rises and blows up to the polar regions, where it is sucked down, because cold air is suck in near the ground at the equator. One of the major differences is that the atmosphere is a very thin layer: 10 miles deep, spread oout over a circumference of 25000 miles, which would correspond to the glass tank in your school laboratory being 10 cm high and 250 m wide, which means that any turbulence becomes much more localised, which translates into the much more chaotic system that is our weather.
Ah cynicism, the metaphysical mechanism that can be used to mask ignorance for every possible outcome.