Slashdot Mirror
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).
Let's pray for a drought in California.
Irresponsible disclosure is responsible
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!
You missed what they actually said, which was "more droughts", not a worldwide 100 year drought.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
It's called synecdoche. Calling businessmen "suits" and supporters "partisans" is referring to a whole by using a part. By the same token we refer to carbon dioxide as "carbon" and NO3- as "nitrogen".
In context is is perfectly clear to someone who actually understands what the whole is. To those who do not understand what the whole is calling the whole by its proper name is unlikely to be enlightening.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If we were talking about pure rainwater falling directly into bodies of water, it would. But we're talking about runoff. After that initially pure water runs over the land it's not so pure by the time it reaches a natural water body.
Take an empty cup and fill it from a city gutter during a heavy rain. Now drink it. Not an attractive proposition, is it?
In the case of eutrophication, we're worried about fertilizers applied to crops and lawns. This is in the form of various highly soluble nitrogen and phosphorous salts which are highly soluble and readily washed away. People use these highly soluble compounds because they stimulate rapid plant growth. These do the same thing for microorganisms when they reach a marine or fresh water body.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For those who are merely confused and ignorant, yet not fully deprived of intellectual honesty or interest in learning, here are two excerpts from Wikipedia that may help:
“Assuming high growth in GHG emissions (IPCC scenario RCP8.5), presently dry regions may be affected by an increase in the risk of drought and reductions in soil moisture. Over most of the mid-latitude land masses and wet tropical regions, extreme precipitation events will very likely become more intense and frequent.” (in “Effects of global warming”).
“The warmer atmospheric temperatures observed over the past decades are expected to lead to a more vigorous hydrological cycle, including more extreme rainfall events. Erosion and soil degradation is more likely to occur.” (in “Climate change and agriculture”).
Nitrogen is the name used in describing the macro-nutrients in fertilizer. While you generally see something like ammonium nitrate used as the source of available nitrogen you also have stuff like urea which, while I'm not a chemist, I do not believe is actually a nitrate.
The end result, however, is that nitrogen is available to the plant which is the ultimate goal. Hence referring to anything in the N of NPK as nitrogen.
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.
Consider the word "Jack"; it can refer to a playing card, it can be a person's name, it can be an electrical socket, it can be a lifting machine, it can be a flag, or it can be a variety of cheese. On the face of it this should make the word confusing. But it's not.
Words are not like variables in a programming language. Just as human grammar is context-sensitive, so are the meanings of words. So people in-the-know understand that a "carbon tax" isn't levied on, say, a diamond.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Whilst they have focused on the nitrates it tends not to be the biggest problem. Increased rainfall also changes movement of moisture through the soil, taking away many soluble elements, increasing porosity of soil, so then larger particles are taken away and then major soil movements, both sink holes and landslips. Also means much more organic material to rot in rivers, sucking up oxygen and releasing methane, a far worse greenhouse gas. There is a real need to slow down the movement of moisture through water catchments, pulling agriculture, industry and housing off water fronts to get more trees and plants to grow on river banks and perhaps at least 100m inland from river banks and ever further, dependent upon the catchment. In Rural areas, every fence line should have a line of trees, preferably at least three rows, associated with it to catch and hold run off. Those trees can serve commercial purposes if done properly, rather than empty headed farmers whining about losing arable land (OK if it washes down river and damages their farm but no one can tell them to plant trees). What will be done, nuthin', it's the nature of US society now.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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
Eutrophication actually being reported is being caused by fertilizer runoff, not additional rain. Early predictions of climate change forecast drought everywhere. Now we're worrying about excess rain. Are liberals incapable of reporting good news?
Where do you get the "drought everywhere"? Droughts, yes, but not everywhere. Droughts will be an increasing problem in areas that already suffer from them. Other areas are likely to see more clouds and more rain.
Just stick to the truth (avoiding straw men) and you'll understand that it really isn't a liberal/conservative issue, it's reality.
Lemon curry???
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.
Bullshit. Look up the etymology of "partisan". Also this is supposedly science. If someone uses names of elements for chemical compounds in a scientific context, I must assume they don't know what they're talking about.
Herein lies the rub... This context is not scientific but political: "Carbon tax" is not science but politics, and the "Carbon" in question is carbon dioxide, not coal or diamonds. "Nitrogen" is similarly used instead of "nitrates" in this speculation about pollution and changes in water quality.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
We call them "Carbon Monoxide" and "Nitrogen Dioxide". If we are in a context where the only carbon compound we could possibly be interested in is "Carbon Monoxide", then among people who share that context and work closely together it is highly likely those will be abbreviated to "Carbon" and "Nitrogen", and in context it will be perfectly clear although obscure to outsiders.
This is a natural process called "polysemy" and it is part of how non-mutually understandable human languages eventually arise. Natural and inevitable as it is, it flies in the face how "good" students are taught to think about using words, which is to use them "correctly". There's a lot to be said for that, but ultimately the idea of "correct" is built on a foundation of sand.
But that hasn't stopped people from trying to make language more precise, but unfortunately all of those efforts have failed. You might be interested in John Wilkins Philosophical Language, which figures in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle novels. Here's an interesting tidbit: the one useful product that has come out of those failed efforts is the thesaurus. Roget's Thesaurus started out as an attempt to develop a concept index (technically speaking, an ontology) for conducting semantically precise discussions of "philosophical" (then including scientific) matters.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Actually, it's a pretty convenient theory.
If global warming is a thing, either it will get wetter or it will get drier.
If it gets drier, of course drought, sky falling, etc as per the news in California for the last couple of years.
If it gets wetter, as this article asserts, it will be terrible for all sorts of reasons.
It's a perfect theory: no matter what happens, it can be interpreted to be bad, and it's humans' fault.
It used to be that the weather just changed, and we didn't try to blame anyone for it.
-Styopa
"Carbon" and "Nitrogen". If it is unclear in context, "atomic carbon" and "atomic nitrogen", or (if appropriate) "molecular nitrogen".
If this seems like a PITA, think of language as something like a compression algorithm. You want to represent the commonest cases in the fewest bits. This might make uncommon cases require more bits to represent. In other words people balance the convenience of omitting "dioxide" frequently with inconvenience of adding "atomic" occasionally.
This is how people *actually use language. Attempts to make their semantics less context-dependent have consistently failed in the face of convenience.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.