Scientists Say Our Water Cycle Has Started Breaking Down
38 points by interpol_p 8 months ago | 41 comments- karol 8 months agoWe need to get everyone rich very quickly, because rich people don't drink tap water but bottled spring water, so no-one will be affected.
- ndsipa_pomu 8 months agoGot to keep those microplastic levels topped up
- Zealotux 8 months agoJoke's on you; I drink water from glass bottles only.
- Zealotux 8 months ago
- tsukikage 8 months agoRich people famously have giant lawns behind their white picket fences, which need watering. The /really/ rich have entire golf courses.
- ndsipa_pomu 8 months ago
- card_zero 8 months agoSo it's "breaking down" and "malfunctioning" relative to the water needs of the humans living in the affected areas. So this is not in fact any meaningful step change in the system, unless you see providing comfortable amounts of fresh water to all humans living in those specific areas as its purpose.
- jmclnx 8 months agoThis was my take too. Globally to me, you cannot "waste water", you just can use more that your region can sustain.
Where I live, we have plenty of water and the amount will increase as the Earth warms, based upon current theories. But, there is a limit to how much water is treated and the local government refuse to invest in additional treatment. So we have water shortages here even though our lakes and rivers are filled and in some cases a bit overfilled.
Eventually people in the Southwest will have to move, along with people in the South. And people think migrations are bad now, wait a few decades.
- dash2 8 months agoI don't know what water's purpose is in God's eyes, but I think from humans' point of view, we should try and make sure all humans have comfortable amounts of fresh water, and if that will become impossible, that's a problem.
- card_zero 8 months agoUh-huh. I'm objecting to phrases that give the impression that something specific and terrifying is happening that might, for instance, kill all life, when what's really happened is that a quango released a report about the ongoing general decline.
- piva00 8 months agoKill all life is absurdly hard to happen until the Sun explodes, life has survived multiple asteroid impacts, massive volcanoes eruptions, a global-scale oxidation event, so on and so forth.
The discussion around climate change and breakdown of current climate cycles is always about what's survivable for our current environment and biosphere with humans in it...
- piva00 8 months ago
- card_zero 8 months ago
- noselasd 8 months agoYes, pretty much.
- jmclnx 8 months ago
- rtpg 8 months agoThere's some cruel irony in the planet getting hotter not just making it rain more and making rain happen on land.
I do wonder what the state of desalination is. I have read a bit about brine management out of curiosity , but I really have a hard time understanding what can be done about it. If someone figured out how to make concrete from brine or something could we be doing a lot more desalination?
- Sakos 8 months ago> That’s the conclusion of a new report published this week by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water—a group of leading scientists and economists formed in 2022 whose mission is to assess the state of Earth’s hydrological systems and how those systems are being managed. The results are not encouraging. The report finds that demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by more than 40 percent by the end of the decade, mostly due to stresses caused by climate change.
We're marching ourselves straight into disaster that will affect hundreds of millions of people. Are we ever going to wake up and do something about it as a species?
- ok_dad 8 months agoYea, we’ll use all the power useful for making clean water from the ocean for AI, and the shareholders will be so happy they can continue to extract value from those aquifers for a while longer :)
- ThrowAaaaway 8 months agoIt's possible to use waste heat to evaporate water, to make drinking water from salt water, but it's unpractical to build datacenter on a shore, or pump salt water uphil to a datacenter.
- aspenmayer 8 months agoSeems like Microsoft and Google are trying to make it work.
How Oceans are Being Used to Cool Massive Data Centres [2017]
https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-oceans-are-being-used-to...
Alternative Water Cooling Sources for Data Centers [2019]
https://www.ashrae.org/technical-resources/ashrae-journal/fe...
> While the temperature of surface ocean water can fluctuate seasonally, it can still be a valuable source of cooling. In hot regions such as the Middle East, surface seawater as high as 90°F (32°C) is used for condenser cooling with conventional systems. This is because even the higher temperature water is more efficient than air cooling and using potable water for evaporative cooling is not allowed due to water use restrictions.
Feasibility study and multi-objective optimization of seawater cooling systems for data centers: A case study of Caspian Sea [2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22131...
- ndsipa_pomu 8 months agoEvaporating water is not the best way to desalinate water as it's inevitably energy intensive (though waste heat makes that less of an issue). It seems unlikely that datacenters will produce enough waste heat to supply populations with drinking water.
- aspenmayer 8 months ago
- ThrowAaaaway 8 months ago
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- euroderf 8 months agoDunno. Which alternative creates more shareholder value ?
- muthuh 8 months agoDoesn't look like it :( too busy with our 'smart'phones.
- card_zero 8 months agoHave we ever done anything as a species?
- ndsipa_pomu 8 months agoIt seems like efforts to fix our problems are being deliberately sabotaged by wealthy corporations as they attempt to squeeze as much profit as they can before our inevitable civilisation collapse.
Personally, I think the best way to make progress would be to remove the billionaires first as they are working against the majority's interests.
- 0xEF 8 months agoIt's called Accelerationism. Those with the resources to weather the collapse feel it is their duty to bring it about so they can restart civilization "correctly" this time.
- OccamsMirror 8 months agoThat's not cool, man. I'm totally planning on becoming a billionaire! How else will I be able to afford the bunker of my dreams to protect my family from the incoming calamity?
- jebebeebehhe 8 months agoCommunism. (I say as a non-pejorative) I wonder if there is a way to make that work.
Or decent socialism. Co-ops > Corps.
- ndsipa_pomu 8 months agoI think there has to be some controls put on Capitalism as currently, all the incentives are for corporations/businesses to exploit natural resources as fast as possible with hardly any incentives to protect habitats (including ours).
- ndsipa_pomu 8 months ago
- 0xEF 8 months ago
- EnigmaFlare 8 months ago[dead]
- ok_dad 8 months ago
- gmuslera 8 months agoNot just this water cycle will be disrupted, most of the other “stable” cycles on which the global ecosystem and the human civilization are based on will get disrupted too. Pushing the system off balance will make things harder to survive with, with our population numbers or with much less than that.
And those disruptions also cause increasing effects, more humidity in the air also accelerates global warming, water vapor is also another greenhouse gas, a pretty powerful one.
- Grandeculio 8 months agoMaybe next the air will get tired of circulating and we’ll just have to take turns breathing.
- floppiplopp 8 months ago"Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!" Immortan Joe, tech visionary and innovator
- demarq 8 months agoSuddenly Mad Max doesn’t look like sci fi anymore.
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- EGreg 8 months agoElon Musk is worried about “population collapse” in countries
Perhaps he’s underestimating the amount of resources needed per person and the garbage each person produces
Our planet had under a billion people for every century except the 20th and 21st, right?
What was so bad about that? The idea that less human scientists, workers means less innovation, productivity is not necessarily true now in the age of automation and AI.
The way I see it, people having less children across the planet may be the best way to rebalance this phenomenon.
One third of arable land is desertified. Insect and other species are plummeting. The world is being converted to monocultures and farms. And we are here talking about having more babies for the sustainability of .. social security schemes?
- Boundomma 8 months ago> What was so bad about that?
They invented the ponzi scheme of pensions. There needs to be an army of younglins slaves to prop up the system. No generation will willingly accept no pension.
Plus, last time I checked the vast majority of those billions is china, india and africa. The native west is already in decline and keeps importing third worlders to keep said scheme barely going.
- prolly97 8 months agoUhu.. And how do we decide which people we don't want to exist? Is it last in first out? - "we were here first"?
As one of the 8 billion on this earth, I'm rather happy being alive. And would love to give that gift to someone else. As many as possible, in fact. You're proposing a world where I should be happy not to have my siblings in my life. Which is absolutely insane. Your view only makes sense from the POV of those surviving or being the lucky chosen ones. I'd rather have my siblings + have to figure out how to fix issues with water supply etc. along the way, than not have my siblings and not have meaningful 'problems' to work on.
We've solved harder problems. Throwing 7 billion people under the bus, because a problem seems a little hard, seems idiotic.
- eesmith 8 months ago> As many as possible, in fact.
How many? 20 billion? 50 billion? 1 trillion? That Star Trek: ToS episode "The Mark of Gideon" where the planet is so overpopulated that privacy does not exist and it's a rare privilege to be alone?
> I should be happy not to have my siblings in my life
How unhappy should I be that my parents decided to not have more kids, when I could have had more siblings? Should I criticize their decision to prioritize parental attention and the family's economic well-being over me being one of 12 kids like my grandfather?
The US state where I was born and raised has 3x the population now as compared to when I was born. Wild, isolated places I enjoyed have been replaced by row upon row of houses. Roads that were empty and fast are now white-knuckled congestion.
I would love to give that gift of wilderness to someone else. You are proposing a world where everything is dedicated towards human habitation. Your view only makes sense from the POV of someone who doesn't care about natural places, or being the lucky chosen one who can afford their own reserve.
> We've solved harder problems.
You are mistaken. We've delayed harder problems. As Norman Borlaug ("father of the Green Revolution") said in his Nobel Prize speech in 1970: "The green revolution has won a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise, the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only"
He was an optimist. "Since man is potentially a rational being, however, I am confident that within the next two decades he will recognize the self-destructive course he steers along the road of irresponsible population growth and will adjust the growth rate to levels which will permit a decent standard of living for all mankind."
- card_zero 8 months agoBalls, they're proposing a world where somebody else, who never had siblings, should be happy not to have siblings. It's nothing to do with people who are already alive or what they're accustomed to.
I reserve judgement on whether this natural phasing out of 7 billion people (through natural deaths) is a good idea or not. Ideally, we'd cure death, which makes the plan unethical.
- rrrrrertt 8 months agoLOL, there's so many people who hate being alive, you don't know if your kids will be happy or not. You are betting with an innocent's life, all for your self-satisfaction.
- EGreg 8 months agoWho says we decide it?
They voluntarily live their lives and have less children. They make the decision.
Contraception is much better than it was before. Women’s education is correlated heavily with having less children.
Elon Musk and people that think like him are the ones bemoaning it and trying to encourage them to have more children. But scratch below the surface — the reasons these “pronatalists” have stated are quite interesting.
https://fortune.com/2024/10/22/elon-musk-people-should-have-...
If you want to go the other way, consider Pavel Durov’s approach of sperm banks and fathering over 100 children he won’t have to take care of. A great way to propagate your DNA of course!
But consider the Categorical Imperative … what would happen if everyone did it?
- card_zero 8 months agoThe growth rate is declining anyway, might level off at ten billion. I don't think people are having many more children than is wise, really.
- card_zero 8 months ago
- eesmith 8 months ago
- rrrrrertt 8 months agoNot to mention how nasty it is to create new sentient beings in a shitty world that is going to ruin just to satisfy our selfish needs... I would be ashamed to meet their eyes, let alone tell them I love them.
- Boundomma 8 months ago
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