India is drying up
tribuneindia.com
tribuneindia.com
I feel sad when Indians wank about military technology and "national security" issues due to Pakistan and China. The single greatest national security threat for India is Indians' abject incompetence in governing themselves. I fear that we will pay a very heavy price for this.
All the while, even the DNC refuses to hold a climate change debate to figure out how candidates are approaching the biggest existential threat we face now.
Unfortunately humanity isn't good at facing long term issues that require serious sacrifice and collective action.
On the contrary, long term issues are not likely to be a huge problem, if you factor investment, innovation and technical improvements. It's not like the world is static and nothing is going to happen in the coming 50 years.
Let me remind you at that in the early 20th century everyone was seriously worried that humanity might starve to death once we reach 1 billion people. And we are now more than 7, and no starvation is in sight. That was a long term problem that basically disappeared completely.
It's not obvious the problem is solved, it may only be delayed.
I presume, though, that you're opposed to e.g. a heavy carbon tax. You can use that same line to sweep the downsides of it under the rug--after all, a carbon tax will drive innovation toward green tech.
It's a kind of technological nihilism that says that technology will fix everything. In the real world, we have to consider concrete costs and benefits.
In the long term, we are far poorer if we don't address climate change.
* hold that technology will fix everything, but
* oppose a carbon tax, which would give a market incentive to technology aimed at fixing this
It's not even consistent with market principles. We have the income tax, a massive distortion in the economy. We could replace much of this with a carbon tax.
To the extent that carbon use is absolutely necessary (read: inelastic), the tax will be passed on transparently. It'd be theoretically efficient in the same sense a land tax is efficient.
To the extent that carbon use isn't necessary (read: elastic), it'd drive people to substitute it for something else.
Even efficiency of implementation is trivial compared to income tax. The government knows where companies are extracting fossil fuels, and it knows which companies are extracting fossil fuels, and fossil fuel extraction requires large amounts of hard-to-move capital.
Policy-wise it's as pure an economic win as we can imagine in this world of ours, as we'd be moving away from distortionary income taxation.
Threats are rarely the reasons we attack people. Politics and resources are more likely.
Asking with India is fighting Paskistan is like a drunk asking a friend why smoking those bad, bad cigarets.
It would be revealing, but I would fear for the safety of the author of such an article.
Why isn't the US equally interested in spreading freedom and democracy in every single country on this map? https://planetrulers.com/current-dictators/
If you see comments that should be moderated but weren't, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing all the comments here. You can let us know about it by flagging it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases.
Whether or not M1A2s are equal or inferior to a tricked-out T-90 is a long, long debate.
There is also China, but I personally don't think much of their new tanks.
That's an interesting way to put it! From my basic reading I'd consider the M1A2 to have an edge over the T-90MS. If you look at the bigger picture (logistics and total cost of a war), then the T-90MS might have an edge.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_doctrine_of_Pakistan
Why don't you learn from your Northerly neighbors (China) on how to run government? One thing I find in my travels to India, is how much abject contempt you guys have towards the Chinese way of doing things. Unbelievable - considering the cultures are very similar (Buddhist thought has historical played a major roles in both cultures), similar population sizes, etc..
No, let's follow a political system that has had no organic roots/development in the country and pretend all are literate folks who are capable of holding a debate on what policies are good for their country, while the politicians take out everyone to the cleaners.
India is far more multicultural (multiple religions, multiple ethnicities, multiple languages) than China.
Easy rule of thumb for the last 2 millennia of history: China has spent most of its time unified, while India hasn't.
There were very few genocidal wars or wars of total annihilation. This strangely was a common problem not only in China but in Europe where loosing a war would mean total annihilation. This only came to an end in India with the Islamic invasion - whose strategy like in Persia or Mesopotamia consisted of raid, loot, murder and flee. When they found themselves more permanent rule it was mostly about conversion, taking slaves, destruction/defacement or appropriation(repurposing) of non-islamic buildings.
It is like saying the Soviet was united and the EU was never. The Soviet was held together by force, the EU is held together by consent.
Perhaps India could learn a few lessons from China, but the role model approach wouldn’t work.
Ah yes humans really do thrive under totalitarian dictatorships
However, I do feel that we can learn a lot from Chinese people and culture.
> Buddhist thought has historical played a major roles in both cultures
Buddhism was born in India, but never spread across country in any considerable amount, other countries took up on it. The place where Buddha was born and enlightened is in modern day Bihar, you rarely find any Buddhist there.
India is very diverse, we have 22 official languages (~1000 unofficial), and for many languages writing scripts change, within 100 to 200km dialects and languages keep changing. Food keeps changing, climate keeps changing. People's behaviour keep changing. Dressing style, music, dance,... keeps changing. Nothing stays the same.
Government have recently released a educational draft, indicating children should be tri-lingual (native language, Hindi, English) and many people straight out opposed it, indicating they don't accept Hindi, as in near future there language may go out of existence.
The main problem is we cannot communicate properly, with each other from other places.
India is in no way similar to China, except for huge population numbers.
Despite being colonized for ~800 years(600 years under Muslim rulers, 200 years under British), culture haven't changed, think how stubborn people are.
We are a mess in it's own way, but we somehow survive and flourish slowly.
A good modern day example would be, Indian election.
Indian media and left tried there best to spread anti-modi movement (~5 years), no media channel have expected modi to win majority in 2019, but it came to be quite opposite.
Even now, all media channels are doing some analysis, how did this happen.
There is an old saying ( loosely translated), If you are having a discussion with 5 chinese and 5 Indians about a problem. All Chinese come up with one solution, Indians come up with atleast 6 different ideas.
Thank you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_campaign_of_Ahmad_Shah_...
We can build-up national security and enhance focus on internal problems at the same time.
For example, there have been talks of cooperation with Israel on the water-shortage issue:
https://www.timesnownews.com/india/article/israel-comes-forw...
Maintaing the equilibrium is obviously good for peace. But there are reports of India and Pakistan beefing up nukes.
1. https://wap.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/fewer-...
True. But in a nuclear conflict there are no winners.
It seems that you just wanted to make a point.
For the municipal water issue what has the state government/city done over the years?
As Paul Graham put it in another context:
"Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that."
People aren't used to thinking of civilization in these terms. We make retirement plans etc divorced from the projections of change to come. If we rationally considered priorities, you'd see much more popular support for actions designed to address the problem, such as increasing carbon taxes, cutting other taxes, and making an international framework to get other countries to do the same.
There's a scene in 12 Monkeys where the protagonist is in a mental hospital in the past, before a virus takes out the civilization. The psychologist asks if he came back to "help" them. The protagonist looks confused and says "how can I help you? You're all dead".
We have such a flurry of concern and activity aimed at the present. I can't help but have a similar feeling when I observe people making plans and not accounting for the predicted future, even if they claim to "believe" in climate change.
If people truly believed in it, you'd see much different political priorities. Right now effective action tends to be unpopular. Income taxes (taxing a good thing) have much more political support than carbon taxes (taxing a bad thing). I find the situation baffling.
More from Paul Graham's article:
"There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes."
We assume it will be easy to solve problems in the future, with future technology. Or that we will have surplus resources in the future, when worsening conditions cut crop yields, cut water, increase civil strife, and when the global population is larger and total emissions are higher.
You're saying:
1. I don't like vc's, because a startup founder said "move fast and break things"
2. Paul Graham didn't fund that founder, but he was a vc
3. Ergo, every idea paul graham has is bad
4. Ergo, this specific essay is bad
5. So, anything that mentions this essay's ideas is wrong
6. Your post is wrong
Do you disagree with the concept of default dead? Are you arguing that it's impossible to be in such a state as a civilization? If you have an actual critique I'd be interested to hear it.
A common critique I've also heard in religious contexts. I think both Jordan Peterson and Nassim Taleb have made comments on it. What people "believe" and what they believe can be very different. Belief is hard.
Just because you haven't wrapped your head around complexity or how good outcomes are produced, doesn't mean only bad things can happen.
The internet does a great job of keeping people feed with problems way above their pay grade for no good reason.
If Paul Graham had taken a course in Education or Pedagogy, his article would have an elaborate note on who should really be reading them. The conclusions you reach are very different once you have experience and done the prereqs.
It's like dropping off your second grader, in a tenth grade classroom for a month. What conclusions about the world is the second grader going to draw at the end of it?
Ideally, we'd shift incentives so that companies have more of an economic reward to producing the good things. Currently we actually subsidize fossil fuels in many countries.
If you have a critique that isn't ad hominem I'd be interested to hear it.
India's chief problem is overpopulation. There are simply too many people to provide water to. The country needs an urgent population program encouraging poorer families to have one or zero children. The same things are working in Bangladesh.
The only issues are in engineering and government to ensure citizens are actually provided what they need, which in this case is limited by decades of corruption and poor decision making. India is more than capable of handling the issue, it just needs better leadership to cast off some of the anchors it has been carrying for far too long.
The overcrowded cesspits that we whimsically call 'cities' in India are founts for all kinds of shit like the water table drying up, widespread water-borne and air-pollution diseases, anti-microbial resistance, shitty healthcare in overworked hospitals in general etc. These things are ALL made orders of magnitude worse to deal with just because our population is through the roof.
Not to mention the "smaller" quality of life factors. Enjoyable walk in nature? Hah! It's impossible to walk for even two minutes in Delhi and not see another person. Never-do-wells loiter the streets all day. No possibility of orderly queuing, just this huge, irritating, wearisome crowd wherever you look and wherever you turn. The metro. The park. The roads. The neighbourhood. Even the fucking hill stations that you seek to escape to. No solitude.
In an ideal world, these thing may manageable while still fostering a large population. But an ideal world this isn't.
> "...more than enough space and resources for everyone"
That's going to be a hell-to-the-no from me dawg. I hate the fact that we fucking breed like Rabbits.
The earth is a gigantic place. Every single human would fit into a cubic mile. The amount of freshwater that every single living creature drinks is only a sphere of a few miles in diameter, which itself is less than 1% of the freshwater on the planet.
The capabilities are vast, we are not limited by numbers but only by the weaker parts of human nature.
Sure, wave a wand, and POOF! No more greenhouse gases. Wave a wand, and POOF! No more single-use plastics. Wave a wand, and POOF! No more dead bodies in the Ganga.
That's not the world we inhabit. The world we inhabit moves at a glacial pace, and I sincerely doubt India moves at ALL.
The fact that humans can all fit into a small cube says nothing. Or at least, says far less than the fact that in India, the cities are in squalor and resemble garbage dumps much more than they resemble thriving metropolises. And that's NOT hyperbole.
What, exactly, has improved in our cities that leads you to your optimism? The fact that Delhi is the least polluted city in the world? Oh, wait. Or does your heart glow with joy while taking long walks along the banks of the Ganga, breathing in the smells of nature?
Hypothetically, anything can be done. In reality, the only part of your argument that matters is the rather poignant last statement. Optimism is for other people. A large order of deep-fried cynicism for me please.
I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make but optimism has nothing to do with the discussion.
I understand the pessimism. I think that course of action can be justified. I am still saving for retirement but I can't really justify it beyond some very early markers that we are going to decarbonize and save what we can.
That's not a call for doing nothing, anything that improves the specific tech that can solve the problem is worth doing, but anything that detracts from it should be avoided.
So, carbon tax is great. Subsidizing renewables is iffy (has to be done right). Any proposition that slow things down is actively harmful. Saving energy is neutral.
It might not work, but we should at least try.
I think PG's concept is really about defining horizons, risks, and resources, and making sure the math adds up. That concept makes sense to me in a startup, but I find it hard to fit something as big as human civilization into that particular framework.
Human activity is essentially extractive, and even if we solve global warming, I think we're ticking the clock on how long Earth can support this kind of society.
In this context, here's an interesting map on what the world will look like 4 degrees warmer: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look-l... - apparently, much of the Indian subcontinent will be uninhabitable...
And don't forget, that a very valid answer is "food chain collapses, causing mass starvation and death".
The rise of ISIS was driven by crop failure due to climate change. The temperature in India reached 123 degrees already this year.
Attributing ISIS to climate change is about the same as blaming social media for ISIS; arguably social media’s existence actually helped ISIS propagate more than any causes attributed to climate change. ISIS and it’s origins are exceptionally complicated as are most conflicts in that region. To trivialize it by claiming it was because of climate change is to reveal a profound misunderstanding of the history of that region.
We can discuss climate change and it’s causes and effects, but it weakens credibility when almost everything gets blamed on it. It’s getting to the point where when one used to say this bad thing happened because “it’s God’s will,” but now people say, “climate change.” It’s taking on religion-levels of influence to where actual causation gets ignored in favor of attributing everything to CO2. Every storm, every war, every bad thing that happens has a least some people trying to use those events to justify their belief systems. Sometimes weather is just weather, war is just war. If we ended all CO2 emissions tomorrow, the Middle East would still be a cauldron, wars would still happen, crops would still fail from time to time, hurricanes would still destroy things, tornados would still happen. Climate is an important issue, but let’s not turn it into a religion.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/06/world/climate-change-terroris...
> As described here, water and climatic conditions have played a direct role in the deterioration of Syria’s economic conditions. There is a long history of conflicts over water in these regions because of the natural water scarcity, the early development of irrigated agriculture, and complex religious and ethnic diversity. In recent years, there has been an increase in incidences of water-related violence around the world at the subnational level attributable to the role that water plays in development disputes and economic activities.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-0005...
This line of argument is so ridiculous that one is tempted to speculate you're trolling us to make real warming enthusiasts look worse...
If we managed to invent a carbon removal technique scalable and cheap enough to deploy on a massive scale, we'd still be able to prevent the worst.
The problem is, currently there is no money in it, so the efforts are not the size they should be. We'd need a war economy on all fronts here.
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/
There is no chance your individual actions will have any impact. Our only hope is drastic, large scale policy changes at the national and international level.
Big factors like industrial pollution, transport, long distance shipment are 1) too heavy to move (you need political power, and political power is also heavy to move) 2) but they do depend on people spending their money for their product.
I dream of a smooth swap (https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Flh4.googleu...) where people allocate more to simple and local life. Forcing the economy to curb accordingly.
I have the feeling that it will make (and it does already) people a lot happier[0], and since having to do locally you can't rely on economies of scale so people will have things to do instead. It won't be fancy or pretty but plausibly more meaningful to work with and for your surroundings, even if it means no more white collar position in a shiny tower.
There are online places to discuss, reddit has many (r/collapse, r/guerrillagardening), some people also make discord groups. You might take a peek.
What the world will look like 4°C warmer
For the 5% of humanity that survived World Wars 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Maybe there'll be world government by then...
I really need convincing that a world government wouldn't be extremely inefficient. I believe this would be the most disappointing utopia ever tried with a guarantee for regular civil wars.
I get that unity is required for dealing with global life threatening disasters waiting to happen, but it would just suck so badly if you think closer about it.
Just my take to add to the pessimism.
If you look at the world happiness report/index, the top 50 countries are all under 100 million (exceptions: US, Mexico) and not especially large landmass (exceptions: US, Australia).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
Growing up watching Star Trek I always thought the idea of some benevolent global government running in a post scarcity future was the goal we should all be shooting for but in retrospect it looks about as flawed as traditional communist command economies.
https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/articles/news-and...
But nevertheless I think that distributed and subsidiary governance is at least less less efficient.
That said, I would instantly exchange my government for the united federation of planets.
However as I don’t know too much, why would 4 C increase result in a lot of South Asia being uninhabitable and making most of America into hostile land. The other link said most of it would be desert land. And that Siberia and north west Antarctica would be green inhabitable. Wouldn’t part’s of Siberia and any part of Antarctica still be crazy cold and awful places to be?
I guess I’m a “dummy” because I also don’t get how global weather increase will mess and change things so much outside of what I acknowledged in my first paragraph. Though again I’m all for fixing up our behavior wrt environment and controlling climate change.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/02/climate-...
My guess is that "uninhabitable" in this context refers to specific critical periods that are deadly short of water or deadly hot which last long enough to make building/maintaining cities in those places a losing (i.e. prohibitively expensive) proposition
That’s not what’s happening here exactly but perhaps some people thought I wasn’t being genuine.
Thanks! Yes that’s a big difference if it’s average and some seasons might not change much. That would be a big difference.
Uninhabitable explanation makes sense too. Thanks.
Nah, the rest of the world is fine with using SI units and understanding them. No need to dilute it down by using different systems.
So if you want to impress large numbers upon the public, maybe Joules or Watts of excess energy would be good.
Poking around a random Quora post it looks like the equivalent for 1*C of warming would be on the order of a billion TeraJoules.
Guardian reported the ocean warming since 1871 study as "...equivalent of one atomic bomb explosion per second for the past 150 years" (1.5x the power of Hiroshima), which seemed a bit hyperbolic. Except the same article then asked the author of the study[1]:
“I try not to make this type of calculation, simply because I find it worrisome,” said Prof Laure Zanna, at the University of Oxford, who led the new research. “We usually try to compare the heating to [human] energy use, to make it less scary.”
At which point I think Guardian might have been on to something in their choice of visualisation...
Edit - here, for people who can't do their own homework: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/travel-through...
And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
It's like asking for a source to prove the sky is blue or that the earth is round...
This community claims to be one of educated professionals, yet somehow there's comments questioning things that are literally common knowledge and if somehow they don't know, can't spend 2 seconds to google it? Instead write "Source?". It's intellectually lazy as hell.
Yes. But then we invented science and "common knowledge" was proven ignorant time and time again.
>It's like asking for a source to prove the sky is blue or that the earth is round...
Hardly. I can't look out my window and see what the temperature was thousands of years ago.
>This community claims to be one of educated professionals
You're claiming that, not 'the community.'
What is intellectually lazy is not providing information that verifies your claims, and instead preferring to debate the social circumstances of an internet discussion. You're not obligated to provide a source. You don't have to do it. But don't think you're somehow more intellectually honest or hardworking because you refuse to.
If 2 seconds of googling solves this problem, then you should have probably just done that rather than arguing about whether you should need to.
As an aside, the reason we know that CO2 affects earth's temperature is the same reason we know what kind of vegetation existed during that same time period. Because of observations in the fossil record.
Sure the earth was warmer in the past, it was also colder, it was also a molten hellscape. Trying to relate a grade schooler's understanding of geologic time to specific climate models seems to be far more intellectually lazy than asking for a source so people can put your very vague claims into context.
[0]https://curiosity.com/topics/pluto-and-neptune-swap-places-e... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction
Climate science is based on past CO2 levels and uses the fossil record of foliage to estimate temperatures. Not even the most dire predictions claim the earth will be mostly desert in 100 years. There will be flooding and some desertification, but many regions will also become greener.
Even NASA has observed that the earth is greener today than 40 years ago.
Anyhow, we know from the geologic record of fossils that the world, at it's hottest, had vegetation in most regions. It wasn't 80% desert like the OP I responded to.
Thanks for link. The topic interests me and I’d like to know more.
Yes, because at that point it was a map of pangea.
The point is that the map posted by OP is junk and not based on any science, just alarmist rhetoric.
So, yeah, Eocene was super warm, but the flora and fauna was well adapted to survive in those conditions.
Also, if you don't believe me, look better in the article you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... (pay attention to the non uniform time axis...)
Edit: Lake Michigan is at 176m - which is quite a bit higher than the level seas would reach if all ice melts (which I think is about 90m).
But you're right about the political ramifications of where the Great Lakes Compact line gets drawn. Waukesha, WI is one place that comes to mind where their own water supply became inadequate (mostly due to radium levels) and they requested to have access to Lake Michigan's water. My understanding is within a few years, they'll have the infrastructure in place and be able to legally draw from it.
It doesn't take a deep imagination to think of what a few dozen new such situations will do to Michigan let alone the other Lakes.
Also Africa and Australia has a head start, they know how to live in deserts.. but maybe this one will be lunar void of life.
Sarcasm aside I wonder:
- Will humanity find wisdom and courage in doing what's simple and right (degrowth, relocalized, green first)
- Will humanity will pile head on to fix the problem through gigantism (let's be mad: fusion powered geo engineering)
Mumbai receives a LOT of rain, and I’m glad that we’re able to divert some of it to the ground water table.
Seeing this succeed, I’m pushing the same for my building too, I’m surprised to see a lot of my neighbours have problems with the same (cause of wastage of a common terrace), I should send them this article.
As a foreigner who has visited several times, here's what I've noticed:
- lots more people on the street with those iconic plastic water containers. Lots more water trucks on the road.
- water quality is BAD. Even in upper-class highrise condos, the water has much more odor and color. In this building, salinity is way up too. There's a reverse-osmosis plant here, but it's only on for several hours a day because RO systems waste so much water.
- haven't seen many restaurant closures, but I'm sure they're happening.
- a lot of hotels targeting westerners have advanced filtration and reverse-osmosis plants, seem to still be operating. Some pools are drained.
- water pressure in some neighborhoods is so low that it's only a trickle at the tap. News says some people are using pumps to pull of the metro system, making things worse.
Overall, it seems like bad expensive water is still out there if you can afford it and want to pay.
Conservation + Desalination is the only way here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country
India's problem is overconsumption and population excess. Until India is able to reduce their population by 50% or more, their water shortages will continue to worsen. A sizeable decrease in their population will also reduce their power consumption needs, so they'll be able to close their coal power plants instead of opening dozens more.
In the U.S. for example climate change is leading to decreased rainfall meaning less runoff and less groundwater recharge. The southeast of the US is going to have some very serious water issues for the next generation, albeit not as soon as India.
Where are you getting this? It certainly doesn't agree with figures published by the government. [0] The aquifers that are dropping are dropping because of massive well pumping. The wildfires are because we've stockpiled understory fuel while building homes in fire-prone forests. Overstating the case for global warming will convince some people, but others will only grow more skeptical.
[0] https://www.drought.gov/drought/data-maps-tools/current-cond...
>Surface and groundwater supplies in some regions are already stressed by increasing demand as well as declining runoff and groundwater recharge. In some regions, particularly the southern U.S. and the Caribbean and Pacific islands, climate change is increasing the likelihood of water shortages and competition for water. Water quality is diminishing in many areas, particularly due to increasing sediment and contaminant concentrations after heavy downpours.
I find that people's skepticism regarding climate change has almost nothing to do with data and evidence and nearly everything to do with their personal politics, to the extent that I draw a causative link between right-leaning politics and "climate skepticism".
Your reply is "I'm not reading this, I did a fast google search instead?"
Oof owie, my intellectualism.
I shouldn't have to spoon feed you after I gave you an extremely high quality source.
But whatever:
"Climate changes pose challenges for an already parched region that is expected to get hotter and, in its southern half, significantly drier. Increased heat and changes to rain and snowpack will send ripple effects throughout the region’s critical agriculture sector, affecting the lives and economies of 56 million people – a population that is expected to increase 68% by 2050, to 94 million. Severe and sustained drought will stress water sources, already over-utilized in many areas, forcing increasing competition among farmers, energy producers, urban dwellers, and plant and animal life for the region’s most precious resource."
>Theobald, D. M., W. R. Travis, M. A. Drummond, and E. S. Gordon, 2013: Ch. 3: The Changing Southwest. Assessment of Climate Change in the Southwest United States: A Report Prepared for the National Climate Assessment, G. Garfin, A. Jardine, R. Merideth, M. Black, and S. LeRoy, Eds., Island Press, 37-55 http://swccar.org/sites/all/themes/files/SW-NCA-color-FINALw...
* reject evidence for non-sense reasons
* over reliant on public search engines for quick, contextless answers
* pedantry rather than discussion
* a complete and total inability to find any meaningful evidence for yourself
For the record, my original comment in this thread has always been about the Southwest, but since you're behaving as such an anti-intellectual bad actor, I'll continue spoon feeding you the data that you're clearly too lazy to even try to understand
"Freshwater supplies from rivers, streams, and groundwater sources near the coast are at risk from accelerated saltwater intrusion due to higher sea levels. Porous aquifers in some areas make them particularly vulnerable to saltwater intrusion., For example, officials in the city of Hallandale Beach, Florida, have already abandoned six of their eight drinking water wells."
>Obeysekera, J., M. Irizarry, J. Park, J. Barnes, and T. Dessalegne, 2011: Climate change and its implications for water resources management in south Florida. Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, 25, 495-516, doi:10.1007/s00477-010-0418-8.
>Berry, L., F. Bloetscher, H. N. Hammer, M. Koch-Rose, D. Mitsova-Boneva, J. Restrepo, T. Root, and R. Teegavarapu, 2011: Florida Water Management and Adaptation in the Face of Climate Change. 68 pp., Florida Climate Change Task Force
That's just one way that climate change is negatively affecting groundwater in the US south east and how freshwater is becoming more scarce in America due directly to climate change
Have any more ignorance-fueling pedantry to use to avoid discussing the topic at hand?
Maybe you'll try reading a source? Nah, you'll just Google search it!
It also doesn't lead to groundwater depletion and the absence of well water. That's more or less independent of climate change. Well water is a semi-renewable resource. In other words, there's only a certain fraction of rain that will filter down to where the wells are pulling it from. If wells pull more than that the water table gradually drops until the wells run dry.
That's what is happening in India (and in a lot of other places.). They've drilled too many wells and depleted the ground water. Fixing climate change isn't going to help with that problem.
Of course in reality it's much more complicated since rainfall doesn't stay constant, and the changes in wind patterns and ocean currents have hard to predict consequences. But I think it's safe to say that rainfall will change, and at least for some regions it will make things worse.
In India, a 22 per cent deficit has been recorded in pre-monsoon showers in the months of March, April and May — the second lowest in the past 65 years — and with monsoons delayed by a fortnight or so, daily temperatures have been sizzling.
In other words the once reliable monsoons are no longer that reliable.
From what I have read one of the reasons for this is the warming of the Indian Ocean, with that warming then resulting in changes to the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD).
That dipole has a big influence on climate, not only in India but across the whole region and as it changes so does the climate.
you seem to be getting into full blown thanos mode here, probably you have seen this work somewhere before? can you please share?
India's fertility rate is at or below the global average and has been falling for decades. [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/06/1040621
The more reasonable standard of living, healthcare and food more people get access to, the faster we’ll reach a balance.
If only there was a name for it...
Some care is involved in doing this so as not to wreck nearby ecosystems, but the ocean as a whole is big enough to absorb a brine flow.
So our actual consumption is far below even those 0.8%. But our problem with fresh water isn't necessarily that it's not enough but that it's very unevenly distributed and we tend to be very wasteful.
This being said how much desalination do we have to do until the brine (now 30% more saline than regular salt water) is significantly affecting the overall salinity of the oceans? Desalinating 0.2% of the ocean's water would give humans a 25% more fresh fresh water and the increase in salinity would be marginal.
Does anyone know if an increase that looks as minute as this (0.1% increase is salinity?) is actually a real danger to ocean life and/or currents?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_distribution_on_Earth
There are other aspects of desalination that seem far more critical, like the ones related to efficiency and the scale of the required infrastructure.
Then again I would imagine the water pulled out comes back rather fast in the form of a tropical storm.
Versus news like this: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/one-third-of-world-s-...
> 82% of the greening seen in India – comes from intensive cultivation of food crops.
And then:
> For example, increased food production in India is facilitated by groundwater irrigation. If the groundwater is depleted, this trend may change.
What this new article says is that groundwater is depleted.
They are trying to link up all Indian water bodies.
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/a-wish-list-on-water-fro...
It's not something like demonetization, to not have any discussion.
Is that a validated statistic? If so, how is the entire country not panicking about this? That seems like a really serious problem.
Some might be blinded by the space program and how technologically advanced India is/might be in this regard.
No time to look for solid water supply, especially if you're not living where water will become not available.
This is simply not as emotive an issue for elections as banning cow-slaughter or defending India from the evil Muslims.
Not to mention that Indian political discourse is basically a shit-show of politicians trading 3rd grade level insults with one another, a bit like monkeys flinging excrement at each other.
Ref: https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/civic/benga...
Most of the apartment complexes water supplies are provided by tankers. Local politicians have stake in these tanker services, so it is in their best interest to make sure local populace is dependent on the these tankers and not on government connections which is heavily backlogged.
Few societies, residents do get together invest their own money to get proper water harvesting, but that is far and few to even make a noticeable difference. Builders most of them flat out refuse to build robust water harvesting systems.
But, what I'm surprised of is, many plants didn't dry up. And they are in good condition.
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-hot-efficiency-solar-desalinat...
One can do it even by focusing sunlight, why can’t they do it at industrial scale? I think Israel started to.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...
They used to import icebergs. (It’s a good example of Cunningham’s law.)
What could go wrong.
Abrogate the Indus Water Treaty brokered by World Bank.
This idea is bad in so many ways. It's gross hatred due to mass propaganda. First rule for sustainable water management is having local water supply used locally. We need better water management at individual city/village level like reviving lakes have a good ground water recharge etc.. Diverting rivers and desalination ideas are going to have huge ecological cost even if we forget about the economical possibility of them.
The reason Pakistan want Jammu-Kashmir, water security. China took Tibet, for a similar reason.
US wanted Gulf Oil; Invaded Iraq, what other countries after WW-II
Shit insecure bullies do to nurture their ego/fear.