It’s certainly an interesting technology and achievement but one that could be easily misused with “unintended consequences”; or so it seems.
Strong Dune vibes.
You could use these to water plants and set up a cycle where a significant portion of the water lost through evaporation was reclaimed and gradually accumulated locally. Dot a landscape with solar powered stacks of these things feeding appropriately selected plantations and you might make the desert bloom or help prevent the spread of deserts.
I don't have faith gov't will do it either. Those opposed to climate change will argue it is money spent on fake science. It'll die in congress (for US, s/congress/localGovUselessBody/ for other places).
Someone might get popular enough to crowd source fund it with an NGO type thing, but I'm not holding my breath there either.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find organic opposition to tackling environment issues that aren't related to the relatively abstract C02 pollution issues. I say organic because the corporations responsible for pollution will always find ways to manufacture consent that protects their own best interests. But, your stereotypical human-caused climate change denier is likely someone that hunts, fishes, or resides in a rural area, where environmental and conservationist concerns are taken very seriously, regardless of political affiliation. Your opposition is only going to come from people whose livelihood is affected by pollution controls. A broader swathe of people will always oppose addressing C02 related climate concerns because it affects literally everyone's bottom line in the form of rising cost of goods with energy prices going up, and it has abstract consequences, rather than concrete ones like your local streams being poisoned, or your well water going bad because the aquifer has been contaminated.
There are plenty of desert coastlines.
Not sure how much that would cost per square meter of forest/agriculture, tbh.
Solar powered desal is pretty expensive.
I suspect that if you think that this is going to give us the ability to suck out all the water out of thousands of cubic kilometers of desert air any time soon, you're probably being a little too optimistic.
It's infuriatingly hard to find good citations, but I think they actually mostly breathe it out. IIRC, the water breakdown for some (spacecraft) life support system was something like 50% from respiration, 30% in urine, 10% in sweat, and 10% in feces.
At 15% relative humidity, then, you can extract a maximum of 0.15 x 17.3g = 2.6g from every 1,000L of air.
If a person needs 5L/day for survival (I am making this up), then you’d need to dry out 5000 / 2.6 = 1,923L of air each day — that’s just short of two cubic meters…
If the density of people living in an area is 50 per square km, drying the air out to extract water would deplete the first meter of the atmosphere by 10%.
You made a unit conversion mistake there. It's 1923 cubic meters, not liters.
I was curious so I looked it up because I also did not know, ref: https://www.google.com/search?q=liters+in+cubic+meter&oq=lit...
Okay let’s say the bottom 10m of atmosphere is available for water making. That means there are 10 million cubic meters of air per square km, or per 50 people. We will need to dry out 1,923 x 50 = 96,150 cubic meters of air. But there is 10,000,000 available, meaning we are only drying out just under 1% of the air.
https://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/SEM/dossiers/...
When reading through the article, it has potential application in areas where a local water supply may not be clean enough to drink or lacks sufficient water treatment & filtration.
In many industries this airborne salt can cause corrosion. Talk to anyone with a classic car in LA/SF, both cities with sea breezes. They don't want to leave them outside too much. That's why the aircraft "boneyards" are all in the interior, across the mountains from the sea.
Wikipedia speaks of an "abrupt desertification" 5400 years ago.