Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage
science.org
science.org
Also, this is stated later in the doc:
"Between 1984 and 2015, a loss of 90,000 km2 of permanent water area was observed by satellites—an area equivalent to the surface of Lake Superior, whereas 184,000 km2 of new water bodies, primarily reservoirs, were formed elsewhere (14)"
My first impression was that this means there has been a growth in total permanent water area from 1984-2015. Am I just reading this wrong?
A barrel of oil has about 159 litres in it. The Keystone Pipeline would have transported 1.1 million barrels if it were fully expanded. 174,900,000 million litres per day. The City of Phoenix by itself uses about 1 billion litres per day.
https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...
Science is supposed to answer these questions, instead this article carefully withholds information to make molehills into mountains.
But what percentage of the water we can actually use? The Arctic and Antarctic are far away from most of us, and groundwater is limited and probably spread out quite a bit. Water vapour is hard to extract from the air.
You are trivializing it by saying it is just a tiny percentage of freshwater, but it is actually where most of our used water currently comes from.
What percentage of lake water could we use prior to literal millennia of engineering effort was put into moving it where we need?
> most of our used water currently comes from
This is technically true today, but barely. Nationwide roughly twice as much water comes from surface as the ground, but it varies dramatically by region. If you live in NY, 90% of your water already comes from the ground. It’s certainly not the case that we’re “locked in” to lakes, rather we are very capable of adapting to local conditions.
All of it, people built settlements on lakes and rivers for this very reason
> It’s certainly not the case that we’re “locked in” to lakes, rather we are very capable of adapting to local conditions.
No, we are locked in to rivers and lakes because thats the only big source of renewable fresh water. The underground aquifiers under midwest and under much of middle east will be gone in 50 years and will never return
You should not incorrect people here without basic facts at your disposal
> The underground aquifiers under midwest and under much of middle east will be gone in 50 years and will never return
> You should not incorrect people here without basic facts at your disposal
Nothing quite as HN as someone making bold alarmist unsupported assertions about the future of climate for all of time, then following it up with a sentence demanding an appreciation for “basic facts”.
The aquifers are left over from the ice age. Once depleted, the aquifer will take over 6,000 years to replenish naturally through rainfall.
https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/3143/steam...
Raining could increase exponentially over open sea and not much would change for the lakes. We had also a lot of monster wildfires in the last decade. Feels like a competition about who is able to sink the ship faster.
Not to lecture but write out my thoughts, I feel like the discussion on climate change consistently revolves around who supports or opposes the idea and who/what is to blame. To me, looking around, it’s a conversation about responsibility. I don’t see how, say, having a bunch of casinos in Las Vegas is responsible behavior for a society. Same goes with eating a ton of calories and sitting around all day.
And you can say it’s not, no biggie, people do crazy shit all the time. But like a body, it can only take so much before (to extend the latter example) diabetes sets in. At some point it seems like a wise decision to be responsible with our planet and our bodies, collectively. But I don’t really see people willingly assuming responsibility for their actions, let alone their impact on the collective. Oof, especially in the US where the interest in “independence” has a large following.
As for the rest, so much of the discussion seems to rest on a sort of cognitive dissonance people hold that on one hand humans are terrible for the planet and our horrible actions must be stopped, but on the other we must do everything possible to keep humanity going on forever. To me this doesn’t jive - if humanity is so awful, let us die and let this astronomically mind-bogglingly fertile rock bring about new life that might perhaps learn from our mistakes. If not, stop all the damn doomsaying. It doesn’t make for interesting reading, it’s without fail entirely speculative, and there’s evidence to suggest many of the youth have become severely depressed by it - far beyond what the “science” could possibly support. A dear cousin of mine recently killed himself before the age of 18; it’s impossible to know all the reasons, but based on his writings climate change terror was a significant part of it.
the phrase you read said "Over half (53 ± 2%) of the large lakes experienced significant water losses" (emphasis mine)
There's 91k cubic kilometers of fresh water in lakes according to: https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...
And a cubic kilometer is basically a Gt, right? .98 Gt?
So 26 / 91,000 = ~0.02% ?
Is that a lot? If it's really 0.02% - wouldn't you expect something to be random noise? How do we know it's not random noise?
Like, it's unclear if there's a problem here or not.
https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/nieuws/archief/2023/04/hoger-...
Also salification and other problems with only pumping out all the time.
What's the other countries excuses?
Global forest cover loss between 1990 and 2020 was estimated to be around 178 million hectares, representing a reduction of approximately 10% in the total global forest area.
To restore water resources we should prioritize aforestation.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#how-has-global-land-use-...
1700 ... 1 billion ha for agriculture
1800 ... 1.35 billion ha
1900 ... 2.54 billion ha
2016 ... 4.93 billion ha (=cca 50% of all habitable lands)
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
Animal agriculture taking 75% of that.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
"Beef is the leading driver of deforestation"
https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation
As Ernst Gotsch says: water is planted (‘Água se planta!’)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_G%C3%B6tsch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_pump
- Evapotranspiration: Vegetation influences the water cycle by releasing moisture into the atmosphere through transpiration, affecting cloud formation and regional rainfall patterns.
- Surface runoff and infiltration: Vegetation intercepts rainfall, slowing down surface runoff and promoting better water infiltration into the soil, which helps mitigate drought conditions.
- Shade and temperature regulation: Vegetation provides shade, lowers surface temperatures, and reduces evaporation rates, potentially alleviating drought intensity.
- Feedback loops: Healthy vegetation enhances soil moisture levels, maintains humidity, and supports water resources, while stressed or absent vegetation can worsen drought conditions.
- Forests and rainfall patterns: Forests contribute to local and regional rainfall by releasing moisture through transpiration, and their removal or degradation can disrupt precipitation, potentially contributing to drought.
For a while I pointed people to a study showing that geohydrological model of the Amazon rain forest indicates that it is well past a breaking point in which the hydrology there will never be recovered, and the landscape will likely transform dramatically. It’s very poorly received though. Not because it’s a bad study but I guess no one thinks what’s happening in the Amazon happens anywhere else. As though it’s fear-mongering to point to this phenomenon despite that deforestation occurs the entire world over.
My understanding is that there’s no known feasible way to improve future hydrology as inexpensively or low-tech, too. Here in British Columbia, Canada we have a fairly aggressive forestry practice which generates a shockingly small portion of our GDP. I seriously wonder if our GDP could be maintained or increased overall by converting forestry efforts to afforestation efforts.
Were we to succeed in recreating healthy forests here, the impact on other sectors through improved hydrology (healthier rivers and lakes, better water retention in forests, better forest fire outcomes, eventually strengthened tourism, etc) actually seems like it could be a net positive. This would be an extremely long term project though, and virtually impossible to enact given jobs would be lost on the short term.
This is also important for us because so much of our energy is generated from rivers. We need stable, consistent flows to power almost every home in the province. We should be hyper focused on efforts to improve hydrology, and forestry works directly against that.
It’s such a big part of our history and so broadly evident and present in our lives here. Most people assume it’s a major part of our economy and that we could never function without it. I sincerely wonder if it’s a net drain on the province though. Not only does it visibly and measurably harm the environment here (even with our “green” forestry practices), but a lot of our forestry products are immediately exported for absurdly low prices. I think I would support a ban on exports and reducing our forestry to supporting domestic needs, based on what I know of the situation.
It’s scary stuff, anyway. And it seems like not many people are aware or listening.
Also interesting:
- atmospheric rivers (rainforest deforestation influencing rainfall even on other continents)
- biotic pump theory (or something like it) - without continuous/significant forest we lose rain inland and get droughts
- forestry practices - those sorry ass patches of trees (33% of land) surrounded by fields and pastures (50%) in europe should not be called forests, they don't force wind to go over them, because they're not multilevel canopies, so wind goes through and dries them up and they're dying more quickly and don't function as well as they could if they were larger and properly structured (like primaeval forests). Our foresters make them look like monoculture parks, even removing dead branches and stumps ... no wonder that they're almost biodeserts.
- cca 50% of felled roundwood (paper, celulose, furniture) could be replaced with cca 5% of animal agriculture lands and hemp
> It’s scary stuff, anyway. And it seems like not many people are aware or listening.
Nobody cares. Nobody wants to care. Depressing.
Forests are as much our lifeline as the seas in my opinion. They’re a major factor in stabilizing climate — they quite literally make it rain, in more ways than one.
I’ve heard the biotic pump theory referred to as “rain hopping” quite often, recently. Is it still a theory, or very evidently real now? I know some hydrologists refer to it very plainly, but maybe it isn’t officially in the books as a known phenomenon. I seem to recall it was considered as a factor in the irreversible changes in the Amazon, but I’d need to review it. I might be assuming that.
There’s the famous California telephone pole picture too. https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/themarinpost/emimg/1249/S...
The pole is from 1977 or later but shows the historical land level of 1955 and 1925
Previously it was in lakes, groundwater it glaciers. Glaciers which ultimately kept rivers flowing all year around even when not much snow falls in a given winter. Once all the glaciers are melted, the rivers can dry up completely. The glacier water has already made it to the ocean and doesn't need to travel there anymore via river. With groundwater depleted, we cannot use that anymore to substitute and some sources of creeks will dry up.
> The subducting slabs also carry deep-sea sediments piggyback into the Earth’s interior. These sediments can hold large quantities of water and CO2. But until now it was unclear just how much enters the transition zone in the form of more stable, hydrous minerals and carbonates – and it was therefore also unclear whether large quantities of water really are stored there.
> The answer has now been provided by an international study. The research team analyzed a diamond from Botswana, Africa. It originated at a depth of 660 kilometers, directly at the interface between the transition zone and the lower mantle, where the dominant mineral is ringwoodite. Diamonds from this location are very rare, even among the extremely rare diamonds of super-deep origin, which account for just 1% of all diamonds. The studies found that the stone had a high water content due to the presence of many ringwoodite inclusions. The study team was also able to establish the chemical composition of the stone.
https://scitechdaily.com/an-underground-ocean-scientists-dis...
Things like diversions into cities will also contribute, but generally gets dwarfed by agricultural use.
The Colorado river flow for example is 80% agricultural. 20% for all other uses, including the bare trickle that actually makes it to the ocean
You’re actually right. We’ll probably burn garbage and radio hosts will call people against burning garbage effeminate names.
As you can set it up to burn very hot and have all sorts of scrubbers on the outcomes.
We are scrambling to find ways to capture atmospheric carbon and store it underground and burning garbage is literally the opposite of that.
You'd have to do the math, it's not manifestly obvious that it's not the case (especially once you consider all the transportation involved in sending waste around the country and across the ocean).
Maybe people prefer incinerators in their community over landfills in their community (unclear), but if that's the case, that's a policy decision and not one that seeks to minimize carbon emissions.
It's likely that landfill are the way to go in many cases, but people don't like them.
The same designer made this Terracooler which is also a fascinating idea.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Is it just a case of the scale making it safe?
0: https://www.timeout.com/croatia/things-to-do/ston-salt-works
The brine slowly go down through geological layers. After 5 years it reaches groundwater reservoir.
20-50 years later, the regions become famous for its fun pod racing and for its numerous ghost cities around the old plain.
The problem is strictly local: if the brine produced by the plant is dumped in an area with low flow, it can hang around and affect sea life.
If you use a big discharge pipe and put it a decent distance offshore in a current where it can mix effectively, there’s very little effect.
This is not a reason to shoot down desalination plants as a concept, it’s a design constraint to take into account when building them.
of course, a renewable powered ship
If you have ever flown into SFO you have seen the reddish pools. (By the way the red color comes from Brine Shrimp, which presumably there is also use for)
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/salt-ponds-san-francisco
https://www.archdaily.com/994769/could-salt-be-a-material-of...
When you have a practically free resource which is waste from a large scale industrial process, cottage industries to make use of the free waste sometimes pop up. It's a solvable problem.
We also, so far, globally have not shown any evidence of replacing fossil fuels with green energy, only supplementing them.
And we need more power to let emerging economies rise out of poverty, where having electric pumps and washing are truely life-changing from a quality of life perspective.
So we need about 5x more total energy while also shifting from 80% fossil to 0% fossil.
This is why I advocate for nuclear while most people advocate for wind and solar. We need advocates for all clean energy. Nuclear can actually use its own direct low-carbon heat to help with buildings (district heat) and industry, and that heat can also help in desal in some cases, though RO is the preference these days and doesn't really need that much heat input.
Earth is a closed system, so we should expect to see water storage decline in some areas and flooding increase in some areas.
It’s all climate change stuff.
Of course, Earth is a closed system, but I am not sure it is that closed.
http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...
I afraid that a lot of fresh water is going to become an ocean water. Flooding theory creates the impression of transferring fresh water from one place to another where it will remain just as fresh. It is incredibly hard to create a fresh water from salty one.
Fresh water is created from the salty water by evaporation all the time.
So while technically it happens all the time, practically it’s as if it isn’t happening at all when it comes to the concerns talked about here, specifically the quantity of available fresh water declining.
You know, unless we build a massive “roof” of devices to capture all that rain. Literally covering the entire planet. At that point yeah it would dev a reasonable thing to bring up in the context of fresh water reserves falling.
So I very much stand by the point that while, sure, it happens all the time, that does nothing to actually help with the topic at hand.
How?
Rain is not predictable at the scale of a crop season. Rain is not scalable, it’s extremely localized.
Rain happens, and when it does your crops get watered, but you can’t in any way shape or form rely on that.
The ocean covers the majority of the Earth's surface. The ocean is full of salt.
Water which rains out over the oceans is unusable as drinking or irrigation water without expensive processing (desalination).
If historic rainfall patterns change, there is absolutely no requirement that the rain land anywhere useful for our existing infrastructure or human habitation.
Yes, the water won't disappear, but if the effect is rainfall hits the ocean, or say, flood-prone regions even harder then it normally does, it's still going to be coming down somewhere not useful to us.
The problem is not that we can't solve these problems, it's that is is staggeringly expensive to do so.
Necessity is the mother of all invention, and with Necessity also comes scale, and with scale comes less cost...
Desalination has been expensive because it is not necessary, the second it becomes necessary I bet you will see the costs drop..
If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick
Make it so.
I doubt scaling desalinization is as hard as hurling stuff into space, but it may not be easy to scale either. There are plenty of places on earth which are very dry, adjacent to salt water, and extremely rich and yet no great desalinization technologies have come from them.
You may have neatly (and politely) pinned down why we computer folks are so arrogant about how easy problems outside our direct field would be to solve, if only we were the ones “allowed” to solve them.
Why? Nestle just passes the cost on to the consumer, because where else are they gonna go?
There are more than a few places where desalination is necessary, and we still haven’t come up with a way to make it cheap.
The current issue is that there is just no way that we know of to reliably desalinate that isn’t super energy intensive, so it comes down to trading energy for water. That’s why desalination is expensive.
So maybe that will work out in the end if the economics make water expensive enough to trade energy for water.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Costs
Although that doesn't include irrigation..
EDIT: can even be economical for irrigation in some circumstances: https://www.fluencecorp.com/desalination-and-agriculture-les...
Without it, snowmelt-fed rivers dry out earlier.
As more ice melts there might be more liquid water available, but the ecosystems that would process that water into vapor are struggling. So you end up with a situation where the only source of water vapor in the air is the oceans.
As temperatures increase that'll again be a net increase in ocean-driven evaporation, but it'll be less evenly distributed than evaporation+transpiration was.
So the concern is that the only available water will be too salty to drink, or too destructive to capture.
Most resource problems are not about the quantity of some thing changing as a percentage of earth's matter. Most resources are about density and composition.
If all of the (non-ice) freshwater on earth was suddenly dumped into the ocean, we'd have the same amount of overall water - but little to no drinkable water.
Likewise, we're not really creating new carbon by burning fossil fuels. We're moving and re-distributing it. Compared to being deep underground, the form we create by burning captures much more heat, causing many problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods
“in the recorded history [of the area] that we have since 1918, we have never had this much rain.”
/s
Very few people want to impact farmers negatively, because of the way farming is romanticized almost everywhere across the globe.