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Comment by explaininjs | Hacker News Reader

The article also states “climate change and human activities increasingly threaten lakes that store 87% of Earth’s liquid surface fresh water”, but neglects to mention that only 0.3% of freshwater is liquid surface water in the first place. All in all a giant nothing burger, as with so many climate change alarmist “science” nowadays.

https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...

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> but neglects to mention that only 0.3% of freshwater is liquid surface water in the first place.

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.

> But what percentage of the water we can actually use?

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.

> What percentage of lake water could we use prior to literal millennia of engineering effort was put into moving it where we need

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

And yet they built aqueducts and wells too. Local surface water has been insufficient for civilization for at least 2000 years.

> 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”.

Are you at odds with basic addition or something? We are pumping out the aquifers faster than they recharge. Basic math lets you calculate that they will run out in a few decades.

The aquifers are left over from the ice age. Once depleted, the aquifer will take over 6,000 years to replenish naturally through rainfall.

So we now agree the aquifers have the capacity to refill on human timescales, especially given climate change is suspected to have a tendency to cause more rainfall. And by your omission I’ll take that we agree civilization cannot exist without significant engineering efforts to bring water to it, surface or otherwise. I don’t really know what’s left to say, besides hurling personal attacks back and forth as you seem want to steer this.

You would think that on a planetary scale, climate change result in more water, not less. Increased oceanic surface temperatures would cause more storms and thus more rain.

You are correct - and that is indeed the expectation.

Hot air retains more water then cold air.

https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/3143/steam...

Is not only a matter of how much as where it rains.

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.

The link you point to claims 1.2% of fresh water is surface water, fyi. According to the link, the bulk is in glaciers and icebergs (~69% - nice). 30% is ground water, which is cool and all, but replenishes slowly from what I know.

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.

Yes 1.2% is on the surface, but most of that is frozen. Only 0.3% is liquid surface water, as I said.

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.

Because obviously the amount of surface water is completely independent of the amount of subsurface water in aquifers. /s

What do you think the “obvious” correlation coefficient is between the two? Or even its sign? I suppose it’d be far too much to ask for the R value too.

Science is supposed to answer these questions, instead this article carefully withholds information to make molehills into mountains.

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