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Comment by dakolli | Hacker News Reader

we live in a closed greenhouse system, the water just doesn't just disappear and most of the Earth is covered in it. Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already, I think we'll be fine. I'm much more concerned about everyone becoming a moron from using AI.

edit: cloud seeding too.

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> Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already

Let's take Kansas... the largest producer of wheat in the US. https://www.statista.com/statistics/190376/top-us-states-in-...

Kansas wheat crop down 38% from last year https://youtu.be/QjrhAXzEGDc

Kansas cannot run on desalination plants ... there's no salt water. The gulf coast of Texas is 1000 miles away.

While aquifers do regenerate (Groundwater levels in the Kansas High Plains aquifer see first overall increase since 2019 https://kgs.ku.edu/news/article/groundwater-levels-in-the-ka... ) I'm going to point out that news article has seven years of declines previously.

The aquifer that Kansas draws upon is the Ogallala Aquifer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer ) and you can see the rate of depletion at https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation... - there are spots in Kansas where the groundwater dropped by 150 feet from before it was tapped with deep wells to 2015.

Yes, most of the earth is covered by water. Getting that water to Kansas and Nebraska and North Dakota, however, is a problem.

We didn't get much snow in ND over the winter. Hasn't rained much this year either

If you can find climate data... for example, in Wisconsin 2012 our snowfall looked like https://www.aos.wisc.edu/oldsco/clim-history/stations/msn/ms... and the overall water year precipitation chart was https://www.aos.wisc.edu/oldsco/clim-history/stations/msn/ms...

PBS program on the 2012 drought - https://www.pbs.org/video/wpt-presents-wisconsin-drought-201...

And what the fields looked like ... http://www.wcwcw.com/feature96.html (also has a national map, and all of Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois were in bad shape - Wisconsin looked pretty good by comparison in that map).

If you've got similar data for ND... (digging) https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/sites/default/files/2026-05... page 2 has the precipitation chart. North west ND looks bad.

My parents live on the west side of the state and my mom sent me a picture yesterday that looked a sandstorm

The problem is that aquifers are really cool natural filters, and only refill as fast as groundwater moves through the soil. So they're a finite resource. Instead of depleting them, people who want to farm in deserts should probably start desalinating or whatever themselves instead of assuming subsequent generations will do it.

The government made it literally the only way to claim much of the land out west[]. They require that you come up with an agricultural land including plan for watering crops on that acreage in order to claim the land. And you're required to execute the plan to get the deed.

In fact, this is the only remaining way I know of to more or less 'homestead' federal land in a way that results in a permanent deed. The rest of the homesteading type stuff was revoked back in like the 70s or 80s.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Land_Act

Is this relevant in 2026? Are people still claiming land via the 1877 Desert Land Act?

Yet it's still active. As a pure anecdote, I know of someone doing it right now.

https://www.blm.gov/sites/default/files/Desert%20Land%20Entr...

Is this an opportunity that opened up with this administration? Or has the BLM been quietly processing these for the last century?

AFAIK it's been available since the 1870s but after the 20s they clamped down a lot harder on ensuring you were actually irrigating it and had agricultural plans.

I'm not sure if the BLM has relaxed their discretion under Trump.

Do you think laws go away just because they're old?

The Colorado River compact came into effect in 1922 and I'm almost surprised literal fist fights haven't erupted over it during the modern negotiations.

I think laws become less relevant over time for many reasons. There are entire books written about silly and obsolete laws, e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trenton_Pickle_Ordinance_a...

The age of a law or regulation is likely a strong indicator for its relevance in modern times, especially if it’s regarding something quite niche.

These laws are neither silly nor obsolete. That's a distraction.

So is the age of the law, for that matter; courts don't waste one second on the topic. Settled law is settled.

I’m no lawyer, but according to my perusing (sourced directly from the BLM), the 1877 Desert Land Act is very much obsolete.

The age of a law does not matter with regards to its validity, you are pedantically correct. But it very much matters to its relevancy, which was my argument. Laws regarding horse traffic in Manhattan may still be valid, but a lot less relevant than they were hundreds of years ago - assuming they haven’t been repealed.

Regarding the “Colorado River compact”, I would say my qualifier of “quite niche” is important. Ownership and water rights over the second largest watershed in the US by affected population is far from “niche”.

On the other hand, how settlers can claim public land in the desert (which happens incredibly rarely now, by design) is quite niche.

Even if you presume it's obsolete, the fact remains the land was distributed under a model where it had to be claimed, developed, and irrigated for agriculture. The water distribution and well systems alone required for agriculture far surpass use for residential purposes, for example, but once you have wells and irrigation suitable (not cheap in the desert, and also valuable) for agriculture it may be more economical to just keep going with it. The momentum of that remains and the economic incentives aligned with those policy choices remain with us as to part of the reason why desert land is used as it is. The first developed use of land can have a lot of influence on what happens next, it's quite different from starting from an undeveloped state with pure free market forces on development.

This makes sense; its legacy is its contribution to the culture of development that is damaging to our shared water resources, no doubt.

I read your original comment too literally with regards to this law still being a problem, rather than the historical second order effects of the law.

The energy required to transport water from the coast to our major agricultural areas would be astronomical, and the resulting brine waste would create its own environmental crisis. If we get to a point where we're forced to bypass natural water cycles entirely, our native ecologies will have already collapsed. At that point, we'll be trying to engineer our way out of a total ecological apocalypse as masses starve in bread lines.

> Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already

There are only 3 countries that do: Bahamas, Maldives, and Malta.

Other countries that depend heavily, but not completely: Qatar, Kuwait, UAE.

Qatar, Kuwait, UAE. And these guys rent out tons of farmland in the USA to grow crops because they can flood irrigate and get five crops of alfalfa a year to feed their livestock.

Desal isn't useful for anything but a stop gap

Plants require a ton of desalinated water and Animals who eat plants as such require desalinated water too.

There are countries in middle east like UAE, Saudi arabia etc. which rely on desalination but they are relying it for the clean drinking water, not for the food generation. They import almost 90% of their food iirc.

The amount of energy required to desalinate all water and the environmental impacts to get that energy would literally be quite catastrophic and I am not even sure if it would be even feasible and food prices would literally skyrocket or food would simply be produced even more less by magnitudes of order.

The middle east tends to import hay and food for their livestock from other countries rather than growing it locally.

https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/commodities/forage-and-hay

https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/QAT/yea...

Alfalfa/hay uses so much water that cultivation of it is banned in Saudi Arabia. They import large amounts from the US - basically we're exporting water.

Desalination isn't really much of an option for deeper inland and much higher than sea level areas. Tell me, which ocean is Dodge City KS going to pull from?

Global warming will bring the sea to them

Dodge City is at ~1,500ft ASL.

If the ocean is anywhere near there, Tulsa OK would be under some 800 feet of ocean.

The Great Lakes will have also been flooded by the oceans, as they top out at ~600ft ASL.

and desalination is so efficient/cheap at scale already that it barely affects water prices in those countries (less than 10% already, further shrinking every year as methods improve)

This is by far the dumbest post in this thread by a mile. It's funny saying AI will make people dumber when you've obviously don't understand this issue in the first place. Food security is human security. When you take a huge percentage of a countries grow able land out because it stops raining then food proces go up, often dramatically.

Desalination uses far more power than AI ever would.

And if we wait until large scale desalination becomes profitable, it will be too late to respond quickly without massive upheaval and deaths.

This is where capitalism drives humanity off a cliff.

huh?

we live in an open system at any scale except the whole universe and even that is gaining energy

the earth is slowly losing both hydrogen and oxygen, and has tons of energy coming in from the sun

into the scale of a field, or a state or a country or a continent, theres very obvious flows of the water cycle introducing water via rain/snow, and removing it via evaporation, seepage, and rivers.

the only closed system is if you make one of those wine fermenter biospheres, and even there its open to energy coming in via light

the second law will keep applying

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