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24.5 Trillion Gallons of Water
- jayess 9y agoCan't view the page. It blocks me because of ad blocker.
- msla 9y agoIt works for me with Firefox and uBlock Origin. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
- overcast 9y agouBlock doesn't work with Nightly yet :(
- medlazik 9y agoRC works fine so far https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/versions/beta https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
- overcast 9y agoawesome, thank you! Have you tried uBlock + ghostery together, necessary? conflicts?
- weaksauce 9y agoIt is if you click on the "development channel" button at the very bottom.
- overcast 9y agoThanks for heads up!
- wybiral 9y agoIt blocks me without ad blocker because it wants me to subscribe to continue reading.
- bpchaps 9y agoDeleting "drawbridge-up" from the html tag and the <div id="drawbridge-root"> tree does the trick.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hkchad 9y agoThis has been working really well for wapo articles, https://outline.com/ https://outline.com/
- pwg 9y agoWorks for me as well, NoScript in default deny all javascript mode.
- secabeen 9y agoMy favorite statistic is that 24.5 trillion gallons of water is 75 million acre-feet, or slightly more water than all California agriculture uses in 2 years.
- s0rce 9y agoThe water "shortage" is more of a distribution problem.
- cannonedhamster 9y agoSame with food, money, housing, etc.
- martinald 9y agoAcre-feet? Is this a satirical unit of measurement?!
- DontGiveTwoFlux 9y agoThat's common for water allotment and agriculture. Western water rights allow for users to take only a limited number of acre-feet of water per year. If there is less water, then some people get bumped off the list for that year.
- Pyxl101 9y agoI'm not a farmer but I would guess it's serious. Land area is measured in acres, and the amount of water that crops need per growing cycle could be measured in feet, hence acre-feet. An acre-foot is the amount of water required to cover a one acre area in one foot of water, or about 1.2 million liters.
- peterwwillis 9y agoSo basically, we need a pipeline from Houston to California.
- secabeen 9y agoYeah, and the pumps/tunnels to get it over/under the Rockies and the Sierras.
- jboles 9y agoUS already has a wall to build.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoTo make at least a dent in Houston's problems, it would have to be able to move 10 trillion gallons in a few days. But, hey, let's give it all year, just to make it easier. That's 27 billion gallons a day, just over a billion gallons an hour, 19 million gallons a minute, or 317,000 gallons a second. That's... improbable. That's 508,000 cubic feet per second. Assuming a velocity of 1000 miles per hour, or 1467 feet per second (also improbable), you'd need a cross section of 346 square feet. That's a pipe that is 21 feet in diameter, which is not completely impossible. Or four pipes that are each 10.5 feet in diameter. That's doable. The 1000 miles per hour pumping speed is a bit of an obstacle, though...
- sapienthomo 9y agoCalifornia has only 20 million acre feet of reservoir capacity, which is currently filled to 125% of typical levels. The last thing that state needs is another 75 million acre feet of water.
- melling 9y agoThere's been a bit of discussion about how Houston is prone to flooding to begin with because there's no zoning, etc. This Guardian article was written 2 months ago: “Where the built environment is a main force exacerbating the impacts of urban flooding, Houston is number one and it’s not even close.” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/16/texas-flooding-houston-climate-change-disaster https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/16/texas-fl... A more recent Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/why-cities-flood/538251/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/why-c...
- jhayward 9y agoThese are rather viewpoint-based articles. As a thought experiment, test their cause-and-effect explanations against the historical floods that Houston has experienced since it was originated by the Allen brothers. Houston had terrible floods even in the 1920's and 30's. There was very little concrete and pavement in those days, especially in the areas they claim are lost prairie.
- melling 9y agoSaying there were bad floods before and there are bad floods now doesn’t negate the claim that humans have made the problem worse. http://www.npr.org/2017/08/27/546603361/houstons-explosive-growth-amid-disregard-of-flood-preparedness http://www.npr.org/2017/08/27/546603361/houstons-explosive-g...
- jhayward 9y agoNothing in that article demonstrates that the flooding was made any worse by any of the claimed mal-administration. The only demonstrable difference these days is that very heavy rainfall events are more frequent, and more severe. Which does not support the hypothesis. Edited to add: I will grant that there is more damage, because there are more structures now. Also that many of the structures built in the last decade or so a infill in flood-prone areas. So that's a good candidate for mal-administration. But the theory that the actual floods are worse, in terms of area flooded, flood depth, etc., is not supported IMO without better science. Could be true. But what we know for sure is it's raining more.
- marzell 9y agoThis includes a visualization of a "cube" that doesn't have parallel planes. I'm not sure how much I can trust that lol
- sapienthomo 9y agoAs they say: Is that a lot? I hate the way headlines measure things in useless units, just to get a bigger exponent. Why didn't they say it was 19000 trillion teaspoons? That's just as easy -- i.e. impossible -- to visualize. I think a possibly easier-to-visualize description is enough water to cover the whole state of Texas six inches deep.
- Johnny555 9y agoThe diagram of the huge cube of water hovering over the city wasn't enough to help you visualize that it's a huge amount of water? They included several other visualization descriptions in the article. They can't put it all in the headline.
- ianai 9y agoThe take away is that there aren't likely to be technological remedies to the affects of climate change. Once the earths defense systems are triggered we simply die.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Diederich 9y ago> Once the earths defense systems are triggered we simply die. Citation/clarification needed. Does your 'we' mean 'all of us'? To be clear, there are very few people who have been alarmed for as many years as I have been about climate change. And my alarm only deepens over the years. It's hard for me to imagine a reasonable way that humans will become extinct. I can imagine billions of us passing away.
- Johnny555 9y agoHow is that a takeaway? The article didn't even mention climate change (and it's impossible to definitively attribute a single event to climate change. How is a big wet storm a "defense mechanism"? Why would the earth even have active "defense" mechanisms? What it is it defending? It doesn't seem like a very effective defense mechanism, so far reports are that there were only 20 - 30 confirmed deaths due to the floods out of 6 million in the metro area. While tragic in the real sense, more people than that must die of natural causes in the Houston area every day.
- elevensies 9y agoThere are ~500 cities with population over one million, so I think we are going to be seeing a 500-year disaster hit a million-plus city about once a year.
- pizza 9y agoSampling a timeseries is not like sampling an ensemble. But nonetheless I agree we will probably see many more large-scale climate events than we have.
- flexie 9y agoThat' almost 100 trillon litres. In a few hours it is. So 1 with 14 zeros after. A cubic meter is 1,000 litres. So we are talking 100 billion cubic meters. Or the same as 100 cubic km. Or the same amount of water as in a deep square lake which is 10 times 10 km wide and 1 km deep. Or a square lake which is almost 32 km on each side and 100 meters deep. Or a shallow square lake which is 1 meter deep and roughly 317 km on each side.
- samstave 9y agoI prefer all my lakes to be hexagonal or octagonal - please edit your comment.
- nashashmi 9y agoThat's it! We need a new unit of volume to replace gallons. A gallon is way too small. A barrel is difficult to understand. If only we had something standard like swimming pool or something...
- dreamcompiler 9y agoAnother nice visualization: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/28/16217626/harvey-houston-flood-water-visualized https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/28/16217626/ha...
- nashashmi 9y agoNYC has reservoirs close to 500 billion gallons of water combined. And the water level only goes down to 80% during the summer.
- pc2g4d 9y ago24.5 trillion gallons of water is a huge problem... and also a huge resource. It's just in the wrong place, right? What if we had a system for rerouting water dumps like this around the country and could send it to a drought region? We have interstate highways. How about interstate drainage? Well, I guess that's what rivers are....
- the_d00d 9y agoFyi...there are no basements in Houston (or Texas really) despite what the article states about how water will have to be pumped out of all the basements.
- racx 9y agoIf my math is correct, that would be 2.6 hours of foz de iguaçu falls.