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I thought climate change was supposed to provide easier access to water?
by nukeop 9y ago
I thought climate change was supposed to provide easier access to water?
- pjc50 9y agoWhy did you think that?
- yoz-y 9y agoI would guess rising seas. Water gets closer to you, literally.
- SolarNet 9y agoHave you ever tried drinking sea water? It tastes salty. The short of it being: It makes you thirstier; drinking it is worse than drinking nothing. Desalination is expensive in many ways. If it was a viable way of acquiring water (which it is in some places, like literal deserts) then these places would have already done it. Hence rising sea levels provide no additional access drinkable water.
- 20after4 9y agoBut it has what plants crave.
- croon 9y agoNot sure if you're being facetious, but saltwater kills most plants, with a few exceptions.
- chowells 9y agoAnd just yesterday, I was thinking no one here would need to explain who Mike Judge is to the general audience. "It's got what plants crave" is a line from his movie Idiocracy. It is directly relevant the discussion at hand, but it's also a zero-effort joke that contributes nothing new.
- phaemon 9y agoWell, Idiocracy was release over 11 years ago, so young adults might not have heard of it. Hope I haven't made you feel old :)
- SideburnsOfDoom 9y agoI for one got the reference. but HN comment style strongly discourages low-effort jokes. It doesn't add information. I'm not surprised that it was downvoted, whether people "got it" or not. This is fine, HN is not reddit.
- nukeop 9y agoGod forbid somebody makes a joke! This is a professional website, grim attitude is required.
- SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago> a zero-effort joke that contributes nothing new > low-effort jokes. It doesn't add information. And then > God forbid somebody makes a joke! You're misreading what is being said.
- croon 9y agoYour presumption was half correct, but that movie might be my only blind spot in his oeuvre. Nonetheless I thank you for the clarification.
- PeterisP 9y agoWater supplies implicitly mean freshwater supplies. Sea level rising can't help that (seawater is not usable directly, and for desalination plants the bottleneck is their capacity and power usage, not amount of seawater available) but it can make it worse e.g. if certain aquifers become saltwater.
- mikro2nd 9y agoAnd, since most power-generation in South Africa is from coal, desalination - it seems to me - is only aggravating the problem (climate change) over the long run. Yes, we should probably power those plants from some renewable/sustainable source, but that's a different discussion for another day.
- SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago> since most power-generation in South Africa is from coal It's sad and crazy that this is still not changing. SA is a very sunny country.
- spuz 9y agoNot sure why you were downvoted. You weren't the one making a facetious remark, simply explaining one.
- Dylan16807 9y ago> explaining one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16176246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16176246
- spuz 9y agoI don't get it. This is just a link to another attempt to explain the facetiousness of another comment which was itself also downvoted. Why don't we downvote facetious comments instead of the comments that try to redeem them?
- Dylan16807 9y agoI'm saying that it looks like an earnest explanation of a comment that was not facetious. That's why the explanation as if it was facetious gets the downvote. Especially since it's not at all baseless. Outside of the subtropics rainfall is expected to increase. But drought length can also increase. It's complicated.
- nukeop 9y agoMore rainfall?
- mtmail 9y agoEven if, it's salt water https://www.thesouthafrican.com/cape-town-water-crisis-desalination-issues/ https://www.thesouthafrican.com/cape-town-water-crisis-desal...
- SideburnsOfDoom 9y agoIt should not be surprising that the effects of climate change vary from place to place as weather systems move or are disrupted. Cape Town is at the bottom of Africa, but at 33.9° S it is roughly as far south as Tunisia and the Mediterranean, or Los Angeles, California are north. To pick other coastal places. The climate is "Mediterranean" with rain in winter sweeping in over the sea from the west, and hot dry summers. (1) But the area to the north of Cape Town, towards the equator is dryer, even along the coast. In fact it becomes harsh desert by the time you reach Namibia (2). So it only takes a small shift of the weather systems away from the equator to impact the winter rainfall that reaches Cape Town. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town#Climate http://www.capewatersolutions.co.za/rainwater-harvesting/cape-town-rainfall-pattern/ http://www.capewatersolutions.co.za/rainwater-harvesting/cap... 2) http://www.grainsa.co.za/images/Articles/2012-08/reenval_fig02.jpg http://www.grainsa.co.za/images/Articles/2012-08/reenval_fig... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeleton_Coast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeleton_Coast