14 ms·

India is drying up

214 points by akbarnama 7y ago

mc32 7y ago
Climate change and weather patterns change coupled with over a billion people in a country (roughly) the size of Argentina is bound to have water problems as per capita consumption grows with wealth. Conservation + Desalination is the only way here.
- Nux 7y ago
  Argentina what? How are the two comparable?
  - daliusd 7y ago
    Argentina 2 766 890 km² India 3 287 263 km²
  - arethuza 7y ago
    They are roughly comparable in area - though India is a bit bigger.
    - naravara 7y ago
      I would suspect India also has a lot more arable land.
      - jessaustin 7y ago
        "Arable" is a misleading word. It is not a quality of land so much as a quality of the people who live there. India's very problem is that so much wild land has been converted to intensive agricultural use. There is no slack. In Argentina cattle live on the pampas. In India there are no grasslands left so they live in the street. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- assblaster 7y ago
  Why are you attributing water deficit with climate change? Increasing atmospheric water vapor leads to larger storms, floods, and overabundance of ground water. India's problem is overconsumption and population excess. Until India is able to reduce their population by 50% or more, their water shortages will continue to worsen. A sizeable decrease in their population will also reduce their power consumption needs, so they'll be able to close their coal power plants instead of opening dozens more.
  - criley2 7y ago
    It's more complicated than that. Climate change doesn't lead to global increased atmospheric water vapor and the water cycle is very complicated on a global scale. Climate change leads to floods and storms... and droughts and wildfires. Some areas could see greatly increase groundwater recharge while others will see greatly reduced recharge. Even if the global net effect were to increase water, there would still be extreme examples of local droughts causing extreme water stress. In the U.S. for example climate change is leading to decreased rainfall meaning less runoff and less groundwater recharge. The southeast of the US is going to have some very serious water issues for the next generation, albeit not as soon as India.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      In the U.S. for example climate change is leading to decreased rainfall meaning less runoff and less groundwater recharge. Where are you getting this? It certainly doesn't agree with figures published by the government. [0] The aquifers that are dropping are dropping because of massive well pumping. The wildfires are because we've stockpiled understory fuel while building homes in fire-prone forests. Overstating the case for global warming will convince some people, but others will only grow more skeptical. [0] https://www.drought.gov/drought/data-maps-tools/current-conditions https://www.drought.gov/drought/data-maps-tools/current-cond...
      - criley2 7y ago
        https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/water-supply https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/... >Surface and groundwater supplies in some regions are already stressed by increasing demand as well as declining runoff and groundwater recharge. In some regions, particularly the southern U.S. and the Caribbean and Pacific islands, climate change is increasing the likelihood of water shortages and competition for water. Water quality is diminishing in many areas, particularly due to increasing sediment and contaminant concentrations after heavy downpours. I find that people's skepticism regarding climate change has almost nothing to do with data and evidence and nearly everything to do with their personal politics, to the extent that I draw a causative link between right-leaning politics and "climate skepticism".
- empath75 7y ago
  Desalination just makes global warming worse.
  - gubbrora 7y ago
    Not if we use nukes or solar to power it.
    - lorenzhs 7y ago
      ("nukes" commonly refers to nuclear weapons, not power plants)
    - warmwaffles 7y ago
      You still have to deal with the residuals from desalination. About 1/3 of the salt water is useable. The other 2/3s is a brine that can not be used. Not to mention what are you going to do with all of that salt and biological material you just pulled out? You aren't going to be able to sell it.
      - LeifCarrotson 7y ago
        Typically, it's diluted and pumped back into the ocean.
        xeromal 7y ago
        Diluted with what?
        pjc50 7y ago
        More ocean. Some care is involved in doing this so as not to wreck nearby ecosystems, but the ocean as a whole is big enough to absorb a brine flow.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - 7y ago
harryf 7y ago
Last year there was “Rally for Rivers” aimed at addressing some of the problems India faces - https://www.google.com/amp/s/relay.nationalgeographic.com/proxy/distribution/public/amp/2018/03/rally-for-rivers-un-world-water-day-spd https://www.google.com/amp/s/relay.nationalgeographic.com/pr...
- gbuk2013 7y ago
  And, fortunately, it looks like it is getting some traction: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/sadhguru-brings-rally-for-rivers-back-to-maharashtra-with-revival-plan-for-waghari/articleshow/69670513.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/sadhguru-bri...
vectorEQ 7y ago
climate change to the rescue. send them melt water from the poles :D
- dang 7y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
f_allwein 7y ago
> while 2018 was the fourth hottest year on record in the past 140 years since the world began to keep a track on temperatures, NASA expects 2019 to be still hotter. In this context, here's an interesting map on what the world will look like 4 degrees warmer: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look-like-4degc-warmer https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look-l... - apparently, much of the Indian subcontinent will be uninhabitable...
- sadness2 7y ago
  This is unreasonably rosy. Acidification of the ocean and ecological breakdown from overly rapid environmental change appears likely to cause a catastrophic failure of the food chain. Rapid change is necessary. The status quo is not OK.
  - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
    Rosy or not, we need to plan when it happens. The only if we don't know is how bad it will exactly be. And don't forget, that a very valid answer is "food chain collapses, causing mass starvation and death".
    - WalterSear 7y ago
      It's happening. What's the plan? The rise of ISIS was driven by crop failure due to climate change. The temperature in India reached 123 degrees already this year.
      - briandear 7y ago
        The rise of ISIS was not due to climate change, it was a group that arose from AQI, which itself had it origins from Jordanian Jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who, in the 1990s ran jihadist paramilitary camps in Afghanistan. ISIS wasn’t driven by crop failure “due to climate change.” It was essentially a war due to Sunnis not liking Sh’ites — a conflict that has been ongoing for literally centuries. And, in this specific case was due to a power vacuum in the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the roots of that conflict are as old as the 1975 Algiers agreement between Iraq and Iran. Attributing ISIS to climate change is about the same as blaming social media for ISIS; arguably social media’s existence actually helped ISIS propagate more than any causes attributed to climate change. ISIS and it’s origins are exceptionally complicated as are most conflicts in that region. To trivialize it by claiming it was because of climate change is to reveal a profound misunderstanding of the history of that region. We can discuss climate change and it’s causes and effects, but it weakens credibility when almost everything gets blamed on it. It’s getting to the point where when one used to say this bad thing happened because “it’s God’s will,” but now people say, “climate change.” It’s taking on religion-levels of influence to where actual causation gets ignored in favor of attributing everything to CO2. Every storm, every war, every bad thing that happens has a least some people trying to use those events to justify their belief systems. Sometimes weather is just weather, war is just war. If we ended all CO2 emissions tomorrow, the Middle East would still be a cauldron, wars would still happen, crops would still fail from time to time, hurricanes would still destroy things, tornados would still happen. Climate is an important issue, but let’s not turn it into a religion.
r_singh 7y ago
My office building has recently adopted water harvesting (which is an ancient practice in many parts of India). Mumbai receives a LOT of rain, and I’m glad that we’re able to divert some of it to the ground water table. Seeing this succeed, I’m pushing the same for my building too, I’m surprised to see a lot of my neighbours have problems with the same (cause of wastage of a common terrace), I should send them this article.
- rusticpenn 7y ago
  I heard things are critical in southern India, apparently restaurants are closed, our offshore guys are working from home, using starbucks for toilets etc... is this true?
  - iKevinShah 7y ago
    Yes, if your offshore guys are from Chennai.
  - oasisbob 7y ago
    I'm here in Chennai, and things are bad, but it's hard to tell how bad. So much of the water is trucked anyways - Chennai doesn't have a well developed unified water system. As a foreigner who has visited several times, here's what I've noticed: - lots more people on the street with those iconic plastic water containers. Lots more water trucks on the road. - water quality is BAD. Even in upper-class highrise condos, the water has much more odor and color. In this building, salinity is way up too. There's a reverse-osmosis plant here, but it's only on for several hours a day because RO systems waste so much water. - haven't seen many restaurant closures, but I'm sure they're happening. - a lot of hotels targeting westerners have advanced filtration and reverse-osmosis plants, seem to still be operating. Some pools are drained. - water pressure in some neighborhoods is so low that it's only a trickle at the tap. News says some people are using pumps to pull of the metro system, making things worse. Overall, it seems like bad expensive water is still out there if you can afford it and want to pay.
  - r_singh 7y ago
    Must be true, but I would expect a bit of exaggeration there.
airza 7y ago
Climate change and the huge imbalance of men to women in india makes it seem like water wars are inevitable in the region in the next 20-30 years.
AareyBaba 7y ago
Paani Foundation - if you are looking for a heartwarming story of a village in India that overcame water scarcity through rain water harvesting (and a good organization to donate to) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSGF1KQ1UQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSGF1KQ1UQ
nilsocket 7y ago
I live in India, and I can literally feel the difference. But, what I'm surprised of is, many plants didn't dry up. And they are in good condition.
fortytw2 7y ago
awdwad
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
godelmachine 7y ago
Divert water from all 3 rivers in Kashmir down south into mainland India. Abrogate the Indus Water Treaty brokered by World Bank.
- yellowflash 7y ago
  Divert to Ganges and make it a sewage too? This idea is bad in so many ways. It's gross hatred due to mass propaganda. First rule for sustainable water management is having local water supply used locally. We need better water management at individual city/village level like reviving lakes have a good ground water recharge etc.. Diverting rivers and desalination ideas are going to have huge ecological cost even if we forget about the economical possibility of them.
- Arun2009 7y ago
  It turns out that Pakistanis are humans too, and they need water as well. Besides, there's the little problem of nukes.
- devdas 7y ago
  Erm, that makes things worse in Pakistan. You do not want to destabilise an already unstable nuclear power.
- lota-putty 7y ago
  Water The reason Pakistan want Jammu-Kashmir, water security. China took Tibet, for a similar reason. US wanted Gulf Oil; Invaded Iraq, what other countries after WW-II Shit insecure bullies do to nurture their ego/fear.
nilsocket 7y ago
Recently, government of India, started to look into this problem, some part's of India get too much of rain, and others live in drought. They are trying to link up all Indian water bodies. https://www.livemint.com/news/india/a-wish-list-on-water-from-parched-india-1560265588046.html https://www.livemint.com/news/india/a-wish-list-on-water-fro...
- devdas 7y ago
  Which will fuck up river ecologies :(
  - nilsocket 7y ago
    Don't worry they have got brains, they will indeed setup a panel and go forward, with good plan. It's not something like demonetization, to not have any discussion.
  - naruvimama 7y ago
    People are so comfortable pumping the environment air, water and soil with fertilizers, pestisides, antibiotics, plastic, smoke and toxic waste. We have wiped out large areas of forests, over produce and waste food. Why is that we have suddenly become so sensitive when we want to connect waterways. Yes there can be ecological imbalances, but is a very small price to pay compared to all the horrors that we commit.
graeme 7y ago
Basically I think our civilization is default dead. As Paul Graham put it in another context: "Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that." People aren't used to thinking of civilization in these terms. We make retirement plans etc divorced from the projections of change to come. If we rationally considered priorities, you'd see much more popular support for actions designed to address the problem, such as increasing carbon taxes, cutting other taxes, and making an international framework to get other countries to do the same. There's a scene in 12 Monkeys where the protagonist is in a mental hospital in the past, before a virus takes out the civilization. The psychologist asks if he came back to "help" them. The protagonist looks confused and says "how can I help you? You're all dead". We have such a flurry of concern and activity aimed at the present. I can't help but have a similar feeling when I observe people making plans and not accounting for the predicted future, even if they claim to "believe" in climate change. If people truly believed in it, you'd see much different political priorities. Right now effective action tends to be unpopular. Income taxes (taxing a good thing) have much more political support than carbon taxes (taxing a bad thing). I find the situation baffling. More from Paul Graham's article: "There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes." We assume it will be easy to solve problems in the future, with future technology. Or that we will have surplus resources in the future, when worsening conditions cut crop yields, cut water, increase civil strife, and when the global population is larger and total emissions are higher. http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html
- orcdork 7y ago
  Yes, the absolutely correct group to take ideas from as far as our semi-long term survival goes is VCs (and the surrounding ecosystem), the same group that made "move fast and break things" the mantra for a decade. Nothing bad ever came out of that!
  - thatcat 7y ago
    The ideal things to be broken are the structures that currently prevent collective long term survival. While not all VC's focus on this, I think PG does. After all, what is the alternative?
dugluak 7y ago
Didn't NASA report recently that earth is greener than 20 years ago due to China and India? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19228922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19228922
- Mikeb85 7y ago
  Yup. But let's not let science get in the way of alarming headlines...
  - athenot 7y ago
    I have no knowledge of the situation but couldn't the 2 be related? As in more (green) trees pulling more water out of the ground? Then again I would imagine the water pulled out comes back rather fast in the form of a tropical storm.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    "You have ebola but at least your flu is gone." "So I'm going to be all right?!"
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    Read the article. It isn’t as simple as the headline. It’s not good to assume a headline answers all and is the only thing that needs to be known?l.
    - Mikeb85 7y ago
      I read the article. It's mainly about reviving traditional methods of conserving water. The headline is far more alarming. Versus news like this: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/one-third-of-world-s-new-vegetation-in-china-and-india-satellite-data-shows/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/one-third-of-world-s-...
- otikik 7y ago
  Please don't just stop at the title. From the article: > 82% of the greening seen in India – comes from intensive cultivation of food crops. And then: > For example, increased food production in India is facilitated by groundwater irrigation. If the groundwater is depleted, this trend may change. What this new article says is that groundwater is depleted.
Arun2009 7y ago
Monsoons have been a dud so far. Our well nearly dried up, and we were planning to shift should water run out. The municipal water supply is useless. The irony: my state (Kerala) receives around 3000+ mm rainfall per year on average, and suffered from devastating floods last year. I feel sad when Indians wank about military technology and "national security" issues due to Pakistan and China. The single greatest national security threat for India is Indians' abject incompetence in governing themselves. I fear that we will pay a very heavy price for this.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  Does India spend a lot of time and resources on Pakistan stuff? PK is so puny compared to India.
  - iKevinShah 7y ago
    tbf, its less about being actually worried about Pakistan (we are a little) but its more about gaining public support and hence votes due to it.
  - scarmig 7y ago
    How much time does the US spend arguing over relatively minor (in the grand scheme of things) issues like immigration, Presidential dignity, and campus political correctness? All the while, even the DNC refuses to hold a climate change debate to figure out how candidates are approaching the biggest existential threat we face now. Unfortunately humanity isn't good at facing long term issues that require serious sacrifice and collective action.
    - addicted 7y ago
      And the RNC considers it a conspiracy.
      - stronglikedan 7y ago
        Not a conspiracy, just the DNC being the DNC - not really interested in actually solving crises, since crises are their platform.
hangonhn 7y ago
Can someone please enlighten us about the traditional water conservation or restoration methods he alludes to? I'm super curious because apparently they have enough merit that Texas A&M is looking into them. Thanks!
- gbuk2013 7y ago
  My guess is things like this: https://www.thebetterindia.com/61757/traditional-water-conservation-systems-india/ https://www.thebetterindia.com/61757/traditional-water-conse...
  - newsumworld 7y ago
    See also this article: https://newsum.in/news/swimmers-can-track-sweat-through-an-underwater-skin-sensor-now/ https://newsum.in/news/swimmers-can-track-sweat-through-an-u...
sailfast 7y ago
> 21 cities — including the four metropolises — Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi — will run out of groundwater by 2020. Is that a validated statistic? If so, how is the entire country not panicking about this? That seems like a really serious problem.
- martin_a 7y ago
  > If so, how is the entire country not panicking about this? That seems like a really serious problem. Some might be blinded by the space program and how technologically advanced India is/might be in this regard. No time to look for solid water supply, especially if you're not living where water will become not available.
- Arun2009 7y ago
  > If so, how is the entire country not panicking about this? That seems like a really serious problem. This is simply not as emotive an issue for elections as banning cow-slaughter or defending India from the evil Muslims. Not to mention that Indian political discourse is basically a shit-show of politicians trading 3rd grade level insults with one another, a bit like monkeys flinging excrement at each other.
  - cmonnow 7y ago
    r/India leaking.. ?
- sreekanthr 7y ago
  I cannot comment about other cities, Bengaluru it was a known issues. Primarily big builders who launch their projects dig up multiple borewell and pump out the groundwater. When government realized that ground water levels were getting depleted they did make rainwater harvesting mandatory. Yet it is either shoddily implemented or never implemented. Ref: https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/civic/bengaluru-slips-up-on-rainwater-harvesting-despite-being-mandatory-59000-structures-yet-to-have-the-facility-installed/articleshow/64846543.cms https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/civic/benga... Most of the apartment complexes water supplies are provided by tankers. Local politicians have stake in these tanker services, so it is in their best interest to make sure local populace is dependent on the these tankers and not on government connections which is heavily backlogged. Few societies, residents do get together invest their own money to get proper water harvesting, but that is far and few to even make a noticeable difference. Builders most of them flat out refuse to build robust water harvesting systems.
sametmax 7y ago
So no more water in a country saturated with pollution, full of 1.7 billion of people with huge social tensions, bad relationships at borders and the atomic bomb. What could go wrong.
petilon 7y ago
California is drying up too. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/depleting-the-water/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/depleting-the-water/ Our planet's groundwater is being pumped out much faster than it can be replenished.
- EGreg 7y ago
  What happened to desalination? The oceans are ripe for desalination! https://phys.org/news/2019-06-hot-efficiency-solar-desalination.html https://phys.org/news/2019-06-hot-efficiency-solar-desalinat... One can do it even by focusing sunlight, why can’t they do it at industrial scale? I think Israel started to. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the... They used to import icebergs. (It’s a good example of Cunningham’s law.)
sudipnth 7y ago
If you feel depressed after reading this, watch how one person initiated the clean up of an entire beach in Mumbai which was covered with 5 feet of filth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0ka45g4Fyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0ka45g4Fyc

214 points by akbarnama 7y ago

mc32 7y ago

Climate change and weather patterns change coupled with over a billion people in a country (roughly) the size of Argentina is bound to have water problems as per capita consumption grows with wealth. Conservation + Desalination is the only way here.

Nux 7y ago
Argentina what? How are the two comparable?
- daliusd 7y ago
  Argentina 2 766 890 km² India 3 287 263 km²
- arethuza 7y ago
  They are roughly comparable in area - though India is a bit bigger.
  - naravara 7y ago
    I would suspect India also has a lot more arable land.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      "Arable" is a misleading word. It is not a quality of land so much as a quality of the people who live there. India's very problem is that so much wild land has been converted to intensive agricultural use. There is no slack. In Argentina cattle live on the pampas. In India there are no grasslands left so they live in the street. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
assblaster 7y ago
Why are you attributing water deficit with climate change? Increasing atmospheric water vapor leads to larger storms, floods, and overabundance of ground water. India's problem is overconsumption and population excess. Until India is able to reduce their population by 50% or more, their water shortages will continue to worsen. A sizeable decrease in their population will also reduce their power consumption needs, so they'll be able to close their coal power plants instead of opening dozens more.
- criley2 7y ago
  It's more complicated than that. Climate change doesn't lead to global increased atmospheric water vapor and the water cycle is very complicated on a global scale. Climate change leads to floods and storms... and droughts and wildfires. Some areas could see greatly increase groundwater recharge while others will see greatly reduced recharge. Even if the global net effect were to increase water, there would still be extreme examples of local droughts causing extreme water stress. In the U.S. for example climate change is leading to decreased rainfall meaning less runoff and less groundwater recharge. The southeast of the US is going to have some very serious water issues for the next generation, albeit not as soon as India.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    In the U.S. for example climate change is leading to decreased rainfall meaning less runoff and less groundwater recharge. Where are you getting this? It certainly doesn't agree with figures published by the government. [0] The aquifers that are dropping are dropping because of massive well pumping. The wildfires are because we've stockpiled understory fuel while building homes in fire-prone forests. Overstating the case for global warming will convince some people, but others will only grow more skeptical. [0] https://www.drought.gov/drought/data-maps-tools/current-conditions https://www.drought.gov/drought/data-maps-tools/current-cond...
    - criley2 7y ago
      https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/water-supply https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/... >Surface and groundwater supplies in some regions are already stressed by increasing demand as well as declining runoff and groundwater recharge. In some regions, particularly the southern U.S. and the Caribbean and Pacific islands, climate change is increasing the likelihood of water shortages and competition for water. Water quality is diminishing in many areas, particularly due to increasing sediment and contaminant concentrations after heavy downpours. I find that people's skepticism regarding climate change has almost nothing to do with data and evidence and nearly everything to do with their personal politics, to the extent that I draw a causative link between right-leaning politics and "climate skepticism".
empath75 7y ago
Desalination just makes global warming worse.
- gubbrora 7y ago
  Not if we use nukes or solar to power it.
  - lorenzhs 7y ago
    ("nukes" commonly refers to nuclear weapons, not power plants)
  - warmwaffles 7y ago
    You still have to deal with the residuals from desalination. About 1/3 of the salt water is useable. The other 2/3s is a brine that can not be used. Not to mention what are you going to do with all of that salt and biological material you just pulled out? You aren't going to be able to sell it.
    - LeifCarrotson 7y ago
      Typically, it's diluted and pumped back into the ocean.
      - xeromal 7y ago
        Diluted with what?
        pjc50 7y ago
        More ocean. Some care is involved in doing this so as not to wreck nearby ecosystems, but the ocean as a whole is big enough to absorb a brine flow.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - 7y ago

harryf 7y ago

Last year there was “Rally for Rivers” aimed at addressing some of the problems India faces - https://www.google.com/amp/s/relay.nationalgeographic.com/proxy/distribution/public/amp/2018/03/rally-for-rivers-un-world-water-day-spd https://www.google.com/amp/s/relay.nationalgeographic.com/pr...

gbuk2013 7y ago
And, fortunately, it looks like it is getting some traction: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/sadhguru-brings-rally-for-rivers-back-to-maharashtra-with-revival-plan-for-waghari/articleshow/69670513.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/sadhguru-bri...

vectorEQ 7y ago

climate change to the rescue. send them melt water from the poles :D

dang 7y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

f_allwein 7y ago

> while 2018 was the fourth hottest year on record in the past 140 years since the world began to keep a track on temperatures, NASA expects 2019 to be still hotter. In this context, here's an interesting map on what the world will look like 4 degrees warmer: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look-like-4degc-warmer https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look-l... - apparently, much of the Indian subcontinent will be uninhabitable...

sadness2 7y ago
This is unreasonably rosy. Acidification of the ocean and ecological breakdown from overly rapid environmental change appears likely to cause a catastrophic failure of the food chain. Rapid change is necessary. The status quo is not OK.
- crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  Rosy or not, we need to plan when it happens. The only if we don't know is how bad it will exactly be. And don't forget, that a very valid answer is "food chain collapses, causing mass starvation and death".
  - WalterSear 7y ago
    It's happening. What's the plan? The rise of ISIS was driven by crop failure due to climate change. The temperature in India reached 123 degrees already this year.
    - briandear 7y ago
      The rise of ISIS was not due to climate change, it was a group that arose from AQI, which itself had it origins from Jordanian Jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who, in the 1990s ran jihadist paramilitary camps in Afghanistan. ISIS wasn’t driven by crop failure “due to climate change.” It was essentially a war due to Sunnis not liking Sh’ites — a conflict that has been ongoing for literally centuries. And, in this specific case was due to a power vacuum in the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the roots of that conflict are as old as the 1975 Algiers agreement between Iraq and Iran. Attributing ISIS to climate change is about the same as blaming social media for ISIS; arguably social media’s existence actually helped ISIS propagate more than any causes attributed to climate change. ISIS and it’s origins are exceptionally complicated as are most conflicts in that region. To trivialize it by claiming it was because of climate change is to reveal a profound misunderstanding of the history of that region. We can discuss climate change and it’s causes and effects, but it weakens credibility when almost everything gets blamed on it. It’s getting to the point where when one used to say this bad thing happened because “it’s God’s will,” but now people say, “climate change.” It’s taking on religion-levels of influence to where actual causation gets ignored in favor of attributing everything to CO2. Every storm, every war, every bad thing that happens has a least some people trying to use those events to justify their belief systems. Sometimes weather is just weather, war is just war. If we ended all CO2 emissions tomorrow, the Middle East would still be a cauldron, wars would still happen, crops would still fail from time to time, hurricanes would still destroy things, tornados would still happen. Climate is an important issue, but let’s not turn it into a religion.

r_singh 7y ago

My office building has recently adopted water harvesting (which is an ancient practice in many parts of India). Mumbai receives a LOT of rain, and I’m glad that we’re able to divert some of it to the ground water table. Seeing this succeed, I’m pushing the same for my building too, I’m surprised to see a lot of my neighbours have problems with the same (cause of wastage of a common terrace), I should send them this article.

rusticpenn 7y ago
I heard things are critical in southern India, apparently restaurants are closed, our offshore guys are working from home, using starbucks for toilets etc... is this true?
- iKevinShah 7y ago
  Yes, if your offshore guys are from Chennai.
- oasisbob 7y ago
  I'm here in Chennai, and things are bad, but it's hard to tell how bad. So much of the water is trucked anyways - Chennai doesn't have a well developed unified water system. As a foreigner who has visited several times, here's what I've noticed: - lots more people on the street with those iconic plastic water containers. Lots more water trucks on the road. - water quality is BAD. Even in upper-class highrise condos, the water has much more odor and color. In this building, salinity is way up too. There's a reverse-osmosis plant here, but it's only on for several hours a day because RO systems waste so much water. - haven't seen many restaurant closures, but I'm sure they're happening. - a lot of hotels targeting westerners have advanced filtration and reverse-osmosis plants, seem to still be operating. Some pools are drained. - water pressure in some neighborhoods is so low that it's only a trickle at the tap. News says some people are using pumps to pull of the metro system, making things worse. Overall, it seems like bad expensive water is still out there if you can afford it and want to pay.
- r_singh 7y ago
  Must be true, but I would expect a bit of exaggeration there.

airza 7y ago

Climate change and the huge imbalance of men to women in india makes it seem like water wars are inevitable in the region in the next 20-30 years.

AareyBaba 7y ago

Paani Foundation - if you are looking for a heartwarming story of a village in India that overcame water scarcity through rain water harvesting (and a good organization to donate to) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSGF1KQ1UQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSGF1KQ1UQ

nilsocket 7y ago

I live in India, and I can literally feel the difference. But, what I'm surprised of is, many plants didn't dry up. And they are in good condition.

fortytw2 7y ago

awdwad

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

godelmachine 7y ago

Divert water from all 3 rivers in Kashmir down south into mainland India. Abrogate the Indus Water Treaty brokered by World Bank.

yellowflash 7y ago
Divert to Ganges and make it a sewage too? This idea is bad in so many ways. It's gross hatred due to mass propaganda. First rule for sustainable water management is having local water supply used locally. We need better water management at individual city/village level like reviving lakes have a good ground water recharge etc.. Diverting rivers and desalination ideas are going to have huge ecological cost even if we forget about the economical possibility of them.
Arun2009 7y ago
It turns out that Pakistanis are humans too, and they need water as well. Besides, there's the little problem of nukes.
devdas 7y ago
Erm, that makes things worse in Pakistan. You do not want to destabilise an already unstable nuclear power.
lota-putty 7y ago
Water The reason Pakistan want Jammu-Kashmir, water security. China took Tibet, for a similar reason. US wanted Gulf Oil; Invaded Iraq, what other countries after WW-II Shit insecure bullies do to nurture their ego/fear.

nilsocket 7y ago

Recently, government of India, started to look into this problem, some part's of India get too much of rain, and others live in drought. They are trying to link up all Indian water bodies. https://www.livemint.com/news/india/a-wish-list-on-water-from-parched-india-1560265588046.html https://www.livemint.com/news/india/a-wish-list-on-water-fro...

devdas 7y ago
Which will fuck up river ecologies :(
- nilsocket 7y ago
  Don't worry they have got brains, they will indeed setup a panel and go forward, with good plan. It's not something like demonetization, to not have any discussion.
- naruvimama 7y ago
  People are so comfortable pumping the environment air, water and soil with fertilizers, pestisides, antibiotics, plastic, smoke and toxic waste. We have wiped out large areas of forests, over produce and waste food. Why is that we have suddenly become so sensitive when we want to connect waterways. Yes there can be ecological imbalances, but is a very small price to pay compared to all the horrors that we commit.

graeme 7y ago

Basically I think our civilization is default dead. As Paul Graham put it in another context: "Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that." People aren't used to thinking of civilization in these terms. We make retirement plans etc divorced from the projections of change to come. If we rationally considered priorities, you'd see much more popular support for actions designed to address the problem, such as increasing carbon taxes, cutting other taxes, and making an international framework to get other countries to do the same. There's a scene in 12 Monkeys where the protagonist is in a mental hospital in the past, before a virus takes out the civilization. The psychologist asks if he came back to "help" them. The protagonist looks confused and says "how can I help you? You're all dead". We have such a flurry of concern and activity aimed at the present. I can't help but have a similar feeling when I observe people making plans and not accounting for the predicted future, even if they claim to "believe" in climate change. If people truly believed in it, you'd see much different political priorities. Right now effective action tends to be unpopular. Income taxes (taxing a good thing) have much more political support than carbon taxes (taxing a bad thing). I find the situation baffling. More from Paul Graham's article: "There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes." We assume it will be easy to solve problems in the future, with future technology. Or that we will have surplus resources in the future, when worsening conditions cut crop yields, cut water, increase civil strife, and when the global population is larger and total emissions are higher. http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html

orcdork 7y ago
Yes, the absolutely correct group to take ideas from as far as our semi-long term survival goes is VCs (and the surrounding ecosystem), the same group that made "move fast and break things" the mantra for a decade. Nothing bad ever came out of that!
- thatcat 7y ago
  The ideal things to be broken are the structures that currently prevent collective long term survival. While not all VC's focus on this, I think PG does. After all, what is the alternative?

dugluak 7y ago

Didn't NASA report recently that earth is greener than 20 years ago due to China and India? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19228922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19228922

Mikeb85 7y ago
Yup. But let's not let science get in the way of alarming headlines...
- athenot 7y ago
  I have no knowledge of the situation but couldn't the 2 be related? As in more (green) trees pulling more water out of the ground? Then again I would imagine the water pulled out comes back rather fast in the form of a tropical storm.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  "You have ebola but at least your flu is gone." "So I'm going to be all right?!"
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  Read the article. It isn’t as simple as the headline. It’s not good to assume a headline answers all and is the only thing that needs to be known?l.
  - Mikeb85 7y ago
    I read the article. It's mainly about reviving traditional methods of conserving water. The headline is far more alarming. Versus news like this: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/one-third-of-world-s-new-vegetation-in-china-and-india-satellite-data-shows/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/one-third-of-world-s-...
otikik 7y ago
Please don't just stop at the title. From the article: > 82% of the greening seen in India – comes from intensive cultivation of food crops. And then: > For example, increased food production in India is facilitated by groundwater irrigation. If the groundwater is depleted, this trend may change. What this new article says is that groundwater is depleted.

Arun2009 7y ago

Monsoons have been a dud so far. Our well nearly dried up, and we were planning to shift should water run out. The municipal water supply is useless. The irony: my state (Kerala) receives around 3000+ mm rainfall per year on average, and suffered from devastating floods last year. I feel sad when Indians wank about military technology and "national security" issues due to Pakistan and China. The single greatest national security threat for India is Indians' abject incompetence in governing themselves. I fear that we will pay a very heavy price for this.

skinnymuch 7y ago
Does India spend a lot of time and resources on Pakistan stuff? PK is so puny compared to India.
- iKevinShah 7y ago
  tbf, its less about being actually worried about Pakistan (we are a little) but its more about gaining public support and hence votes due to it.
- scarmig 7y ago
  How much time does the US spend arguing over relatively minor (in the grand scheme of things) issues like immigration, Presidential dignity, and campus political correctness? All the while, even the DNC refuses to hold a climate change debate to figure out how candidates are approaching the biggest existential threat we face now. Unfortunately humanity isn't good at facing long term issues that require serious sacrifice and collective action.
  - addicted 7y ago
    And the RNC considers it a conspiracy.
    - stronglikedan 7y ago
      Not a conspiracy, just the DNC being the DNC - not really interested in actually solving crises, since crises are their platform.

hangonhn 7y ago

Can someone please enlighten us about the traditional water conservation or restoration methods he alludes to? I'm super curious because apparently they have enough merit that Texas A&M is looking into them. Thanks!

gbuk2013 7y ago
My guess is things like this: https://www.thebetterindia.com/61757/traditional-water-conservation-systems-india/ https://www.thebetterindia.com/61757/traditional-water-conse...
- newsumworld 7y ago
  See also this article: https://newsum.in/news/swimmers-can-track-sweat-through-an-underwater-skin-sensor-now/ https://newsum.in/news/swimmers-can-track-sweat-through-an-u...

sailfast 7y ago

> 21 cities — including the four metropolises — Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi — will run out of groundwater by 2020. Is that a validated statistic? If so, how is the entire country not panicking about this? That seems like a really serious problem.

martin_a 7y ago
> If so, how is the entire country not panicking about this? That seems like a really serious problem. Some might be blinded by the space program and how technologically advanced India is/might be in this regard. No time to look for solid water supply, especially if you're not living where water will become not available.
Arun2009 7y ago
> If so, how is the entire country not panicking about this? That seems like a really serious problem. This is simply not as emotive an issue for elections as banning cow-slaughter or defending India from the evil Muslims. Not to mention that Indian political discourse is basically a shit-show of politicians trading 3rd grade level insults with one another, a bit like monkeys flinging excrement at each other.
- cmonnow 7y ago
  r/India leaking.. ?
sreekanthr 7y ago
I cannot comment about other cities, Bengaluru it was a known issues. Primarily big builders who launch their projects dig up multiple borewell and pump out the groundwater. When government realized that ground water levels were getting depleted they did make rainwater harvesting mandatory. Yet it is either shoddily implemented or never implemented. Ref: https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/civic/bengaluru-slips-up-on-rainwater-harvesting-despite-being-mandatory-59000-structures-yet-to-have-the-facility-installed/articleshow/64846543.cms https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/civic/benga... Most of the apartment complexes water supplies are provided by tankers. Local politicians have stake in these tanker services, so it is in their best interest to make sure local populace is dependent on the these tankers and not on government connections which is heavily backlogged. Few societies, residents do get together invest their own money to get proper water harvesting, but that is far and few to even make a noticeable difference. Builders most of them flat out refuse to build robust water harvesting systems.

sametmax 7y ago

So no more water in a country saturated with pollution, full of 1.7 billion of people with huge social tensions, bad relationships at borders and the atomic bomb. What could go wrong.

petilon 7y ago

California is drying up too. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/depleting-the-water/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/depleting-the-water/ Our planet's groundwater is being pumped out much faster than it can be replenished.

EGreg 7y ago
What happened to desalination? The oceans are ripe for desalination! https://phys.org/news/2019-06-hot-efficiency-solar-desalination.html https://phys.org/news/2019-06-hot-efficiency-solar-desalinat... One can do it even by focusing sunlight, why can’t they do it at industrial scale? I think Israel started to. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the... They used to import icebergs. (It’s a good example of Cunningham’s law.)

sudipnth 7y ago

If you feel depressed after reading this, watch how one person initiated the clean up of an entire beach in Mumbai which was covered with 5 feet of filth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0ka45g4Fyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0ka45g4Fyc