6 ms·

If weather patterns shift, the infrastructure built to store water will have to shift as well. Earth is a closed system, so we should expect to see water stora

If weather patterns shift, the infrastructure built to store water will have to shift as well. Earth is a closed system, so we should expect to see water storage decline in some areas and flooding increase in some areas. It’s all climate change stuff.

eimrine 3y ago
> Earth is a closed system, so we should expect to see water storage decline in some areas and flooding increase in some areas. Of course, Earth is a closed system, but I am not sure it is that closed.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- smeej 3y ago
  I don't mean this to sound snarky. I'm genuinely curious where you think the water will go, if not to other places on earth.
  - xwdv 3y ago
    We lose atmosphere to space everyday.
    - neom 3y ago
      The mesosphere has very little water in it. http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2 http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2 https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/mesosphere https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...
    - chmod775 3y ago
      And we also gain water from space through meteorites every day.
    - seventytwo 3y ago
      I’m sorry my model didn’t account for your 8th order effects. You’re technically correct.
  - eimrine 3y ago
    > where you think the water will go, if not to other places on earth I afraid that a lot of fresh water is going to become an ocean water. Flooding theory creates the impression of transferring fresh water from one place to another where it will remain just as fresh. It is incredibly hard to create a fresh water from salty one.
    - helge9210 3y ago
      > It is incredibly hard to create a fresh water from salty one. Fresh water is created from the salty water by evaporation all the time.
      - fpesce 3y ago
        Indeed, and it's interesting to note that this natural desalination process also incorporates long-term storage mechanisms. Historically, vast quantities of freshwater have been stored in the form of snow packs and glaciers. However, in our changing climate, this storage is not occurring at the same scale as it used to. This could potentially exacerbate future water scarcity issues, making man-made desalination techniques even more crucial. As challenging as creating freshwater from saltwater may be, it's a puzzle we need to solve with urgency.
        flavius29663 3y ago
        on the other hand, global warming will pump much more water in the atmosphere, and we will have more precipitation. In fact, global warming would not be a problem at all if what I said above was not true. CO2 alone could only raise the temperature by 1C no matter how much we would put in the air (by year 2100). The water vapor creates a positive feedback loop that warms it far beyond what CO2 can do alone.
        mrguyorama 3y ago
        But that's not actually helpful. Occasional massive rains don't refill aquifers very well. There needs to be a buffer to allow water to slowly make it's way into the system in a manageable way. Currently that is mountain snow melting over the warm season.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    Into the ocean. The ocean covers the majority of the Earth's surface. The ocean is full of salt. Water which rains out over the oceans is unusable as drinking or irrigation water without expensive processing (desalination). If historic rainfall patterns change, there is absolutely no requirement that the rain land anywhere useful for our existing infrastructure or human habitation. Yes, the water won't disappear, but if the effect is rainfall hits the ocean, or say, flood-prone regions even harder then it normally does, it's still going to be coming down somewhere not useful to us. The problem is not that we can't solve these problems, it's that is is staggeringly expensive to do so.
    - phpisthebest 3y ago
      >>it's that is is staggeringly expensive to do so. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and with Necessity also comes scale, and with scale comes less cost... Desalination has been expensive because it is not necessary, the second it becomes necessary I bet you will see the costs drop.. If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick
      - excalibur 3y ago
        > If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick Make it so.
      - nathan_compton 3y ago
        I think many of us working in software can be overconfident about how easy it is to scale things, probably because of the peculiar progress in the improvement of integrated circuits and the commensurate increased availability of raw compute for not that much more energy. But many processes (including desalinization, as far as I understand it) are energy bound. It is really hard to make exponential progress when a process is bound by how much energy you can muster up to put into it. That is why rockets haven't had an exponential increase in the amount of weight they can get into orbit in the last 100 years. With gravity you must pay the piper. I doubt scaling desalinization is as hard as hurling stuff into space, but it may not be easy to scale either. There are plenty of places on earth which are very dry, adjacent to salt water, and extremely rich and yet no great desalinization technologies have come from them.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    It's easy to overlook the effects of transpiration, which is a result of photosynthesis, which is impacted by biodiversity loss. It short circuits water's path back to the ocean and puts it back into the air above land where it can precipitate into lakes a second time. Without it, snowmelt-fed rivers dry out earlier. As more ice melts there might be more liquid water available, but the ecosystems that would process that water into vapor are struggling. So you end up with a situation where the only source of water vapor in the air is the oceans. As temperatures increase that'll again be a net increase in ocean-driven evaporation, but it'll be less evenly distributed than evaporation+transpiration was. So the concern is that the only available water will be too salty to drink, or too destructive to capture.
  - vermilingua 3y ago
    Higher global average temperatures means higher global average specific humidity. As the air warms it can hold more water vapour, which means less condensation. I don’t know how much difference this makes, but I expect it’s not insignificant.
    - ericd 3y ago
      It also means a higher rate of evaporation from the oceans.
      - vermilingua 3y ago
        True, but oceans only evaporate from the surface while the air retains moisture by volume. There is considerably more low, warm air than there is ocean surface.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    The earth as a whole is roughly a closed system, but "usable water" is not. Most resource problems are not about the quantity of some thing changing as a percentage of earth's matter. Most resources are about density and composition. If all of the (non-ice) freshwater on earth was suddenly dumped into the ocean, we'd have the same amount of overall water - but little to no drinkable water. Likewise, we're not really creating new carbon by burning fossil fuels. We're moving and re-distributing it. Compared to being deep underground, the form we create by burning captures much more heat, causing many problems.
neom 3y ago
https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/devastating-floods-pakistan-2022 https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/devastating-floods-pakist... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods “in the recorded history [of the area] that we have since 1918, we have never had this much rain.”
gonzo41 3y ago
Earth isn't a closed system, we take in energy from the sun.
- jakswa 3y ago
  Also we slowly lose upper atmosphere to the solar winds, when the magnetic fields fail to deflect it enough.
- _Microft 3y ago
  That's not a problem. Closed systems can do that. If they additionally do not exchange energy with their environment they are called isolated systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system

eimrine 3y ago

> Earth is a closed system, so we should expect to see water storage decline in some areas and flooding increase in some areas. Of course, Earth is a closed system, but I am not sure it is that closed.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
smeej 3y ago
I don't mean this to sound snarky. I'm genuinely curious where you think the water will go, if not to other places on earth.
- xwdv 3y ago
  We lose atmosphere to space everyday.
  - neom 3y ago
    The mesosphere has very little water in it. http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2 http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2 https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/mesosphere https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...
  - chmod775 3y ago
    And we also gain water from space through meteorites every day.
  - seventytwo 3y ago
    I’m sorry my model didn’t account for your 8th order effects. You’re technically correct.
- eimrine 3y ago
  > where you think the water will go, if not to other places on earth I afraid that a lot of fresh water is going to become an ocean water. Flooding theory creates the impression of transferring fresh water from one place to another where it will remain just as fresh. It is incredibly hard to create a fresh water from salty one.
  - helge9210 3y ago
    > It is incredibly hard to create a fresh water from salty one. Fresh water is created from the salty water by evaporation all the time.
    - fpesce 3y ago
      Indeed, and it's interesting to note that this natural desalination process also incorporates long-term storage mechanisms. Historically, vast quantities of freshwater have been stored in the form of snow packs and glaciers. However, in our changing climate, this storage is not occurring at the same scale as it used to. This could potentially exacerbate future water scarcity issues, making man-made desalination techniques even more crucial. As challenging as creating freshwater from saltwater may be, it's a puzzle we need to solve with urgency.
      - flavius29663 3y ago
        on the other hand, global warming will pump much more water in the atmosphere, and we will have more precipitation. In fact, global warming would not be a problem at all if what I said above was not true. CO2 alone could only raise the temperature by 1C no matter how much we would put in the air (by year 2100). The water vapor creates a positive feedback loop that warms it far beyond what CO2 can do alone.
        mrguyorama 3y ago
        But that's not actually helpful. Occasional massive rains don't refill aquifers very well. There needs to be a buffer to allow water to slowly make it's way into the system in a manageable way. Currently that is mountain snow melting over the warm season.
- XorNot 3y ago
  Into the ocean. The ocean covers the majority of the Earth's surface. The ocean is full of salt. Water which rains out over the oceans is unusable as drinking or irrigation water without expensive processing (desalination). If historic rainfall patterns change, there is absolutely no requirement that the rain land anywhere useful for our existing infrastructure or human habitation. Yes, the water won't disappear, but if the effect is rainfall hits the ocean, or say, flood-prone regions even harder then it normally does, it's still going to be coming down somewhere not useful to us. The problem is not that we can't solve these problems, it's that is is staggeringly expensive to do so.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    >>it's that is is staggeringly expensive to do so. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and with Necessity also comes scale, and with scale comes less cost... Desalination has been expensive because it is not necessary, the second it becomes necessary I bet you will see the costs drop.. If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick
    - excalibur 3y ago
      > If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick Make it so.
    - nathan_compton 3y ago
      I think many of us working in software can be overconfident about how easy it is to scale things, probably because of the peculiar progress in the improvement of integrated circuits and the commensurate increased availability of raw compute for not that much more energy. But many processes (including desalinization, as far as I understand it) are energy bound. It is really hard to make exponential progress when a process is bound by how much energy you can muster up to put into it. That is why rockets haven't had an exponential increase in the amount of weight they can get into orbit in the last 100 years. With gravity you must pay the piper. I doubt scaling desalinization is as hard as hurling stuff into space, but it may not be easy to scale either. There are plenty of places on earth which are very dry, adjacent to salt water, and extremely rich and yet no great desalinization technologies have come from them.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  It's easy to overlook the effects of transpiration, which is a result of photosynthesis, which is impacted by biodiversity loss. It short circuits water's path back to the ocean and puts it back into the air above land where it can precipitate into lakes a second time. Without it, snowmelt-fed rivers dry out earlier. As more ice melts there might be more liquid water available, but the ecosystems that would process that water into vapor are struggling. So you end up with a situation where the only source of water vapor in the air is the oceans. As temperatures increase that'll again be a net increase in ocean-driven evaporation, but it'll be less evenly distributed than evaporation+transpiration was. So the concern is that the only available water will be too salty to drink, or too destructive to capture.
- vermilingua 3y ago
  Higher global average temperatures means higher global average specific humidity. As the air warms it can hold more water vapour, which means less condensation. I don’t know how much difference this makes, but I expect it’s not insignificant.
  - ericd 3y ago
    It also means a higher rate of evaporation from the oceans.
    - vermilingua 3y ago
      True, but oceans only evaporate from the surface while the air retains moisture by volume. There is considerably more low, warm air than there is ocean surface.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  The earth as a whole is roughly a closed system, but "usable water" is not. Most resource problems are not about the quantity of some thing changing as a percentage of earth's matter. Most resources are about density and composition. If all of the (non-ice) freshwater on earth was suddenly dumped into the ocean, we'd have the same amount of overall water - but little to no drinkable water. Likewise, we're not really creating new carbon by burning fossil fuels. We're moving and re-distributing it. Compared to being deep underground, the form we create by burning captures much more heat, causing many problems.

neom 3y ago

https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/devastating-floods-pakistan-2022 https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/devastating-floods-pakist... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods “in the recorded history [of the area] that we have since 1918, we have never had this much rain.”

gonzo41 3y ago

Earth isn't a closed system, we take in energy from the sun.

jakswa 3y ago
Also we slowly lose upper atmosphere to the solar winds, when the magnetic fields fail to deflect it enough.
_Microft 3y ago
That's not a problem. Closed systems can do that. If they additionally do not exchange energy with their environment they are called isolated systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system