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> A queue of ships waiting to use the canal has been growing in recent months amid a deep drought. A key point of a lot of climate change projections have been
by aeturnum 3y ago
> A queue of ships waiting to use the canal has been growing in recent months amid a deep drought.
A key point of a lot of climate change projections have been that we will be encountering changes that are very hard to predict and plan for.
- mysterydip 3y agoRising sea levels and deep drought seem at odds with each other, but I'm not a climate scientist. Maybe they go hand in hand?
- 4death4 3y agoWhy do they seem at odds with each other?
- thepasswordis 3y agoBecause at least intuitively the panama canal seems to rely on seawater, which would seem like it is unaffected by drought, and only positively effected by sea level rise.
- klyrs 3y ago> Canal locks at each end lift ships up to Gatun Lake, an artificial freshwater lake 26 meters (85 ft) above sea level, created by damming up the Chagres River and Lake Alajuela to reduce the amount of excavation work required for the canal, and then lower the ships at the other end. An average of 200,000,000 L (52,000,000 US gal) of fresh water are used in a single passing of a ship. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal
- mongol 3y agoNo the Panama canal passes through freshwater, and you cannot let seawater enter for ecological reasons.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fencepost 3y agoKeep in mind that water flows downhill free but you have to pay for pumping to go uphill. Climate change CAN impact availability of fresh water in the form of rain since warm air holds more moisture, but that's double edged - there's more evaporation from freshwater bodies as well, and the rain can be unpredictable and dangerous since some will be in the form of major storms dumping water nobody's equipped to store along with all the other storm damage.
- HnUser12 3y agoSomeone else linked this video and definitely helped me understand better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh79YSCC8mM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh79YSCC8mM
- ProfessorLayton 3y agoI know the video covered that it has been tried before, but it seems like the long term solution would be to actually excavate and connect the seas. We have much better excavation technology, and would allow for much, much higher throughput than this elaborate contraption subject to climate change.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoThe seas aren't at the same elevation. The Pacific is a couple dozen cm higher than the Atlantic Coast, and the amount varies. Cutting the peninsula would turn into a disaster pretty quickly, even with sci fi excavation technology.
- jacquesm 3y agoI'm not so sure that it would make such a huge difference that it would be an immediate disaster, across that kind of distance there are plenty of examples of more elevation, what you would have is a river flowing one way instead of two rivers flowing towards the see. Not unlike any other island that the sea flows around. Or is there something in particular that would make this connection into a disaster area if that flow got started? The length of the canal is about 75 km, a few dozen cm across that distance would be on the order of 0.04 mm / meter, which is barely enough to make water flow in a particular direction.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoIt'd be highly susceptible to erosion, and the channel wouldn't be stable. It'd either expand gradually over time with all sorts of ecological ramifications, or deposition would clog the channel constantly. Who knows, might do both depending on seasonal factors? Imagine the damage a hurricane might do to those massive cliffs, for example.
- jacquesm 3y agoIt's mostly above sea level.
- acchow 3y agoI'm trying to figure out why they would seem at odds to you. Can you elaborate please?
- lazyasciiart 3y agoDon’t know about original commenter, but I vaguely remember from high school science that seawater evaporates into the clouds and becomes rain. So if you picture it all as water going through a cycle, you’d expect there to be more water in all stages if there is more water in one?
- deadbeeves 3y agoPerhaps there would be more water in total on land, but it doesn't mean it would be distributed evenly. Weather pattern changes caused by the rising sea level could mean that some areas get drought, even while standing right next to the ocean.
- jjulius 3y agoUpvoting this because it seems like they're genuinely trying to understand what's happening. They don't deserve the down votes. Edit: Even I learned this[1] from this comment chain, so it seems to me like this isn't necessarily common knowledge. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38255008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38255008
- mysterydip 3y agoYes, I'm genuinely asking, thanks.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoThat comment doesn’t really seem relevant to the question: it’s answering “why do you need freshwater for the canal when you have sea water”, but if I understood correctly, they asked “why is there less freshwater around when there’s more seawater?”
- vkou 3y ago1. Drought refers to lack of fresh water in a particular region. Sea level rise has next to no bearing on whether or not rain is going to fall in <some particular region>. A higher sea level does not meaningfully affect evaporation and precipitation rates. 2. Most of the sea level rise expected from conservative[1] projections of climate change will be hitting us decades and centuries from now. Sea levels have only risen by ~8 inches since 1900, but even if we stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, we would have another 3 feet to look forward to by 2100, and 4.5 more feet by 2200. 3. Storm surges[1], caused by stronger storms, caused by climate change can make low-lying coastal areas uninhabitable, without actually drowning them due to sea level rise. ---- [1] Less conservative projections are dismissed out-of-hand as alarmist, but seem to provide a better roadmap for reality than fairy tales, like the 2C warming that the Paris Accord promised us. [2] The sea level may have only gone up a few inches, but if an average worst-storm-of-the-year storm surge has gained a foot, it may be the difference between your house being fine, and having six inches of seawater in your living room for one day of every year.
- mysterydip 3y agoThanks!
- Consultant32452 3y agoWould increasing global ocean and air temperatures lead to more water evaporating and a net increase in total rainfall of fresh water across the globe, even if it might also result in changes to where the rain falls?
- jacquesm 3y agoNo, it makes perfect sense: more water in the oceans means less in circulation.
- londons_explore 3y agoUnfortunately, one really needs to divide it as "freshwater" "saltwater" and "ice". It's ice thats seeing the biggest declines. Freshwater is mostly just being redistributed.
- marcosdumay 3y agoIt's less in ice. It's also probably more in circulation. Way more. But it almost certainly also means that water will circulate through different places, making sure you have both catastrophic floods and droughts.
- jacquesm 3y agoYes, that's true.
- Tao3300 3y agoThe drought is probably just bad luck. They should have had a couple hurricanes go through there. Sometimes you just don't get the rain. AFAIK from news people freaking out every time there's a hurricane (good source, I know) climate change is causing more of them.
- fallingknife 3y agoI get the feeling here that a lot of the climate change rhetoric is not at all scientific and based mostly around convenience. E.g. I have to trust the IPCC model or I'm a "denier" but at the same time when something isn't in the model projections it's "unpredictable" Is there any actual evidence that global warming increases droughts in central America? Or is this just another "every time a hurricane hits we blame it on global warming?"
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoExcept the impact was totally predicted. Climate change, with more total energy in the atmosphere, increases the occurrence of extreme weather events - the lengths and severity of droughts, but also the severity of extreme flooding. The best example I've seen of this is portions of Australia: would have to search to find the source but a great quote was that over a ten or twenty year span they had totally average rainfall - it was just distributed with 9 years or something of extreme drought followed by intense floods. It has long been known that drought is a major problem for the Panama Canal, and that climate change will increase the severity and occurrences of droughts. None of this is unexpected.
- nemo44x 3y agoCorrect - this has nothing to do with it. Droughts happen. This is a story not because of the drought but because of how busy the canal is and the cargo of the ship that paid to skip the line. It was time sensitive cargo.
- hef19898 3y agoOne, it was an empty LNG tanker. Two, the owner might still walk back from the bid. Three, the canal's capacitybis limited because of a lack of fresh water. So basically everything you said is wrong.
- kmeisthax 3y agoAccording to the NY Times[0], the direct cause is El Nino, but climate change may be indirectly responsible because it makes extreme weather events more extreme. Furthermore, El Nino has been getting worse alongside climate change getting worse, so it's not entirely unreasonable to say "hey these two might be related" until new evidence and computer modeling is done. The IPCC model tells you that carbon forcing is going to give you a certain amount of global average temperature rise, but it isn't a detailed weather forecasting model that can say "Panama is going to become a desert on November 13th, 2023". If we want to know specific local effects we need to run other simulations based off the IPCC predictions. Many of these weren't done because it wasn't necessary. The IPCC model was already forecasting massive economic damage, that should be enough to scare politicians into doing something, right? :P To be perfectly clear: there will always be gaps where someone can point to and say, "well, over here, we're not sure climate change is responsible yet". We will never have enough scientists to study absolutely every possible effect of climate change, even retroactively. In fact, this is part of why the response to climate change was and is so underwhelming. Fossil fuel companies poured billions of dollars into junk science to try and promote literally any possible alternative explanation, which left enough doubt to make politicians hesitate on the potentially risky move of moving away from carbon-generating fossil fuels[1]. The thing the average reader should take away is: - We know global warming will be very, very bad for the majority of humanity, but... - We don't know exactly who and where it will hurt the worst, and attributing specific weather events to global warming is difficult[2], but... - Regardless of how fuzzy the evidence is, saying that any given weather event is "caused by climate change" is still a safe bet. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panama-canal-drought-shipping.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panama-c... [1] To those shouting the words "nuclear fission" right now, I hear you. The fossil fuel companies also somehow brainwashed the German Greens and Greenpeace with similar bullshit, to the point where Germany is shutting off nuclear plants to replace with the dirtiest burning coal imaginable. Lignite balls. [2] Like, Nobel Prize level research. Ok, so there isn't exactly a Nobel Prize for meteorology, but physics is close enough.
- Lammy 3y agoIronically this will be a solved problem once we're able to melt the Arctic: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/03/science/earth/arctic-shipping.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/03/science/earth... https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/03/04/climate-change-arctic-shipping-lanes-global-warming/1962685/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/03/04/climate-ch... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220620152119.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220620152119.h... https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/new-unexpected-shipping-route-243485 https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/new-unexpected-shipping-r... https://www.axios.com/2018/08/23/maersk-to-send-first-container-ship-through-arctic https://www.axios.com/2018/08/23/maersk-to-send-first-contai...
- aeturnum 3y agoI suspect that an overall rise in sea levels will lead to extremely difficulties in the infrastructure that loads and unloads ships. Again - it's not that this is "the problem" - it's that such huge systemic changes disrupt things in ways and at scales that we've never previously faced.