5 ms·

The weather is not the problem. Overpopulation is. And it is a local problem, so limiting population elsewhere doesn't help.

by genman 3y ago

lukan 3y ago
You can call it overpopulation, I call it underdesalination. There is lot's of sun there and lot's of seawater.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  According to ChatGPT it takes at least 3 kWh to desalinate 1000l of salt-water. Following that math and its estimates on solar panels that would come down to 0.003 m^2 of solar panels per liters. UAE is about 83.6 billion m^2, lets assume half of that can be covered in solar panels, so that would be enough to desalinate 13 trillion liters of water. That sounds like it could be enough for a country like UAE by a factor of 10, if ChatGPT's math is right (probably not) and water can be desalinated instantly (probably not).
  - yau8edq12i 3y ago
    If your thought experiment leads you to consider that half the country, or even 5% of the country, should be covered in solar panels, then there a problem somewhere.
  - ashildr 3y ago
    So your reference is “According to ChatGPT”. Did you feel anything when typing this?
    - Kerb_ 3y ago
      So, your argument is "you used ChatGPT for this". They didn't even write the comment with GPT, they just used it as a starting point for some napkin math. The other commenter not only dismissed the idea, but also emphasized how unrealistic and poorly planned it is by responding to the contents of the content, including how absurd it would be to implement that much solar coverage. I'm sure it's fun to make fun of the large language model, but at least it provided some drive to the conversation, even if its value was in being corrected. Did you feel like your addition was significant?
      - ashildr 3y ago
        No, I didn‘t intend to make an argument, I was asking a genuine question because I‘m trying to understand the perspective on the world of people who consider LLM a kind of „source“. To me OP reads like “according to my Ouija board” and I’m frightened by the idea that people on HN are using the output of LLM as “quotable facts” (and not as a tool to start further research outside of it, which would be fine IMO.) I’d like to know if the poster had any doubts using ChatGPT as a source of fact to base their calculations on, when they obviously had access to the internet with all necessary sources to properlt calculate an answer for this basic question.
- Retric 3y ago
  Desalination is expensive, but it’s not just about the desalination simply pumping water up hill is costly. Nevada averages 5,500 ft above sea level. Moving 1 acre foot of water up that high at 100% efficiency takes ~5.6 MWh and a single mid sized farm can use that much water hourly. Start talking 25 inches of water per year across millions of acres and you’ll need a lot of solar. Worse, commercial reverse osmosis desalination only removes around 95-99% of salt so that farmland is quickly getting degraded.
  - blackoil 3y ago
    Then don't farm in Nevada?? Humans don't consume that much water and lot of it can be recycled.
    - Retric 3y ago
      Humans generally use negligible mounts of water, the only meaningful water shortages are based around agriculture.
  - ftth_finland 3y ago
    So don’t do water intensive farming in Nevada?
    - Retric 3y ago
      Nevada is just an example South Dakota is only 2,200 feet above sea level, but now you need an extra long pipe causing its own issues. The point is desalination isn’t some magic fix that makes everything ok. The remaining salt is probably the biggest issue.
      - lukan 3y ago
        "The point is desalination isn’t some magic fix that makes everything ok. The remaining salt is probably the biggest issue." No, but it is a whole lot easier close to the sea. Like most of UAEs cities are. The remaining salt, you could just pipe out in the ocean, if you go in some km towards a current and spread it out enough. Salt in the ocean is only a local problem, if it does not diffuse quickly enough. And for deserts with a high altitude or that are more inland, no, desalination is probably not the solution.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  You can't fix shortage of agricultural or industrial water with desalination because you end up with a bag of potatoes for $50 Desalination only solves water shortages for human consumption. Water shortages mean famine A single hectare of potatoes need about 7,000 tonns / m3 of water. Desalination costs $1/m3, The cost of growing russet type potatoes for the fresh market was $2032 per acre. So potatoes will be 3 times more expensive For wheat, the difference is even worse
  - lukan 3y ago
    True, but if you want to grow in the desert, there are more efficient methods and crops to grow, like in closed greenhouses, that keep most of the water.
  - throwaway11460 3y ago
    Why not ship the potatoes in?
ch4s3 3y ago
People screaming overpopulation are always and everywhere on a slippery slope to eugenics. Carrying capacity is mediated by technology. WRT water, wastewater reclamation and desalination have a lot of gains that aren’t widely deployed. Also rewilding and reforestation can do a lot to mitigate creeping aridity.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  This doesn't have to be true anymore. Not all "we have too many people" people believe we need to FORCE depopulation. We have strong reason to believe that simply giving people sex ed, ample forms of birth control, and women's rights leads to a self selection of fewer children. Every country that has done these things has seen its fertility drop. Personally the earth can easily, EASILY, support more than ten billion humans if we stop being so damn stupid about resource utilization. Remember that we already produce an immense oversupply of food. Every human that is hungry is not a resource production problem, but a lack of empathy problem. The earth can only struggle to supply billions of humans if you insist that nothing can happen without a strong profit motive.
  - vik0 3y ago
    > Every country that has done these things has seen its fertility drop. And this result is somehow supposed to be a good thing? Every country that has this result, no matter how we theorize that it got there in the first place, is now facing a demographic crisis
  - ch4s3 3y ago
    > that simply giving people sex ed, ample forms of birth control, and women's rights leads to a self selection of fewer children. The devil is in the details here, and programs focused on contraceptives in developing nations have a very checkered recent history. > the earth can easily, EASILY, support more than ten billion humans if we stop being so damn stupid about resource utilization This is sort of what I'm driving at.
    - genman 3y ago
Kerb_ 3y ago
That's acting like we don't literally trade resources globally to maintain our population level
- genman 3y ago
  We can do this because the overpopulation is not happening globally. If for example Ukraine and Russia had the same population growth than Africa and Middle East is having then there wouldn't be no grain available for Africa or Middle East. But there are limits to overpopulation and it is water.

The weather is not the problem. Overpopulation is. And it is a local problem, so limiting population elsewhere doesn't help.

by genman 3y ago

The weather is not the problem. Overpopulation is. And it is a local problem, so limiting population elsewhere doesn't help.

lukan 3y ago

You can call it overpopulation, I call it underdesalination. There is lot's of sun there and lot's of seawater.

barbazoo 3y ago
According to ChatGPT it takes at least 3 kWh to desalinate 1000l of salt-water. Following that math and its estimates on solar panels that would come down to 0.003 m^2 of solar panels per liters. UAE is about 83.6 billion m^2, lets assume half of that can be covered in solar panels, so that would be enough to desalinate 13 trillion liters of water. That sounds like it could be enough for a country like UAE by a factor of 10, if ChatGPT's math is right (probably not) and water can be desalinated instantly (probably not).
- yau8edq12i 3y ago
  If your thought experiment leads you to consider that half the country, or even 5% of the country, should be covered in solar panels, then there a problem somewhere.
- ashildr 3y ago
  So your reference is “According to ChatGPT”. Did you feel anything when typing this?
  - Kerb_ 3y ago
    So, your argument is "you used ChatGPT for this". They didn't even write the comment with GPT, they just used it as a starting point for some napkin math. The other commenter not only dismissed the idea, but also emphasized how unrealistic and poorly planned it is by responding to the contents of the content, including how absurd it would be to implement that much solar coverage. I'm sure it's fun to make fun of the large language model, but at least it provided some drive to the conversation, even if its value was in being corrected. Did you feel like your addition was significant?
    - ashildr 3y ago
      No, I didn‘t intend to make an argument, I was asking a genuine question because I‘m trying to understand the perspective on the world of people who consider LLM a kind of „source“. To me OP reads like “according to my Ouija board” and I’m frightened by the idea that people on HN are using the output of LLM as “quotable facts” (and not as a tool to start further research outside of it, which would be fine IMO.) I’d like to know if the poster had any doubts using ChatGPT as a source of fact to base their calculations on, when they obviously had access to the internet with all necessary sources to properlt calculate an answer for this basic question.
Retric 3y ago
Desalination is expensive, but it’s not just about the desalination simply pumping water up hill is costly. Nevada averages 5,500 ft above sea level. Moving 1 acre foot of water up that high at 100% efficiency takes ~5.6 MWh and a single mid sized farm can use that much water hourly. Start talking 25 inches of water per year across millions of acres and you’ll need a lot of solar. Worse, commercial reverse osmosis desalination only removes around 95-99% of salt so that farmland is quickly getting degraded.
- blackoil 3y ago
  Then don't farm in Nevada?? Humans don't consume that much water and lot of it can be recycled.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Humans generally use negligible mounts of water, the only meaningful water shortages are based around agriculture.
- ftth_finland 3y ago
  So don’t do water intensive farming in Nevada?
  - Retric 3y ago
    Nevada is just an example South Dakota is only 2,200 feet above sea level, but now you need an extra long pipe causing its own issues. The point is desalination isn’t some magic fix that makes everything ok. The remaining salt is probably the biggest issue.
    - lukan 3y ago
      "The point is desalination isn’t some magic fix that makes everything ok. The remaining salt is probably the biggest issue." No, but it is a whole lot easier close to the sea. Like most of UAEs cities are. The remaining salt, you could just pipe out in the ocean, if you go in some km towards a current and spread it out enough. Salt in the ocean is only a local problem, if it does not diffuse quickly enough. And for deserts with a high altitude or that are more inland, no, desalination is probably not the solution.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
You can't fix shortage of agricultural or industrial water with desalination because you end up with a bag of potatoes for $50 Desalination only solves water shortages for human consumption. Water shortages mean famine A single hectare of potatoes need about 7,000 tonns / m3 of water. Desalination costs $1/m3, The cost of growing russet type potatoes for the fresh market was $2032 per acre. So potatoes will be 3 times more expensive For wheat, the difference is even worse
- lukan 3y ago
  True, but if you want to grow in the desert, there are more efficient methods and crops to grow, like in closed greenhouses, that keep most of the water.
- throwaway11460 3y ago
  Why not ship the potatoes in?

ch4s3 3y ago

People screaming overpopulation are always and everywhere on a slippery slope to eugenics. Carrying capacity is mediated by technology. WRT water, wastewater reclamation and desalination have a lot of gains that aren’t widely deployed. Also rewilding and reforestation can do a lot to mitigate creeping aridity.

mrguyorama 3y ago
This doesn't have to be true anymore. Not all "we have too many people" people believe we need to FORCE depopulation. We have strong reason to believe that simply giving people sex ed, ample forms of birth control, and women's rights leads to a self selection of fewer children. Every country that has done these things has seen its fertility drop. Personally the earth can easily, EASILY, support more than ten billion humans if we stop being so damn stupid about resource utilization. Remember that we already produce an immense oversupply of food. Every human that is hungry is not a resource production problem, but a lack of empathy problem. The earth can only struggle to supply billions of humans if you insist that nothing can happen without a strong profit motive.
- vik0 3y ago
  > Every country that has done these things has seen its fertility drop. And this result is somehow supposed to be a good thing? Every country that has this result, no matter how we theorize that it got there in the first place, is now facing a demographic crisis
- ch4s3 3y ago
  > that simply giving people sex ed, ample forms of birth control, and women's rights leads to a self selection of fewer children. The devil is in the details here, and programs focused on contraceptives in developing nations have a very checkered recent history. > the earth can easily, EASILY, support more than ten billion humans if we stop being so damn stupid about resource utilization This is sort of what I'm driving at.
  - genman 3y ago

Kerb_ 3y ago

That's acting like we don't literally trade resources globally to maintain our population level

genman 3y ago
We can do this because the overpopulation is not happening globally. If for example Ukraine and Russia had the same population growth than Africa and Middle East is having then there wouldn't be no grain available for Africa or Middle East. But there are limits to overpopulation and it is water.