Aquifers around the world are being drained at an alarming speed. Here's what that looks like in two of the biggest aquifers in the US:
Red dots are bad (more than one meter per year of water loss). This is from a recent paper that examines 1,693 aquifers around the world:
Rapid groundwater-level declines are widespread in the twenty-first century, especially in dry regions with extensive croplands. Critically, we also show that groundwater-level declines have accelerated over the past four decades in 30% of the world’s regional aquifers.
When we have unlimited cheap fusion we'll be able to desalinate and pump water anywhere we want. But that's probably a ways off. In the meantime, maybe we should stop sticking our heads in the sand and face reality?
I saw a video from Sabine Hossenfelder in which she says she used to not worry about climate change, but she's finally coming around after 50 years of smarter people than her explaining the problem.
And I think this is a perfect summation of why we're fucked.
Don't know much about her, but I've watched several of her physics videos and I fine them very unhelpful and non-explanatory. Could be because I'm stupid, but I don't think I'm dumber than the avg youtube audience so I don't get her popularity to be honest. But knowing that she also was, i guess, a climate change denier makes me think maybe it's her and not me.
You might find her straight blogging content more to your liking. She was one of the first online folk to say there was no 'there' there to string theory. A very pragmatic and down-to-earth person.
She's solid as long as she sticks to physics. When she talks about other issues she is sometimes embarrassingly bad. Witness her recent video about trans issues.
Waiting for fission isn't going to help. We need nuclear now.
I mention solar powered desalination below. But yes, you could actually literally build a combined nuclear and desalination plant-- nuclear plants need plenty of water for cooling anyway so you just run it through desalination as part of the process.
We have fission. We've had it for decades. That's what "nuclear power" is.
Fusion power, on the other hand, is still ten years away. It's always just ten years away. It's not gonna save our bacon.
You're right, it was my brain that failed. My feeble brain.
The whole "unlimited cheap ..." idea is as bogus as the "10 years away" idea. Even though it may possibly someday be do-able, it is never going to be cheap. Fusion reactors are necessarily complicated and will be enormously expensive (unlike dumb fission reactors), and then will have rather short operational lifespans due to damaging neutron capture.
_And_ they will also have significant issues with radioactivity.
"unlimited cheap"
This needs to be repeated loudly and often. There is absolutely no reason to think that fusion will be cheap, and many, many reasons to think that it will be very expensive. (Chief among those reasons? That we've been working at it for decades and still can't get it done).
Now, it might offer a lot of other benefits that mean it's worth doing (fusion rockets for spaceflight? Maybe in the future we'll want to consume 10x or 100x electricity per person, and there just aren't enough solar panels to do that?), but *cost* is not going to be one of those benefits.
I've found it weird that the draining of massive, critical aquifers is virtually never mentions in mainstream news. This recent major paper in Nature has gotten a little coverage, but still barely a blip really.
I guess I don't read main stream news. Is that why I have known about the Ogallala aquifer for 30 years??? My grand dad testified in a court case about a water district stealing St. John's River water. That may have been before I was born.
Mark Twain said: Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.
The issue is too esoteric. You can’t see it happen. You can’t see how much water is left. You can’t see how it is replenished. You can’t see the ground compressing so that the acquirer can’t be refilled.
Probably for similar reasons there is not much law in effect about draining aquifers.
Also, this problem is backend loaded. Some people get the benefit of draining the aquifer now but the bad effects come later. Someone else’s problem.
Similar idea with CO2. If CO2 were a colored gas, like Br, then maybe people would be upset as you would see it spewing from every tailpipe.
Oh, like actual emissions that are visible from tailpipes every day? Yeah, that doesn't seem to bother many people.
While there are those vehicles burning oil and smoking, 99 time out of ten (sic) if you see anything coming from a tailpipe, it is water vapor.
When I was a kid back in the Middle Ages cars spewing visible exhaust (burning oil) were quite common. Then clearances got tighter, materials better, and cars like that couldn't pass an emissions test and are rarely seen today.
Emissions testing (and mechanical tests) should be uniform nationwide but it's just the opposite
In the Central Valley of CA, you can literally watch the land sink year over year as the aquifers are drawn down. People are freaking out. The problem is, nobody knows how/is willing to do anything about it because it would involve writing new regulations and laws and conservation is for DFH's.
It would also involve a lot of people losing their jobs and livelihoods, not to mention farms that may have been in families for decades (I assume there are still a few of those that haven't been bought out by the big corporate guys), and the big corporate guys who have quarterly numbers to make.
In short, there's money involved.
Had to look that up. Dirty Effing Hippies.
My solution for California-- solar powered desalination plants.
Until we have enough carbon-free energy to cover everything, the difference between "solar powered desalination plants" and "desalination plants" is zero. Solar electricity used for desalination would be solar power not used for anything else. It would increase the amount of electricity that would require natural gas or coal.
That's a silly comment. If we are currently installling X number of solar collectors we install X plus the additional number we need for desalination.
The question is whether we can use excess, free solar power during the day when it would be otherwise curtailed. E.g. pump seawater to a holding pond at the top of a hill during the day and let it drain through the desalination membrane all night long.
San Diego runs a desalination plant. Should be able to find its power consumption and output on the web. Then you can see how many solar panels it would take to power it.
30MW of power, around the clock. 50M gallons of potable water per day.
30MW * 24 hrs = 720MWhrs of energy per day.
720MWhrs / 50M gallons = 14.4 Whrs per gallon.
At California electric rates that amounts to about half a penny per gallon. That's JUST energy cost. The plant also has other expenses. So this is really expensive water, at least compared to other water sources, but when you're desperate for water like SoCal is, this is the kind of thing you do.
At some point, though, all water just becomes expensive water. If you need the water, you pay for the water. Expensive water might just be what we need to get people to stop installing lawns in a desert, though and planting stupid crops that require a lot of expensive water.
One of the issues with desalination is whether that's cheaper than shipping water from a place where there's lots of it. For instance, California's total water consumption is reported to be about 100 cubic kilometers a year. The Columbia River flows more than 200 cubic kilometers a year into the Pacific. Further north, the Stikine River, which is smaller than the Columbia but still of respectable size, flows through the Alaska Panhandle into the Pacific. Would it be cheaper to desalinate cubic kilometers of ocean water each year, or to run a fleet of super tankers to collect up some of that fresh water that's being "wasted" and ship it south?
As a pilot project, we should implement great plains flood control by pumping water into the Ogalla Aquifer.
I live along the mouth of the Columbia, while that sounds nice in theory, how do you take a big fraction of that river and not destroy the ecosystem it sustains and the hydroelectric energy it provides? You can’t just take half or a quarter or even a tenth of a huge river like that. Years ago there was a proposal to create a water pipeline from the Columbia to California and Oregon was having none of that idea.
I'm suggesting loading the tankers at the mouth of the river, at sea level, so there's no issue with hydroelectric energy. The ecosystem effects would be in the mixing zone, where the river water becomes ocean water. I don't know if there is a specific "brackish water " ecosystem at river mouths; if there is, attention would have to be paid to protecting that. I think at most a tenth of the flow would be needed to alleviate California's water shortages, which surely would not be enough to seriously affect the brackish zone.
I would also note scale. 20 cubic kilometers of water is 20 billion tonnes. At 200,000 tonnes per tanker load (very big tankers), that's 100,000 loads per year, or roughly 300 loads a day. That's a lot of tankers.
Frankly, I don't think that either desalinating or shipping that much water is feasible.
This is why we should bring 50 million refugees to America ASAP! Plenty of space, plenty of jobs, and plenty of resources! 400 million by 2050!
Plenty of water??? The 100th Meridiian Is more than a line on the map.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/11/the-100th-meridian-where-the-great-plains-used-to-begin-now-moving-east/
Yikes! Well, it’s still better than anywhere else. Bring all the huddled masses.
Humph. It's nice to be taken seriously by high calibur intellects.
( ´◡‿ゝ◡`)
Get ready for toilet to tap!
Get ready? It is here, now.
... maybe we should stop sticking our heads in the sand and face reality?
Hahahahahaha stop, please, oh my sides, hahahahahaha.
A large fraction of our population has decided there's no point to being vaccinated against communicable diseases, including ones like measles, despite huge numbers of preventable deaths and sharp increases in incidence of diseases all but completely absent in the near past. Ditto for restrictions on even military-grade firearms, despite the appalling numbers of homicides and suicides -- including but definitely not limited to mass-shootings -- in the US compared to all other major industrialized countries. And ditto again concerning pretty much any preparation for the effects of global climate change, despite near-daily manifestations of its effects and the by now deafening howling of the knowledgeable scientific community. Hell, nearly half the country thinks Trump would be a good President!
Since when do Americans face reality?
Never had much truck with "preppers," but as the family manager I'm paying a lot more attention to the as-yet-low-probability scenarios and how they play out over the next 2 or 3 generations.
We've already got working, commercial "fusion power". Trouble is, the reactor is so dangerous and emits so much deadly radiation, we have to keep it 93 million miles away, and even then, it's a major source of cancer. Meanwhile, it provides a lot of power via photovoltaics, wind, waves, and plain old heat.
Oh, you meant little man-made, totally safe, non-radiating, non-radioactive, maybe even cold, fusion? Better work on cutting back on waste first. Water management in the US is near criminal.
That's really the problem isn't it? During the California's big droughts there are all sorts of public messaging to curtain use while mansions and golf courses manage to maintain healthy green lawns. Farms in the central valley go dry while certain moguls who bought up water rights manage to grow high water use crops just down the road.
You can't cry scarcity while rich people are able to bypass the line and expect everyone else to live a diminished lifestyle. Jimmy Carter proved that no politician gets elected telling people to put on a sweater and turn down the heat.
For all their good intentions, people don't want to give up large SUVs because they're really handy and they don't want to give up green lawns, or watch their water use. Those are just facts and unless you offer people something more compelling that fills a need, they aren't going to give anything up. And they're certainly not going to give up water while golf courses waste it and Kim Kardashian maintains a vast lush lawn.
Until rich people can stop buying the right to bypass restrictions, no amount of curtailment is going to work.
Need more beavers.
Yes! Exactly.
We need this guy (link below) to get a few million dollars - his plan is better than most others, and he's succeeded on multiple continents. Return the perennial grasslands to the Imperial Valley, using massive cattle herds (the only good place for creating live soil in a dry brittle environment is inside a ruminant).
The desertification started prior to the settlers - Native Americans wiped out the mammoth and giant sloth megafauna - but humans can also fix this.
https://www.fixdeserts.com
"When we have unlimited cheap fusion "
fusion energy will never be limitless.
full stop
The sun is a good approximation to limitless...
Couldn't have a comment section without at least one asinine comment. amirite?
"When we have unlimited cheap fusion we'll be able to desalinate and pump water anywhere we want."
We already have "unlimited cheap fusion" that desalinates water. It is called the sun. We just have to figure out how to pump it around the world, that is all.
But if you are going to go there, we already pump the desalinated water around the world for free. The thing that makes desalination expensive is either pumping it through a membrane, or building a huge sheet of plastic to capture the evaporation.
Idiot. "You didn't say your words right" is never a good look, son. On, and you're wrong to but too, of course.
Effectively free and unlimited solar power is probably about 10 years away, particularly in places that lack fresh water sources. I think we’ll be fine.
What was that they used to say about "atomic power"? Oh yeah, electricity "too cheap to meter."
We HAVE "free and unlimited solar power," in places like deserts and parts of the ocean. The problem is getting it where the demand is, which requires expensive things like wires and substations and human maintenance and incurs big losses on the way. And since in a fit of market-oriented genius during the St. Reagan administration, we deregulated T&D, it also interposes profit-making institutions.
I ain't gonna bank on free and unlimited solar power any more than anyone with any sense banked on electricity too cheap to meter 50+ years ago.
I guess you're not the sharpest tool in the shed. By definition, deserts are places that need water (at least if you want agriculture there).
Lol, and with their abundant access to salt water, they're great places for desalination, which is the point of having cheap energy in this case.
My point, oh Sharpest of Knives, is that you don't always have lots of solar energy available where you need electricity, and it requires major infrastructure to get the electricity from where it's generated (eg, deserts) to where it's needed (eg, coastal areas where water can be desalinated, not to mention where lots of people live). It doesn't do you any good to have lots of solar power where you need lots of fresh water if you don't have any salt water around to desalinate.
Sorry, I should have explained with more and simpler words...
... or human life.
Yeah, better batteries are coming Real Soon Now. Where have I heard that one before? Why is it the the less physical science they know, the flatter and more cetain the pronouncments concerning the same become?
Better batteries have come. In my youth, basically the only rechargeable batteries around were lead/acid. Then NiCd batteries came along, then NiMH, then lithium ion, then better cheaper lithium ion. Given that history, and the amount of research effort that is going on, I don't find it at all hard to believe that still better batteries can be expected in the near future.
How many nighttime astrophotography trips of what distance have you taken in the last year in your ICE vehicle Kevin? Because climate change is related to demands on aquifers.
People who live in a desert should act like they live in a fucking desert. Years ago, I flew to a conference in Phoenix and was gobsmacked by the number of houses with outdoor swimming pools.
Amen. I live in Denver and when I walk my dog in middle of the night (I work odd hours), I’m shocked by how many neighbors run the sprinklers on their lawns every night. I live in an area where everyone except me moved in during the past few years from almost close to 20 states (and Puerto Rico!) and I can only guess the wild watering has to do with “how we did things” in their home states, rather than adjust to the situation in their new home. Meanwhile, Colorado is going to (legal) war over water with all the neighboring states, including my home state of New Mexico (Rio Grande used to flood into my back yard each spring when I was in high school. Now, it’s almost just a muddy ditch.)
At least they don't run the sprinklers during the day.
Progress!!
Hey, in Albuquerque during the summer, it's actually illegal to run your sprinklers during certain times of the daylight hours! Too much evaporation.
Central Valley will need a big pipe to navigate through the coastal ranges. That'll cost over a billion dollars and take a decade to permit and another decade to build.
California ought to start right now.
We are running out of water
And yet, there is no concern about a growing population straining our natural resources. The clarion call is, More People. Get more people in here.
+1
People as such aren't the biggest users of water -- it's agriculture, particularly for commodity crops like cotton, alfalfa, and rice.
In Arizona Saudi Arabia buys up land to extract the water from under it and grow alfalfa in the desert, which is then shipped to Saudi Arabia to feed cows. The water table has been going down drastically and people living there have to drill way deeper wells or give up. Somehow Arizona can't figure out how to do anything about it because capitalism or something.
We can't get off oil fast enough.
(Now I see more on this below.)
Climate change? Running out of water?
People who are aware of ongoing societal collapse are just doomers, and what we really need is to burn more resources ASAP to increase GDP because...a receipt of resources that have been burned is more important than having resources.
ThisIsFine.jpg
Agriculture in California has a god-given right to all the free water they want with no requirements for efficiency. Once the aquifers dry up, the state will have to desalinate water and give it to the farmers for free. But first, the state should drain the American and Russian rivers and ship that to the farmers.
Yes, the farmers are so ignored and discriminated against! Almost as if they were not the clear majority of all Americans!
Did you tell us yesterday that there aren't any more problems than there have always been?
"...maybe we should stop sticking our heads in the sand and face reality?"
Sorry, there's money to be made and that concern rules everything else.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/12/groundwater-us-exports-alfalfa-hay-china-saudi-arabia-united-arab-emirates-arizona/
Now maybe when we try to explain extractive colonialism to people, they'll understand why it sucks to be on the receiving end of it.
Oops, hadn't read that when I commented above.
Here's something you probably won't know if you don't know any farmers but many places won't let money to farmers unless you irrigate your crops. The groundwater table in south Georgia has dropped like a rock in the last two decades because no one can borrow money unless they do irrigation even when it's not needed.
Saudi Arabia back in the 70s and 80s tried to embark on an agricultural revolution using the enormous prehistoric aquifers under the Arabian Desert. They quickly expended the water and had to abandon plans to become agriculturally self-sufficient. So what did they do? Started buying up land and water rights in places like Arizona where they could grow alfalfa to ship back to the KSA. The new governor, I believe, recently put the kaibosh on that.
ETA: or, see the link in magarajusticemachine's remarks above. Sorry I didn't catch that before hitting "post" here
Yes! There was a report on NPR about this. The Saudis found that, if they bought a little land, all the water they pumped was FREE, FREE, FREE!! So they used it to grow their hay and shipped it back to the middle east. The wells of neighboring farms started going dry, which caused the farmers to notice that full-on liberrtarian, market-based local government may have needed some constraints...
Required reading to comment on this topic:
The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruption and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecological and economic disaster. In his landmark book, Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth
https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244
Does not need "fusion" - making fresh water from salt water is simply an excellent way of "using" the surplus electricity that we will get if we "overbuild" Wind and Solar enough to meet the worst times
Which is the simplest and most economic way of providing enough power for those times
Effectively additional power when demand is being met and the Pumped Hydro and batteries are topped off is "free" - using that to desalinate salt water is a no brainer