You are not technically wrong, but you are economically wrong.

The water cycle _could_ require spending grid energy to filter/pump water into an economically usable state. Instead if water was better managed, we would not need to build additional grid capacity for water management.

Your argument basically boils down to "If energy was unlimited, we could be wasteful!", which, again, is technically true, but ignores the economic reality.

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hinkley 4 days ago | parent [-]

And we couldn’t anyway because we’d bake the surface of the planet with all the waste heat from that free energy.

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FredPret 4 days ago | parent [-]

Doesn't pass the sniff test:

From what I can glean from Google, the sun moves 1500 cubic kilometers of water from the ocean into the air every day, around 500,000 cubic kilometers a year (ie, a stupendous amount).

Apparently around 10% of that makes it up the various mountains and comes back down as rivers - that's 50,000 cubic kilometers.

And for scale, human "consumption" is 5000 cubic kilometers.

I agree we should be careful and intelligent about how we use water and where we get it from, but I fail to be alarmed.

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hinkley 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Every degree of global warming raises the amount of water the air can hold by 7%. That's what's going on in California recently. We only need to put our finger on the scale to really fuck things up. We don't have to stand on it.

Also heat island effect. We don't have to move the needle in Yosemite to make downtown LA into a death trap.

What's your tidy "Me worry?" explanation for aquifer depletion?

	▲	coredog64 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Degree C/K or F/R?

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4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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