Fun fact: there will be no tomorrow when the water runs dry
Wait till you learn about the water cycle.
It takes hundreds of years for groundwater to replenish. We are experiencing problems right now.
Sure, I never said anything about that, only commenting against the hyperbole that there will be “no tomorrow” when places run out.
There will still be tomorrows, people will just move elsewhere like they’ve done for thousands of years.
Problem is, there will be less and less elsewheres where people can still live within a hundred years or so.
Where you gonna move when people already live there and those areas are low too?
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Fuckin thank you.
These people are addicted to drama. Jfc. _
Thousands of years ago didn’t have desalination nor electricity… there’s a reason why they moved to fresh water inland.and before you jump there: desalination requires a fuck load of electricity that impacts with other issues.
Read a book.
…says the guy who clearly doesn’t understand the geologic water cycle.
Sir?
I see you posting and I’m still waiting for your proof or reasoning behind thinking there will be no tomorrow when some places lose ground water.
You guys are all smug af with your downvotes, but got absolutely nothing for facts beyond your provocative hyperbole.
Keep in mind I never said losing ground water wouldn’t suck and/or be catastrophic, only looking for some proof it will be “the end of tomorrow” as the upvoted dude with his provocative words stated so definitively.
I keep getting told to read a book or that I know nothing of history or geology, yet all of human history proves me fucking right so far, so I’ma need literally any scrap of evidence from fucking anyone who has something better than a shitty opinion alongside some clicks of a down arrow.
Tbf there very well could be no tomorrow
With climate change and large corporations like Nestlé sucking up all the water it can this will only get worse.
By the way large corporations and large agriculture farms are to blame for the most waste of water.
Also the amount of money spent on watering lawns and golf fucking courses are huge factors in this.
We need to put end to Nestlé and fuck lawns.
Promises promises.
Don’t threaten me with a good time
In general: bad.
But the lion’s share of that groundwater is going to agriculture, and much of it specifically to animal feed, so unlike with carbon emissions, this feels like the sort of environmental disaster that market forces are at least going to be somewhat responsive to; less groundwater -> spike in alfalfa prices -> spike in beef prices -> people eat less beef -> people use less groundwater.
Nah, the beef lobbies will just have the government increase subsidies. Obviously corporate profits are more important than the future of the human race.
Yeah but how long does that take, compared to how long the environmental destruction takes?
It sounds from the article like the environmental destruction has been going on for decades and that it’s already affecting crop output in some places.
DUSTBOWL II: Electric Boogaloo
California has areas that have sunk 8+ feet. This is because agriculture dug down past the first water table into the second to feed rich, water-hungry crops like almond trees.
It’s been worrisome for a long time, but bug ag had the ear of the feds so did what it wanted.
I thought that groundwater used in beef production exists in the water cycle and actuslly replenishes. Did I fall for a talking point?
Paywall.
https://archive.is/VjQuZ has the text. Even better, the beginning, which I presume to be one of these terrible scroll-to-advance animated presentations, has the animation removed.
I mean, data visualizations are important and personally I think they contribute to the article by showing aquifer depletion over time, but do you.
Also, I’ve never really appreciated the incessant need to whine about paywalls [edit: sorry, not directly addressed to you, I know you just provided a link]. Journalists and editors shouldn’t have to work for free or depend solely on ad revenue. I understand if you can’t afford it, but journalism is a job that already doesn’t pay very well. I assume you’d also like to get paid for your work.
If you insist on keeping the paywall then posting news and inviting other peoples’ opinions without allowing them access to the link is bad form, no?
The news is accessible, just not for free. Doesn’t stop it being good original reporting that should be shared. NYT does provide a limited number of free articles per month. If we only read and share free articles, then we’d miss out on a lot of very solid reporting or even miss the point of the reporting.
For example, earlier this month someone shared a free article that analyzed the NYT’s reporting on near-miss aircraft collisions at airports. Most people dismissed the article since the planes were missing by pretty large margins, but that’s because the actual story reported in the original article concerned overworked and understaffed air traffic controllers. The planes coming too close to each other is a byproduct of that, but that’s what people on Lemmy focused on because the secondary, free source, chose to focus on that more sensational topic.
[Sarcasm] Fuckin’ poors wanting to know the news! You tell 'em!
Darkly apt and poetic.
the west coast is especially fucked.
there was never enough ground water and there never will be.
Central planes as well, there is an enormous amount of crop land that will no longer support farming.
It’s not like it’s getting zero rainfall, it’s just not getting enough to support its current levels of crop output; they were growing cereal crops in the Great Plains long before we figured out industrial-scale groundwater irrigation.
No, the western plains requires irrigation. Plains as a biome exist because rainfall is marginal.
Idk fam there were some huge rivers in California not that long ago. Arizona and Nevada are much more iffy.
rivers != ground water
the water table dispute has been going on since the early 1800s.
An arab country siphons resources from the US this time? How ironic.
Whatt the fuck
I’m grateful you folks are doing something to combat the rising water levels.
^(/s just in case)^
Plenty of groundwater in New Zealand, once the only economic class of people our society has agreed matters (or we’d stop them) have finished sucking us dry in every conceivable way.
Lol, it’s nice to see nothing has changed in 20 years. Good job conservatives.
I mean, the Democrats haven’t done fuck all better either. California and other blue states haven’t done much better. We just love growing water hungry crops on deserts. It’s insane.
I didn’t say Republicans, I said conservatives. That includes a majority of the Democratic party.
I swear it isn’t possible to roll my eyes hard enough when people call Democrats communists… It’s like ok I get that you don’t even know what a communist is and you’re just parroting a propagandist, but most Democrats aren’t even socialist they’re mostly center-right conservatives…
But muh wine and blueberries taste good in rocky soil :3
Ok idea: any town that is willing to give up land for solar power can earmark 90% of the power from it to run pumps and desalination to get them water.
And for the other 90% of the country not within 100 miles of a coast?
Maybe there will be a nice sale on “Population: 0” signs to plant at the town borders.
Can someone ELI5 where the water actually goes when it’s used? It evaporates and goes somewhere else, right? So the drier one place gets, the more wet a different place needs to get because the earth is a closed system.
So where does water from the US go when it’s used and/or evaporated?
It ends up in the oceans, to answer you simply.
I work in the water industry, not specifically in water resources but hey. The issue we have is the rate at which we’re abstracting water from ground sources. In UK, the statistic I often hear is that it takes around 300 years for rain to soak down and join the water table.
300 years ago, the only below ground abstraction would have been people pulling buckets out of wells. Also it wasn’t like everyone had a well but their house either. Now we abstract millions of litres from a single borehole everyday.
To answer your question about where it goes, most waste water is released into the oceans. So we’re taking clean fresh water that on some cases has been moving down through the earth for thousands of years and discharging it into the oceans.
Ground water is largely used to water crops. As an example, massive amounts of food is grown in California using California ground water. That food (containing said water) is then shipped all over the country and to other nations. It’s exported in the form of produce.
Groundwater is water that has collected at some point. Lake, aquifer, whatever. Over X many years rain has pooled in this spot.
If there is X amount of rain coming in each year and you use less than that, by sending it on down the river/whatever no worries. (as long as you’re not dumping things in the river that are gonna suck for people downriver.
If you use more than that, well there’s going to be less water in the groundwater next year. Also the people downriver probably don’t get as much water, so they’re groundwater will also probably be lessened if they don’t cut back.
Groundwater tends to be millions upon millions of gallons. It takes a while to use up, especially since it’s being replenished occasionally.
But if you’re using more than is coming in it doesn’t matter that it will “eventually” come back around. At some point there’s going to be a dry spot in the loop where previously there’s been a water deposit.
It’s mine. I own it.
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Wow you sound like a dumb asshole
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