6 ms·

Water crisis coming in 15 years unless the world acts now, UN report warns

evo_9 12y ago
Whew, thank god. Cause the Peak Oil guys sure need something new to fret about. And these things always come true exactly as predicted because, you know, progress doesn't continue along, Moore's Law doesn't continue along.
- delecti 12y ago
  Progress would be the world acting.
phkahler 12y ago
They point to population growth as a contributing factor, yet they never suggest anyone do anything about that. How about free birth control to anyone who wants it? How about permanent birth control to any adult who wants it? I'd say free to anyone below some income level since the middle class can afford it anyway. With increasing productivity we don't have jobs for all the people anyway, why not encourage making less of them? I'm not talking about mandates or government deciding who reproduces, just having them help folks that would prefer not to have kids to not have them. The solution doesn't always have to be more regulation.
- ido 12y ago
  Population growth rates world wide have already plummeted in recent decades and continue to do so as more developing countries industrialize. Current predictions point to stabilizing world population at 9 billion and the starting to slowly drop. In the most developed countries we have seen lower than replacement rates for a long while now.
  - r00fus 12y ago
    Amusingly, this is the population posed for 24th century earth in the movie "Star Trek: First Contact". Nice to know they didn't pull the numbers from thin air.
- josefresco 12y ago
  I think one of the keys to "controlling" population growth is to bring people out of poverty. Most studies I read, show dropping birth rates as people/nations climb the economic ladder. Education, and health care also play a big part.
  - throwaway5752 12y ago
    Since the original topic is the global fresh water crisis, wouldn't the increased per capita resource consumption from greater standards of living offset any gains in population growth slowing?
    - dguaraglia 12y ago
      Great question!
    - snowwrestler 12y ago
      Not necessarily; there is sometimes quite a lot of surface water in poor areas of the world, but no reliable way to disinfect it. So you get wells dug next to rivers, because the well water is clean and the river is not. Rising living standards create the capital, infrastructure, and stability to build water and sewage treatment plants to make better use of surface water. In the developed world, much of the "population" problem is the location, not amount, of people. Lots of people have moved to Phoenix because of air conditioning and groundwater wells. Its population growth has been driven almost entirely by migration, not birth rate. One potential solution there is to allow accurate market pricing of water. If it becomes progressively more expensive to live there as water supplies dwindle, people would stop building water-hungry golf courses and stop moving there. Unfortunately, control of the municipal water supply is often in the hands of the local government...who is not going to willingly vote to raise the price of water on their voters, and shrink their own city.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      Hopefully the developing world can learn from our mistakes and not build cities and farmland in deserts.
- makmanalp 12y ago
  I wonder if there are strategic reasons behind this - do the US and European countries fear a growing China and India and feel the need to compete, for example? Are there military or economic incentives to having a large population today as there used to be a millennium ago? I'm probably going to go with no, but who knows?
  - phkahler 12y ago
    >> I wonder if there are strategic reasons behind this - do the US and European countries fear a growing China and India and feel the need to compete, for example? Well the US would be in a slow decline if not for immigration, so we're trying to get smart people to come here which both sustains us and deprives the others of talent. We also seem to like ambitious folks willing to work hard for less pay, so we maintain a very leaky southern border. China is the only country I know actively trying to address population. The guy who invented RISUG is in India, but I haven't checked how that's going in a while.
  - auganov 12y ago
    I always had a feeling that most of China's "success" is just centralizing wealth of the whole country in a few places under governance of not so many people. With so many people you don't have to be terribly successful at reform to produce a bunch of impressive cities etc. Per capita it has a long way to go. We'll never know until/if China breakups into multiple countries (or something similar).
- edkennedy 12y ago
  Lovely ideas, but very far out of reach. Some of our elected officials would rip apart planned parenthood and impose strict rules on birth control if they could.
  - phkahler 11y ago
    >> Lovely ideas, but very far out of reach. Some of our elected officials would rip apart planned parenthood and impose strict rules on birth control if they could. Much of the opposition to planned parenthood is their being a provider of abortions. Witness the new healthcare law requirements for insurance to cover birth control. But then Hobby Lobby wants an exception. I'm just advocating the offering of permanent procedures, which should be cheaper long term.
- tracker1 12y ago
  ...or a global plague... something similar to the black plague, or some of the really bad flu epidemics... without the risks from infectious disease, humans are pretty much un-checked. I'm not suggesting that we actually engineer such a solution, but the fact is there are too many people on the planet, and the population is only growing... Eventually the real perceived value of life will decrease, and more militant solutions will start presenting themselves. It's not popular, and my only hope is I don't live to see things get really worse. Desalinization really should be something under much heavier research than it currently is. As should farming with less water usage, as well as cross-country water pipelines.
  - civilian 12y ago
    Our population should cap out at 10billion: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_g... and the ethical thing we can do to encourage that is to pull people out of poverty and give them education and tv.
- eikenberry 12y ago
  When you say free you don't mean free. Free means no one pays for it which means no one spends time making it. If anyone has to spend any time making and/or distributing this birth control it isn't be free by definition.
  - Vraxx 12y ago
    Or they don't mean the specific definition of "free" you've concocted. Free can definitely mean "without payment" which one could easily infer from context and it's what GP meant.
  - MBlume 12y ago
    "When you see free you don't mean free. Free means [this thing I just decided it means, which is quite obviously not the meaning you're using]. If [the definition I just introduced doesn't obtain] it isn't free by definition."
- techaddict009 12y ago
  Indian Government does have programs for what you have said.
- systemtheory 12y ago
  "I'd say free to anyone below some income level since the middle class can afford it anyway." I totally understand you're coming from a good place here, but this is exactly the type of thing that can go all sorts of wrong when implemented by people coming from not such a good place. Also, this could come across any number of ways if you're coming from a different place (socioeconomic wise). For instance. Well off families tend to have less children and are in a position to provide for them. So, if I'm poor and can't afford to take care of my kids properly, you're proposing I just don't have them? I use that example only to emphasize what I think is already implicit in your comment, that this is a super complex issue. My reaction to the article was similar to yours, just from a different angle. I kept reading "more efficient use of" and thinking, at what point do we realize we need to use less and not just get more out of what we use?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
FilterJoe 12y ago
With all the talk of water running out in CA and the world, I am wondering why desalination is not part of the conversation. According to Wikipedia: "Supplying all domestic water by sea water desalination would increase the United States' energy consumption by around 10%, about the amount of energy used by domestic refrigerators." Is this true? If so, why isn't desalination happening on a massive scale in CA? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Considerations_and_criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Considerations_and... EDIT: The Wikipedia sentence I quoted was not clearly written. It should have said "supplying all household water" not "supplying all domestic water." Far more water is used by farming.
- tehchromic 12y ago
  Simple: cost As long as it is cheaper to exploit an existing clean water source than to spend the energy, and invest in the massive and in some cases unproven tech and engineering infrastructure to build desalination plants, then that's what will happen. It's unfortunate, because the cost to future generations, or the biosphere doesn't calculate into our current economic system, and most of the commercial infrastructure is aligned against re-calibration of that kind, because it would cost them dearly.
  - cpncrunch 12y ago
    http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megascale-desalination/ http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megasca... $0.58/m3 seems pretty cheap to me.
- brianbreslin 12y ago
  The cost to build desalination plants to service millions of residents would be BILLIONS. Tens of Billions. Money that is available, just being spent on other things...
  - satori99 12y ago
    We built one in Sydney a few years back. It cost nearly 2 Billion, and it now sits idle at a cost of around half a million per day I guess we'll be laughing in 15 years though http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Desalination_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Desalination_Plant
jug5 12y ago
Don't worry, Canada is selling a million litres of clean water for $2.25. That's like $1 US.
guyzero 12y ago
Once again, Silicon Valley is way ahead of the curve.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  Guess who will be called in to help them get more water, somehow?
niche 12y ago
Introducing Aquabob! Imagine: a dome that collects condensation (think morning dew). It waters your greenhouse, and leaves you with plenty to water down for those midnight cocktails
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- civilian 12y ago
  This has nothing to do with using water for agriculture, industry and showers.
nobleach 12y ago
With the rising sea levels (due to global warming), wouldn't now be the best time to figure out how to pipe that desalinated water all over the continents?
- webXL 12y ago
  I don't think we'll be able to desalinate all that water, but figuring out an affordable pumping solution to combat sea level rise would be worthwhile, nonetheless. It's a "pipe dream" (sorry) at this point, but who knows what kind of energy technologies might make this doable someday. And if we have the affordable energy to achieve that, then I think we'll have a lot of options. Not buying Florida beach-front property any time soon though.
joeclark77 12y ago
I bet they've got their finger right on a set of great solutions: (1) more money for the UN, (2) more sovereign power handed over to the UN, (3) more money from the UN to fund more studies on why more money should be given to the UN, (4) more posh conferences for UN and UN-related bigshots in exotic locales, (5) annihilate Israel, (6) new Nobel prizes to be handed out to UN-grant-funded researchers promoting increased funding of the UN at UN-sponsored conferences...
rootedbox 12y ago
Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
- systemtheory 12y ago
  so, what i hear you saying is, you're proposing we double down on desalinization?
youngtaff 12y ago
If our weather is getting more unpredictable due to climate change why don't we get better at capturing the heavy rain we experience in some parts of the world and allowing it to sink in to the ground rather than running off into rivers. Particularly thinking of some of the flooding in UK and Europe over the last decade. If the ice caps melt due to rising temperature surely this means more water in the atmosphere and more rain in some places?
- _abattoir 12y ago
  > If the ice caps melt due to rising temperature surely this means more water in the atmosphere and more rain in some places? Over about 20,000 years of the water cycle, yeah. Ideally we'd want a water solution that didn't involve carting incalculable amounts of rainwater across the countryside...
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  This might work in the UK. There is no national water infrastructure, so although it rains a lot, there are regular droughts - especially in the South East where most of the population lives. There's been some noise about fixing this, but after privatisation there's no commercial interest in taking on national-scale projects without government subsidy. Somewhere like CA is largely desert anyway, and there's no obvious wet climate area to collect water from. So practically, only draconian conservation laws and perhaps a huge string of desal plants can save CA. I guess neither of those are likely. And then you get a repeat of what's happening in Sao Paulo and Rio in Brazil, where there's no water for days on end. The terrifying thing about climate change is that it's literally making some areas uninhabitable. Large parts of FL have less than fifty years, CA and NM are drying out, the East Coast will become more prone to flooding and perhaps also to extreme winters. Europe is going to have similar problems as flooding becomes common. There are already places in the UK where buildings insurance is no longer affordable. At some point the economics stop making sense. Not long after that people either leave or become homeless. It would have been smart to avoid these outcomes, but that doesn't seem to have happened.
  - youngtaff 12y ago
mercnet 12y ago
Possible water crisis in the future, and governments are selling water supplies for $2.25 per million litres! http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/06/outrage-boils-over-as-b-c-government-plans-to-sell-groundwater-for-2-25-per-million-litres/ http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/06/outrage-boils-over-a...
Lethe101 12y ago
Something that bears mentioning when you read this type of report: If something is 10-20 years in the future in these types of models, this has: a) Already happened unless b) there are major changes / interactions that scientific models have not had factored in while c) Anthropic actions cannot change this, but it can change x+n where X is original time and n is the 'down ramp' from your curve. For instance: if your Co2 is 400ppm now, then the effects have already happened 20-50 years into the future. It can be made much much worse through events before you hit that time (let us say either Yellowstone or the entire of India / China buying a car per family) but your actions in the interim are merely altering the effects after time X. In the case of water we can say: model presents X+n time > if action: such as massive investment in desalination and/or new osmosis materials (positive to time change) minus climate impacts we've not noticed yet (negatives to time change) where n is less than continued effect without any other imputs. This is a rather loopy way to say: People think of these types of announcements as future based predictions: they're not, they're present events if (and only if) your models don't change. [Note: this isn't to say they're scientifically incorrect - but this inability to understand time in these types of reports fuels a lot of ignorance from both "sides" of Climate / Ecological debates]
- pdkl95 12y ago
  > models don't change I wonder if the software running those models has finally been corrected[1] to use floating point properly. Giving different results from the same data+software when run on different hardware suggests rounding wasn't being handled properly[2]. As these models are already so sensitive to initial conditions that "ensemble prediction" are necessary to avoid chaotic results, mishandling floating point rounding could completely destroy the results. [1] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.ht... [2] http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/07/28/137209/same-programs--different-computers--different-weather-forecasts http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/07/28/137209/same-progr...
webXL 12y ago
This is a non issue, provided that economic growth continues. That 10% of energy costs which desalination would add, we just choose to spend it on things not as vital. With economic growth, we just spend more and more of the new wealth on building desal infrastructure. If we're able to add nuclear to the mix, it lowers our total energy cost freeing up some additional room for desal. Fusion will definitely make this a non issue.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
As more of the world becomes middle class, there is more demand for meat protein. This is a problem since it takes about 10 times the water (and also energy) to support non-vegetarian diets.

evo_9 12y ago

Whew, thank god. Cause the Peak Oil guys sure need something new to fret about. And these things always come true exactly as predicted because, you know, progress doesn't continue along, Moore's Law doesn't continue along.

delecti 12y ago
Progress would be the world acting.

phkahler 12y ago

They point to population growth as a contributing factor, yet they never suggest anyone do anything about that. How about free birth control to anyone who wants it? How about permanent birth control to any adult who wants it? I'd say free to anyone below some income level since the middle class can afford it anyway. With increasing productivity we don't have jobs for all the people anyway, why not encourage making less of them? I'm not talking about mandates or government deciding who reproduces, just having them help folks that would prefer not to have kids to not have them. The solution doesn't always have to be more regulation.

ido 12y ago
Population growth rates world wide have already plummeted in recent decades and continue to do so as more developing countries industrialize. Current predictions point to stabilizing world population at 9 billion and the starting to slowly drop. In the most developed countries we have seen lower than replacement rates for a long while now.
- r00fus 12y ago
  Amusingly, this is the population posed for 24th century earth in the movie "Star Trek: First Contact". Nice to know they didn't pull the numbers from thin air.
josefresco 12y ago
I think one of the keys to "controlling" population growth is to bring people out of poverty. Most studies I read, show dropping birth rates as people/nations climb the economic ladder. Education, and health care also play a big part.
- throwaway5752 12y ago
  Since the original topic is the global fresh water crisis, wouldn't the increased per capita resource consumption from greater standards of living offset any gains in population growth slowing?
  - dguaraglia 12y ago
    Great question!
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    Not necessarily; there is sometimes quite a lot of surface water in poor areas of the world, but no reliable way to disinfect it. So you get wells dug next to rivers, because the well water is clean and the river is not. Rising living standards create the capital, infrastructure, and stability to build water and sewage treatment plants to make better use of surface water. In the developed world, much of the "population" problem is the location, not amount, of people. Lots of people have moved to Phoenix because of air conditioning and groundwater wells. Its population growth has been driven almost entirely by migration, not birth rate. One potential solution there is to allow accurate market pricing of water. If it becomes progressively more expensive to live there as water supplies dwindle, people would stop building water-hungry golf courses and stop moving there. Unfortunately, control of the municipal water supply is often in the hands of the local government...who is not going to willingly vote to raise the price of water on their voters, and shrink their own city.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Hopefully the developing world can learn from our mistakes and not build cities and farmland in deserts.
makmanalp 12y ago
I wonder if there are strategic reasons behind this - do the US and European countries fear a growing China and India and feel the need to compete, for example? Are there military or economic incentives to having a large population today as there used to be a millennium ago? I'm probably going to go with no, but who knows?
- phkahler 12y ago
  >> I wonder if there are strategic reasons behind this - do the US and European countries fear a growing China and India and feel the need to compete, for example? Well the US would be in a slow decline if not for immigration, so we're trying to get smart people to come here which both sustains us and deprives the others of talent. We also seem to like ambitious folks willing to work hard for less pay, so we maintain a very leaky southern border. China is the only country I know actively trying to address population. The guy who invented RISUG is in India, but I haven't checked how that's going in a while.
- auganov 12y ago
  I always had a feeling that most of China's "success" is just centralizing wealth of the whole country in a few places under governance of not so many people. With so many people you don't have to be terribly successful at reform to produce a bunch of impressive cities etc. Per capita it has a long way to go. We'll never know until/if China breakups into multiple countries (or something similar).
edkennedy 12y ago
Lovely ideas, but very far out of reach. Some of our elected officials would rip apart planned parenthood and impose strict rules on birth control if they could.
- phkahler 11y ago
  >> Lovely ideas, but very far out of reach. Some of our elected officials would rip apart planned parenthood and impose strict rules on birth control if they could. Much of the opposition to planned parenthood is their being a provider of abortions. Witness the new healthcare law requirements for insurance to cover birth control. But then Hobby Lobby wants an exception. I'm just advocating the offering of permanent procedures, which should be cheaper long term.
tracker1 12y ago
...or a global plague... something similar to the black plague, or some of the really bad flu epidemics... without the risks from infectious disease, humans are pretty much un-checked. I'm not suggesting that we actually engineer such a solution, but the fact is there are too many people on the planet, and the population is only growing... Eventually the real perceived value of life will decrease, and more militant solutions will start presenting themselves. It's not popular, and my only hope is I don't live to see things get really worse. Desalinization really should be something under much heavier research than it currently is. As should farming with less water usage, as well as cross-country water pipelines.
- civilian 12y ago
  Our population should cap out at 10billion: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_g... and the ethical thing we can do to encourage that is to pull people out of poverty and give them education and tv.
eikenberry 12y ago
When you say free you don't mean free. Free means no one pays for it which means no one spends time making it. If anyone has to spend any time making and/or distributing this birth control it isn't be free by definition.
- Vraxx 12y ago
  Or they don't mean the specific definition of "free" you've concocted. Free can definitely mean "without payment" which one could easily infer from context and it's what GP meant.
- MBlume 12y ago
  "When you see free you don't mean free. Free means [this thing I just decided it means, which is quite obviously not the meaning you're using]. If [the definition I just introduced doesn't obtain] it isn't free by definition."
techaddict009 12y ago
Indian Government does have programs for what you have said.
systemtheory 12y ago
"I'd say free to anyone below some income level since the middle class can afford it anyway." I totally understand you're coming from a good place here, but this is exactly the type of thing that can go all sorts of wrong when implemented by people coming from not such a good place. Also, this could come across any number of ways if you're coming from a different place (socioeconomic wise). For instance. Well off families tend to have less children and are in a position to provide for them. So, if I'm poor and can't afford to take care of my kids properly, you're proposing I just don't have them? I use that example only to emphasize what I think is already implicit in your comment, that this is a super complex issue. My reaction to the article was similar to yours, just from a different angle. I kept reading "more efficient use of" and thinking, at what point do we realize we need to use less and not just get more out of what we use?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

FilterJoe 12y ago

With all the talk of water running out in CA and the world, I am wondering why desalination is not part of the conversation. According to Wikipedia: "Supplying all domestic water by sea water desalination would increase the United States' energy consumption by around 10%, about the amount of energy used by domestic refrigerators." Is this true? If so, why isn't desalination happening on a massive scale in CA? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Considerations_and_criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Considerations_and... EDIT: The Wikipedia sentence I quoted was not clearly written. It should have said "supplying all household water" not "supplying all domestic water." Far more water is used by farming.

tehchromic 12y ago
Simple: cost As long as it is cheaper to exploit an existing clean water source than to spend the energy, and invest in the massive and in some cases unproven tech and engineering infrastructure to build desalination plants, then that's what will happen. It's unfortunate, because the cost to future generations, or the biosphere doesn't calculate into our current economic system, and most of the commercial infrastructure is aligned against re-calibration of that kind, because it would cost them dearly.
- cpncrunch 12y ago
  http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megascale-desalination/ http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megasca... $0.58/m3 seems pretty cheap to me.
brianbreslin 12y ago
The cost to build desalination plants to service millions of residents would be BILLIONS. Tens of Billions. Money that is available, just being spent on other things...
- satori99 12y ago
  We built one in Sydney a few years back. It cost nearly 2 Billion, and it now sits idle at a cost of around half a million per day I guess we'll be laughing in 15 years though http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Desalination_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Desalination_Plant

jug5 12y ago

Don't worry, Canada is selling a million litres of clean water for $2.25. That's like $1 US.

guyzero 12y ago

Once again, Silicon Valley is way ahead of the curve.

tomjen3 12y ago
Guess who will be called in to help them get more water, somehow?

niche 12y ago

Introducing Aquabob! Imagine: a dome that collects condensation (think morning dew). It waters your greenhouse, and leaves you with plenty to water down for those midnight cocktails

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

civilian 12y ago
This has nothing to do with using water for agriculture, industry and showers.

nobleach 12y ago

With the rising sea levels (due to global warming), wouldn't now be the best time to figure out how to pipe that desalinated water all over the continents?

webXL 12y ago
I don't think we'll be able to desalinate all that water, but figuring out an affordable pumping solution to combat sea level rise would be worthwhile, nonetheless. It's a "pipe dream" (sorry) at this point, but who knows what kind of energy technologies might make this doable someday. And if we have the affordable energy to achieve that, then I think we'll have a lot of options. Not buying Florida beach-front property any time soon though.

joeclark77 12y ago

I bet they've got their finger right on a set of great solutions: (1) more money for the UN, (2) more sovereign power handed over to the UN, (3) more money from the UN to fund more studies on why more money should be given to the UN, (4) more posh conferences for UN and UN-related bigshots in exotic locales, (5) annihilate Israel, (6) new Nobel prizes to be handed out to UN-grant-funded researchers promoting increased funding of the UN at UN-sponsored conferences...

rootedbox 12y ago

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.

systemtheory 12y ago
so, what i hear you saying is, you're proposing we double down on desalinization?

youngtaff 12y ago

If our weather is getting more unpredictable due to climate change why don't we get better at capturing the heavy rain we experience in some parts of the world and allowing it to sink in to the ground rather than running off into rivers. Particularly thinking of some of the flooding in UK and Europe over the last decade. If the ice caps melt due to rising temperature surely this means more water in the atmosphere and more rain in some places?

_abattoir 12y ago
> If the ice caps melt due to rising temperature surely this means more water in the atmosphere and more rain in some places? Over about 20,000 years of the water cycle, yeah. Ideally we'd want a water solution that didn't involve carting incalculable amounts of rainwater across the countryside...
TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
This might work in the UK. There is no national water infrastructure, so although it rains a lot, there are regular droughts - especially in the South East where most of the population lives. There's been some noise about fixing this, but after privatisation there's no commercial interest in taking on national-scale projects without government subsidy. Somewhere like CA is largely desert anyway, and there's no obvious wet climate area to collect water from. So practically, only draconian conservation laws and perhaps a huge string of desal plants can save CA. I guess neither of those are likely. And then you get a repeat of what's happening in Sao Paulo and Rio in Brazil, where there's no water for days on end. The terrifying thing about climate change is that it's literally making some areas uninhabitable. Large parts of FL have less than fifty years, CA and NM are drying out, the East Coast will become more prone to flooding and perhaps also to extreme winters. Europe is going to have similar problems as flooding becomes common. There are already places in the UK where buildings insurance is no longer affordable. At some point the economics stop making sense. Not long after that people either leave or become homeless. It would have been smart to avoid these outcomes, but that doesn't seem to have happened.
- youngtaff 12y ago

mercnet 12y ago

Possible water crisis in the future, and governments are selling water supplies for $2.25 per million litres! http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/06/outrage-boils-over-as-b-c-government-plans-to-sell-groundwater-for-2-25-per-million-litres/ http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/06/outrage-boils-over-a...

Lethe101 12y ago

Something that bears mentioning when you read this type of report: If something is 10-20 years in the future in these types of models, this has: a) Already happened unless b) there are major changes / interactions that scientific models have not had factored in while c) Anthropic actions cannot change this, but it can change x+n where X is original time and n is the 'down ramp' from your curve. For instance: if your Co2 is 400ppm now, then the effects have already happened 20-50 years into the future. It can be made much much worse through events before you hit that time (let us say either Yellowstone or the entire of India / China buying a car per family) but your actions in the interim are merely altering the effects after time X. In the case of water we can say: model presents X+n time > if action: such as massive investment in desalination and/or new osmosis materials (positive to time change) minus climate impacts we've not noticed yet (negatives to time change) where n is less than continued effect without any other imputs. This is a rather loopy way to say: People think of these types of announcements as future based predictions: they're not, they're present events if (and only if) your models don't change. [Note: this isn't to say they're scientifically incorrect - but this inability to understand time in these types of reports fuels a lot of ignorance from both "sides" of Climate / Ecological debates]

pdkl95 12y ago
> models don't change I wonder if the software running those models has finally been corrected[1] to use floating point properly. Giving different results from the same data+software when run on different hardware suggests rounding wasn't being handled properly[2]. As these models are already so sensitive to initial conditions that "ensemble prediction" are necessary to avoid chaotic results, mishandling floating point rounding could completely destroy the results. [1] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.ht... [2] http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/07/28/137209/same-programs--different-computers--different-weather-forecasts http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/07/28/137209/same-progr...

webXL 12y ago

This is a non issue, provided that economic growth continues. That 10% of energy costs which desalination would add, we just choose to spend it on things not as vital. With economic growth, we just spend more and more of the new wealth on building desal infrastructure. If we're able to add nuclear to the mix, it lowers our total energy cost freeing up some additional room for desal. Fusion will definitely make this a non issue.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

As more of the world becomes middle class, there is more demand for meat protein. This is a problem since it takes about 10 times the water (and also energy) to support non-vegetarian diets.