quote:

The population of Buckeye, located 35 miles west of Phoenix, has doubled over the past decade to just under 120,000 and it is now priming itself to eventually become one of the largest cities in the US west. The city’s boundaries are vast – covering an area stretching out into the Sonoran Desert that would encompass two New York Cities – and so are its ambitions.

Buckeye expects to one day contain as many as 1.5 million people, rivaling or even surpassing Phoenix – the sixth largest city in the US that uses roughly 2bn gallons of water a day – by sprawling out the tendrils of suburbia, with its neat lawns, snaking roads and large homes, into the baking desert.

Arizona’s challenging water situation appears a major barrier to such hopes, however. In June, the state announced that new uses of its groundwater have essentially hit a limit, placing restrictions on house building, just a few months after the state lost a fifth of its water allocation from the ailing Colorado River.

quote:

Some of the grander options are ambitious to the point of appearing outlandish, such as a plan to bring desalinated seawater from Mexico to Arizona via a lengthy, uphill pipeline. Arizona may, instead, pipe in water west from California, or from 1,000 miles east, from the Missouri river. Buckeye has already shown it is prepared to spend big to achieve its dreams – in January the city council agreed to spend $80m for a single acre of nearby land, an area smaller than a football pitch, just to secure its attached water rights.

cat botherer posted:

loving Arizona. This exurban hellhole outside of Phoenix wants to import desalinated water from the Gulf of California.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/19/arizona-mexico-water-pipeline-housing-boom

Pipeline dreams: the desert city out to surpass Phoenix by importing water

bedpan posted:

lmao @ thinking 80 million is big money when compared to a project of the scale they are talking about

Laterite posted:

not for long

Microplastics posted:

1. Sell cheap water to stupid city
2. Wait for a million rubes to move in
3. Increase price of water 10x
4. Profit while laughing

Someone invest in my company. I've already bought 500 buckets and a shopping cart

ADudeWhoAbides posted:

Not even oil, all the easy stuff is gone! Bully for those neo-agrarian, pre-industrial future humans.

Rectal Death Adept posted:

if we are already at the planning stages of aerosols I need to get to work on designing a snowpiercer train

ikanreed posted:

cat botherer posted:

loving Arizona. This exurban hellhole outside of Phoenix wants to import desalinated water from the Gulf of California.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/19/arizona-mexico-water-pipeline-housing-boom

Pipeline dreams: the desert city out to surpass Phoenix by importing water

cat botherer posted:

loving Arizona. This exurban hellhole outside of Phoenix wants to import desalinated water from the Gulf of California.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/19/arizona-mexico-water-pipeline-housing-boom

Pipeline dreams: the desert city out to surpass Phoenix by importing water

quote:

Most groundwater rights in Arizona are still based on the frontier legal doctrine of “reasonable use,” which holds that a landowner retains the right to pump as much water as he or she pleases, so long as it’s put to a “reasonable use” such as farming. In 1980, Arizona became the first state to pass groundwater reform, effectively deeming groundwater a public rather than a private resource. But in the years since, few regulatory safeguards have extended beyond the boundaries of Tucson and Phoenix. Outside those places, little has changed since statehood in 1912: A farmer needed only to file an Intent to Drill notice and pay a $150 permitting fee and was then free to pump as much as desired. For valley farmers, growing high-water crops like alfalfa and nuts, this often meant about 2,000 gallons, roughly the capacity of a tanker truck, every minute, 24 hours a day, with only intermittent breaks for several months. In 2017 alone, one farm pumped 22 billion gallons, nearly double the volume of bottled water sold in the United States annually.

Dokapon Findom posted:

Using fossil water to grow alfalfa in a desert for cattle feed is exceptionally dark

I was wondering the other day, if we are dumping 7 Hiroshimas worth of heat into the ocean per second, how many Castle Bravos is that per week? Tsar Bombas per year? How would the total amount of heat absorbed thus far compare to the global nuclear arsenal at its historic peak? Science wants to know!

ikanreed posted:

quote:

Billions of snow crabs have disappeared from the ocean around Alaska in recent years, and scientists now say they know why: Warmer ocean temperatures likely caused them to starve to death.

silicone thrills posted:

lol lmao

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/19/us/alaska-crabs-ocean-heat-climate/index.html

no poo poo sherlock

Mr Beef Head posted:

The interesting part wasnt that they starved, but why. It wasnt that the food supply had disappeared. There was probably just as much forage for the crabs as in past years. The warmer temps increased their homeostatis, made them much more active, so much that there were not enough calories availiable. I think it said they were needing 10x more than a normal year. The cold water was key to keeping their metabolisms low and slow.

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

its still goin
https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1714662842727883106?s=20

Paradoxish posted:

I am not a smart climate person but what disturbs me about this graph is less the temperature deviation and more the fact that none of the other lines seem to be doing the thing where they start going up and then just keep going up

Paradoxish posted:

I am not a smart climate person but what disturbs me about this graph is less the temperature deviation and more the fact that none of the other lines seem to be doing the thing where they start going up and then just keep going up

MMania posted:

I used to live in a house with a 3/4 acre lawn and I mowed that thing probably a hundred times. I ask myself "why," and I'm coming up completely blank. Gallons of gasoline, oil changes and maintenance, as well as the manufacture of the lawnmower and it's little house in my backyard, all just so I "owned a lawn." Hahaha lol.

TeenageArchipelago posted:

sounds like the lawn owned you

TeenageArchipelago posted:

sounds like the lawn owned you

quote:

For valley farmers, growing high-water crops like alfalfa and nuts, this often meant about 2,000 gallons, roughly the capacity of a tanker truck, every minute, 24 hours a day, with only intermittent breaks for several months. In 2017 alone, one farm pumped 22 billion gallons, nearly double the volume of bottled water sold in the United States annually.

corona familiar posted:

what if we tricked the number worshippers into thinking the global temperature deviation is actually a bad number, like "amount of leftists in power" or "wages"

Dokapon Findom posted:

Using fossil water to grow alfalfa in a desert for cattle feed is exceptionally dark

I was wondering the other day, if we are dumping 7 Hiroshimas worth of heat into the ocean per second, how many Castle Bravos is that per week? Tsar Bombas per year? How would the total amount of heat absorbed thus far compare to the global nuclear arsenal at its historic peak? Science wants to know!

quote:

It exploded with an energy of approximately 15 kilotons of TNT (63 TJ)

Potato Salad posted:

okay so Donald Trump thinks he's a snow crab?

Scarabrae posted:

gonna be a solid 70 degrees all next week lol

silicone thrills posted:

lol lmao

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/19/us/alaska-crabs-ocean-heat-climate/index.html

no poo poo sherlock

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

its still goin
https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1714662842727883106?s=20

Mr SuperAwesome posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy

so that means we're adding 7 * 63 * 10^12 J s^-1 of energy to the ocean, 4.41 × 10^14 joules per second.

tsar bomba = 2.25e+17 joules, so roughly one tsar bomba every 500 seconds or 8.5 minutes. that's 1185 tsar bombas per week, or about 61,000 per year.

seems like the total world's first strike capacity was roughly 15,000 megatons at its peak (source https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-weapons), which is 6.2 x 10^19 J. If we dump 7 Hiroshimas per second into the ocean, then the equivalent energy of the global nuclear arsenal at its peak is released in about 40 hours.