- Slow News Day
- Jul 4, 2007
-
|
Bit of a necro for my own thread to cross post an article from the ol' Climate Change thread:
The current state of California agriculture is basically hosed and it's tied directly to the energy economy of large scale ecosystems. A nice object lesson that I'm sure zero people will internalize and go forward to utilize.
Freshwater usage in the country is split about 40/40/20 between power generation, irrigation, and public use respectively. The touted solution of large-scale desalination plants buttressing public water systems in California only shifts the burden of that usage towards power generation: boiling or filtering salt out of water takes a lot of electricity and creates a lot of waste. Without commensurately enormous increases in (water-preserving, low-impact) energy generation, desalination is pretty well a non starter for any but the wealthiest municipalities. It also doesn't fundamentally address the problem, because you're going after the smallest fraction of general water use. It doesn't help that California makes about a third of the entire country's food. There's going to be serious shocks to produce prices on the horizon in 2 years or so if the problem isn't seriously addressed.
I'm going to guess that the eventual "solution" will be something along the lines of just cannibalizing surface and aquifer freshwater sources further and further north. Too bad the snowpack in the PNW is also at record low levels this year.
As an update on the work I'm doing, our work in general has been stunted pretty seriously by lovely weather here in South Carolina. It was only in the last ten days that we started accumulating sufficient degree-days to get our winter wheat past tillering stages. We're about 2 or 3 weeks of growth behind where the same plots were last year. The Southeast in general has been the only place in the country that's been colder than average all winter!
And to hit the ol' D&D trifecta with this post, I just finished a journal article that invoked Agenda 21 in the first paragraph hahaha
I read something about underwater desalination, where the membranes are placed a thousand feet under the ocean and the pressure does most of the work.
Even without that though, solar power is becoming cheaper everyday, and the power generated from that can be used to desalinate water more cleanly.
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2015 20:51
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2024 06:19
|
|
- Slow News Day
- Jul 4, 2007
-
|
Science. We are on a cusp of a revolution in genetics- it doesn't get much press but the achievements made in the last decade in the field have been astounding. At any rate I'm not convinced at all this is actually a problem, or that it would be difficult to fix if it did become one.
Is there a place where one can read about these achievements? (Asking out of sheer curiosity.)
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2015 00:37
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2015 20:51
