For context, it's worth nothing that most of Arizona's water use is by farmers who have basically free and unlimited access to public water sources, and grow water-retaining crops that are then shipped to other states or even countries, like Saudi Arabia [1].
The same pattern repeats in other states, where the water laws were written with a presumption that farmers get to use as much as they want for anything they want.
I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two.
It starts with insurance not covering large areas of the coast, water scarcity in dry regions, etc. Pretty soon you have expensive energy, mass migrations, widespread shortages, and politicians yelling jingoistic chants at rallies.
Everyone acts like 20 years from now gas will be more expensive and we’ll get some coastal flooding. These people are hopelessly optimistic. it’s going to get really bad once the dominos start falling.
I'm still surprised I can't find any halfway mainstream real estate search tools that include criteria for climate change predictions on water, fire, etc issues. Redfin will show you general stats inside specific listings, but won't let you search on them.
We were going to buy a house overlooking a creek but were told that an offer had just been accepted. A few days later, we got a call that for some strange reason the sale had fallen through. My wife and I started researching and ran across https://floodfactor.com. It said that there was a 97% chance of a foot or more of water in the house in the next 15 years, incurring more than $100,000 of damage.
I wasn't familiar with floodfactor.com but they were linked from realtor.com I'm a little cynical about that - hey, yes, your house flooded but you should have checked that link and it's not your realtor's fault - but it's a sign that their information should be taken seriously.
Now they do wildfire and "heat" risks as well as flooding. They might introduce something like water supply risk and other things.
Being in a flood plain is a mandatory disclosure and requires additional flood insurance. So they probably realized it when they went to get homeowners insurance and it was much more expensive than they thought it would be.
On the flip side, the person that we bought our house from had the map showing the flood plains as part of the overview of the house and that the house that was outside of the flood plain. She was adamant about it because the house is up on a slight hill, so both neighbors are in the flood plain and had to fight insurance before that the house was not actually in the flood plain.
In a similar vein, check out geological surveys for karsts and sinkholes if you live in an area where bedrock is comprised of soluble rocks (which is much of populated earth). I know this seems outrageous, but increased rainfall doesn't just flood creeks and rivers, it can overload sewage systems. And if an overloaded sewage system means water has to find it's own way.
This doesn't just effect your house. Think about the impact of a road to your house sinks. IME, these can take months to get fixed.
One of the clearest memories I have of my high school education was when my high school Earth Science teacher shared his process on evaluating the surrounding geology of a property before purchasing his home. Home ownership seems like an increasingly distant goal but I look forward to putting that lesson into practice one day.
Just tried it....I'm not very convinced in it's modeling.
I live near the top of a large, steeply sloped hill and water does not flow past/towards the house. It claims there is a 97% chance of a foot or more of water reaching my house in the next 30 years. It at least doesn't claim there would be damages, but there's really no way for what it claims to actually occur.
The FEMA maps also have reliability problems but I'm not sure this is more reliable.
No idea if relevant, but a friend of mine lives on the side of a steep hill and... got flooded recently.
They had heavy sudden rainfall, exceeding the capacity of drainage pipes. He just got superficial damage, his next door neighbour had 1ft of water everywhere on ground floor. No basement at least.
Wouldn't insurance companies have an incentive to overestimate risk though? Not saying you should ignore the danger... just, not sure the two assessments should be expected to line up.
Thanks for sharing. This is interesting and useful. Online real estate companies are very lazy and bad when it comes to adding additional useful info. Once they got a monopoly position and access to MLS in every state (not easy feat, impossible to do today as a founder without serious cash) they just started resting on their laurels.
Not only do I care about these kinds of risks, I also care about neighborhood quality and architectural design. None of this is measured let alone searched for. Walk score is a start but again same problem as Risk Factor.
When the realtor called to say that the previous offer had fallen through and wanted us to buy, he said a couple of times that the owner didn't have to have flood insurance.
We hadn't said anything about flood insurance. So it seemed like either the disclosure scared the other buyer or they found riskfactor.com or something like that.
Beautiful house, beautiful view. Also a quarter mile below a earthen dam 250 feet high and a few feet above a creek that was raging in 1996, several years before this house was built.
You only need to have flood insurance if you have a mortgage. Our home is in a floodplain, but the prior owner was the first owner, and build the home himself. When we bought the home, we had to petition FEMA to remove the home from the flood plain.
This is great. We’re looking at a few areas for a potential vacation home and trying to estimate future climate risk is something we’d like to attempt to account for.
Most people search in small geographic areas, where the threats apply pretty equally (or the data isn't that granular to distinguish between individual plots). You might be better off looking at insurance data by county.
I live in a state with coast and mountains. I don't think grouping them together makes any kind of sense when searching the way the commenter suggests.
Has it ever occurred to you that it means your ideas are very very outside the mainstream? Maybe you will be laughing at us in your water front cabin at the top of the Rockies but probably not.
> Has it ever occurred to you that it means your ideas are very very outside the mainstream?
Which "idea" is outside the mainstream here? That climate change will dramatically alter property values and liveability in some locations, or that housing search sites should surface this information proactively as a search criteria?
Companies are already starting to massively increase insurance rates (Florida and floods) or drop coverage altogether (California and fires). This is an article about a very real thing happening now in Arizona, though this situation is only exacerbated vs. caused by climate change. Extreme heat events in major cities without true access to a natural water source (e.g., Atlanta) or decaying water sources (e.g., Las Vegas) are happening.
We can debate the magnitude of change, but the direction of change is a done deal.
There's the old adage that regulations are written in blood. People are reactive, rarely pro-active.
Once enough people are negatively impacted by climate change, we will start seeing tools and laws pop up to help people/business manage the impact. But, right now, politicians and businesses are still able to get away with their lies and denials of the cause and impact. It might be another 10, 20, or 30 years until enough people are hurt by climate change that perceptions on the right change.
Alternative is there’s an incentive time horizon mismatch.
Realtors and property listing sites want to close sales.
Most homeowners want a multi year home.
Beyond the edges of repeat customers it seems hard to see why a real estate company would have any motivation to provide this information unless they cover an area that will significantly benefit from climate change.
> Has it ever occurred to you that it means your ideas are very very outside the mainstream
I recently bought in Wyoming. Low flood, heat and wind risk are actively talked about in the local saloon. The market appears to be segregating into the climate naive and climate savvy, with the latter hoping to profit off a wealth transfer.
Of course we understand that half of America has been misled about climate change and other resource constraints and environmental issues. You can still make good money serving the other half.
And of course I shouldn't have to say it that the Rockies will certainly not be water front, and no climate scientist is claiming that. Miami high rises may well fall down though.
"I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two."
I mean, this water issue has almost nothing to do with climate change. Groundwater depletion is a huge concern on the great plains and other areas too. This is what happens when you have so many people and need to support their preferences (eg watering commodity crops instead of growing crops that thrive in dry areas, overpopulation in arid regions, etc).
Overpopulation is the fundamental root cause of climate change, and I'm tired of opinion columnists and most scientists denying it or deflecting. Malthus was right. He was only too early for his time. Technology and the Haber-Bosch process gave us more time. But the inevitable can't be delayed forever.
No, we shouldn't try to support 8 billion people with the standard of living of Botswana. It would be much better for everyone involved to have 100 million people with an American/Western standard of living. Quality over quantity.
> No, we shouldn't try to support 8 billion people with the standard of living of Botswana. It would be much better for everyone involved to have 100 million people with an American/Western standard of living. Quality over quantity.
I was curious how big a population could be supported at the per capita emissions of various countries and still be net zero. What I mean by "net zero" is the the atmospheric CO2 level would stay at current levels.
Here's a table of populations (in millions) that would be net zero at the per capita emissions of various countries.
50 Qatar
115 Australia
130 United States
170 South Korea
211 Germany
240 Norway
270 China
360 United Kingdom
390 France
560 Mexico
670 Botswana
1020 Fiji
1050 India
1980 Honduras
3030 Laos
4260 Bangladesh
4900 Cambodia
6100 Kenya
6900 Nepal
7700 Zambia
I'm getting country per capita emissions from [1] and am assuming 2 billion tonnes for net zero based on this article [2] which says that's how much CO2 is currently being removed from the atmosphere per year.
Your idea of 100e6 people with a high standard of living is a fantasy.
High standards of living are a product of billions of people, many in much lower standards of living. The regression to progress of having much fewer people is another huge problem.
And it's a very weirdly urgent take when demographic collapse is going to handle a lot of this for us anyway.
Ahhh, I see. What you mean is that both you and your kids are going to work, underpaid, in elderly care. Underpaid, because the cost of what you do will have to be extracted from the working population, which won't include the elderly, and obviously taxes over 50% ... well a proportion over 50% can't double. The elderly population will more than double though. So the pay for people working in elderly care will have to go down, yet more people will have to do it and they'll have to care for a more elderly per worker.
The problem is that there are very large consequences to anything but the smallest of population changes for those who remain.
Also: Global warming (or at least the co2 increase) WILL stop before 2100 for the simple reason we'll run out of oil. I mean peak oil, we can fight about when it will happen, but before 2100 economically viable oil will be gone in practically every scenario. So why bother?
We don’t have to kill anyone, we just have to stop having >2 kids, and there is a lot of evidence that the best way to do this is to improve economic opportunity and education for women and girls in developing nations.
That might be a technically correct approach for the population growth if we ignore natual constraints. However, it fails if we take a larger perspective in the analysis. We see that the developed world produces more climate impact and has higher resource consumption. Shifting the developing world to a similar lifestyle is not possible due to constrained resources. If anything, in the short term it would lead to additonal resource depletion and more climate impact before we could realize any of the population reduction.
There are ways of improving economic opportunity without shifting to a grossly consumerist lifestyle. But even if there weren’t, it would be better to downscale the population through voluntary means even if it meant a climate hit. What’s the alternative? Birth rates stay high right up to the point of famine?
"There are ways of improving economic opportunity without shifting to a grossly consumerist lifestyle."
Such as?
The only places with famine are the ones that are not wealthy/developed. Of course, it's not in absolute terms but rather relative terms since it's about who can bid the highest for the resources that are on the open market. The current population trajectory is that were already slated to peak in the next 50 years. The first real question is how fast can we decrease without major issues. The second is what is the sustainable population level that the earth can support with the modern high consumption lifestyle.
But nobody really talks about this. In fact, we hear more from people like Musk about the population decline issue. That's rather local thinking. It's more of a population distribution issue than a deportation issue.
I daresay China and the other nations would disagree with your assessment as to where the axe should fall. Your list--and I believe all such lists--has a strong subjective bias. I have no doubt there is a user on Tencent and a user on VK who have the US and Western Europe as candidates.
I do suspect AI can provide a future Alexander with a tool to solve such a Gordian knot. ML controlling chaotic systems such as double or triple pendulums demonstrates how intrinsically unstable systems can be managed. Imagine the power and ability of 8 billion coordinated people.
I live in California, which has infrastructure built for 20m people and a current population of 40m and rising.
'Climate change' is not the issue, unrealistic population infrastructure capacity is. In California the ecology is that we have regular cycles of heavy rain every 5-7 years. The reservoir systems were originally built to store water for the dry years.
Forestry management took into account tree disease and the fact forest floors have self cleansed with fire for millennia.
Today we appear to have forgotten all this and are instead astonished and horrified if it rains/ doesn't rain and when there are fires during fire season.
Arizona is in a far more serious situation with inadequate infrastructure capacity to sustain massive population increases, but currently the mania for housing anyone who wants to live in the west outstrips common sense.
Obviously good ecological stewardship of our planet is a no brainer but it seems as though a lot of people just can't join up the historical dots on this and feel human migration to the more pleasant geographical and climate areas are a human right independent of 'tragedy of the commons' logic.
Not sure if that's the right wording. I live in CA too and the wave of remediations to your "fire event acceptance" and coastal water supplies has been pretty dramatic.
I regularly see more activity to clear land around natural burn territory while out hiking, in addition to laser-scanning vegetation patrol helicopters that map down to individual leaves nearing PG&E lines. Citizens here also have better access to early warnings and fire monitoring tech.
Coastal cities are implementing desalination plants with $80M+ of state DWR grants for this awarded so far. This includes brackish groundwater treatment.
Torrance, Santa Barbara [1], and Catalina island now have new desalination infra up and running and contributing millions of gallons a day to local water supplies. Water resources are managed as part of a diversified portfolio-style contingency strategy.
There's also a new interagency group / process to make the planning and setup more efficient than it would be otherwise.
Even up here in rural NorCal we have received millions in state grant money for coastal works like this.
That's flat out incorrect. The official figures absolutely do account for illegal aliens. Citizenship status and legality of presence are not filters used when deciding which humans to count.
Transients aren't residents. The numbers similarly do not account for tourists.
Is the point you're trying to make that California's population is not in fact shrinking despite all official sources saying otherwise? That would be a pretty extraordinary claim. I'm sure you have a source to back it up though, would you share it?
In 50 years Canada will either be annexed forcefully and pipelines built to transport water south. Or most likely, pro-business politicians will be bought and our water rights sold for pennies.
True. But the root of this problem pre-dates any wide-spread awareness of climate change. There are areas of the country (e.g., AZ, the south of CA, etc.) that are known to be historically drought prone, and in addition the supply of fresh water finite. But those historic lessons were ignored and we kept builting and building. Look at Vegas. What other species would do what we did there?
You're correct, we're unprepared for the wrath of Mother Nature. But that's more or less always been the case, especially when it comes to the west of the USA. Climate Change is simply adding the explanation point to: So Stupid!
This is the same thing Paul Ehrlich has been saying will happen in the next decade for 60 years. The average price of electricity per kWh has been trending down the whole time. Solar and wind are getting really cheap and lithium prices are dropping. In 20 years we might not even be worried about oil prices for most applications.
Not sure I understand the question. The claim is: climate change is going to cause big problems in the United States. Your response was: energy is cheaper than ever.
Energy being cheap does not mitigate the problems created by climate change, and there are many scenarios in which low prices make climate impact worse, such as oil prices falling and consumption increasing.
It'd be nice to talk about this stuff in terms of prices because they're very convenient, but convenience does not necessarily make a good metric. The price shout-out is like an ancillary observation at best.
The claim was that among those problems, energy would become more expensive. My counter point is that energy is actually becoming cheaper and while we’re at it, less carbon intensive.
Cheap energy is a great way to solve a lot of the other problems. And lower carbon energy can chip away at the root cause.
Technology has allowed humanity to push back the frontier for a while now, but I can't believe that anyone could look around and think that the current regime is sustainable. Like a village that is feeling great about how full their bellies are now that they've eaten all their seed corn, I get the same feeling from proclamations like the one you've made above. Record levels of C02 in the atmosphere, each year with more and more devastating heat waves (my city just had several of the hottest days on record since records began in the 1880s), the green revolution allowing us to feed people by basically converting petroleum products into agricultural yield, crashing biodiversity all over, fish stocks disappearing, top soil depleting. Its just this cacophony in the background shouting "IT'S TOO MUCH" and its feels like our modern capitalist economy and government can't bear to face this so we just avert our eyes and keep chugging forward.
I have some hope that we're starting to turn the corner as birth rates keep going down, and I am somewhat hopeful that things like renewables will keep pushing forward and contribute to helping us move in a better direction, but there's still a ton of stuff that won't be helped. You can't eat cheap electricity provided by solar panels, at least not in any sort of regime that feels believable (I don't think giant fields of green houses is a plausible replacement for modern intensive agriculture), and it still relies on all sorts of manufacturing processes that are in no way sustainable. That hope runs up against proclamations from people like Musk and my local government that WE MUST GROW at all costs. We need to triple our population by 2100 despite the fact that our infrastructure is already groaning at less that half the goal. I think its pretty clear that there is no sustainable QUALITY of life at 9 billion, and I can't see it being feasible anywhere over 5 billion, maybe. But the powers that be in society see that they could reign over a teeming mass of the impoverished and I truly get the feeling the sentiment is our billionaire class would rather reign over a ramshackle society of poverty where the gulf between them and everyone else is titanic instead of a sustainable society when the objective standard of living is higher but the gap is narrower, and so I'm not sure if we'll actually make any moves to improve things or just slowly work our way to a grinding cyberpunk dystopia.
To summarize, it feels like people dunking on Malthus and Ehrlich are whistling past the graveyard, their stomach full of seed corn allowing them to put off thoughts of the future and all that matters in our society currently is the next quarter's results. Winter is coming and its not going to be pretty.
The same claims have been made in the past. Europe was out of wood, coal smoke was choking cities, disease was insurmountable, environmental issues in the 60s/70s, ozone depletion, looming extinction of charismatic species, and so on.
> the green revolution allowing us to feed people by basically converting petroleum products into agricultural yiel
The green revolution was largely about shuttle breeding in wheat, corn, and rice. Higher yields mean less land can be used for agriculture. Were we see most biodiversity loss and deforestation, people are subsistence farming, engaging in slash and burn agriculture, and using unimproved seeds/methods.
> You can't eat cheap electricity provided by solar panels,
You can split water and force the H2 under pressure to combine with atmospheric nitrogen and create 0 CO2 fertilizer. So you kind of can eat cheap electricity once its cheap enough.
> that WE MUST GROW at all costs
Economic growth isn't tethered to land use anymore and is increasingly detached from CO2 emissions. A few centuries what little economic growth that existed required grain and wood. Economic growth makes us richer, and that extra accumulated wealth allows us to do things like environmental protections. You see the world over, as countries become richer they devote more resources to environmental protection.
> I think its pretty clear that there is no sustainable QUALITY of life at 9 billion
That isn't clear at all. Paul Ehrlich predicted that 6-7 billion people would lead to mass starvation, yet food insecurity is at an all time low. The Club of Rome predicted we would be out of resources by 1992. You're making the argument that people made about the end of whale oil. The mistake is that thinking resources are fixed and finite arrangements of particular atoms in the ground, rather than the application of human ingenuity to raw inputs. Oil was originally useless black gunk.
I'm not denying that there are problems and that there will be consequences of the old carbon economy. I'm not saying that habitat loss isn't a problem. I'm am however pointing out that these are solvable problems and a lot of very capable people are hard at work. Low and no carbon energy is now a solved technical problem and has become merely an infrastructure challenge. That's pretty amazing. Agriculture isn't standing still, there are a ton of gains to be had in land use. Society has managed to solve a lot of hard problems, we have the ability here.
There are still many people in the US (and elsewhere) that straight up don't believe in climate change and so there is nothing to prepare for. In some places (cough florida cough texas), even mentioning climate change gets you labelled as 'woke' and therefore as a nutjob wacky extremist leftist trans commi. Its not an atmosphere of rational debate and problem solving.
googled the definition and belief is "an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists". Seems to fit the way I used the word in this context. Was there a better way to say it?
Just wondering out loud why people use this word, but only for this issue. What else is so obviously true that one must have belief in it, lest they be considered a "denier"? Are there people who don't believe in the homelessness issue? Poverty-deniers?
Its not just this issue. There are people that don't believe the world is round. Literally a belief about the shape of the planet we have actual photos of. People also have 'beliefs' about 9/11, moon landing, etc. Beliefs abound.
If the dust bowl is any indication, you'll have a period of time where people suffer followed by new technology and investment to address the problem long term. As far as coastal flooding, many countries have already been dealing with this for a long time. Where worth it, technology can fix the issue, and where the value of the land and buildings aren't worth it, people will move.
> I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two.
The general populace is definitely unprepared. Those with means know what is coming and they're "getting mine while the getting is good" before it all goes to shit. Which, of course, means making things worse.
They've been predicting the end of the world any second now for decades. We also habitually overlook or downplay it anytime anything actually gets fixed.
Y2K did not result in a global banking meltdown. Instead, it quietly fixed and VCRs stopped being conveniently programmable.
When Iraq lit oil wells on fire on its way out of Kuwait, it was expected to burn for years and be a global climate catastrophe. Crack teams from around the world converged on the country, invented new techniques and thereby dramatically shortened the projected time for putting them out.
In the aftermath, the desert bloomed like no one could remember seeing. That detail was a footnote in more dramatic stories.
No one wakes up in 2023 and thanks whatever gods they believe in that those two apocalypses were averted. We just go online and handwring about the latest bad news and predict that it's unfixable and we're doomed.
Well, yes, it is incredible that those two apocalypses were averted due to hard work by many, many people. But why in the world would we sit around in 2023 patting ourselves on the back for surviving Y2k a quarter century ago when we've been racing closer to multiple other apocalyptic scenarios ever since?
I think there's a difference between denying that carbon emissions into the atmosphere will create a warming and acknowledging that but not being a fear monger or climate doomer. That we don't need to quickly take drastic action that will upend numerous livelihoods and quality of life because we will be able to engineer things to limit effects of warming and probably limit it.
You can acknowledge that there are problems to solve but that doesn't mean that we are doomed as some would have you believe. Even challenging the worst case models is OK as that's how these things work. There's just so many variables that blindly listening to the worst case people without considering other things is foolish.
With all due respect, the models have been correct since the 70s and continue to be correct, we don't assume or operate on the basis of "worst case scenario", we use ensembles of models and operate on those. The models are correct, have been correct, will continue to be correct. We lived, we live, and will continue to live with the consequences of our inaction.
There is literally nothing you can express to change the mind of a person unwilling to change their beliefs in direct presence of evidence, let alone challenge them when the evidence is indirect, more abstract, or existing in the broader environment beyond themselves.
Frankly speaking, if all the droughts and floods of the past few years in Europe, US, China, etc didn't cause people to wake up, nothing will and they will eventually ponder how we got where we have.
> drastic action that will upend numerous livelihoods and quality of life because we will be able to engineer things to limit effects of warming and probably limit it.
With all due respect, that is absolute bogus. Even the most optimistic scenarios of changing our behaviour tomorrow disagree. We could have done things since the 90s to improve the situation, and it wouldn't have reached the current state.
Whether we "succeed" is not a boolean value conditioned on the average global temp increase < 2.0C. What climate scientists express is that along the way to 2.0C, we will observe many irreversible tipping points, e.g. Ice-sheet of Greenland, change of oceanic currents, yada, issues with polar vortex e.g. increased splitting which causes heat-domes and people suffer and die from heat and so on.
Frankly, I don't expect that anything will change and I have made peace with it.
> "Their excellent climate modelling was at least comparable in performance to one of the most influential and well-regarded climate scientists of modern history," Prof Supran said, comparing ExxonMobil's work to Nasa's James Hansen who sounded the alarm on climate in 1988.
Unwillingness to build nuclear power, which could possibly solve the problem, is a driver of suspicion, which is a driver of denial.
Politicization of social sciences and campus activities, severely damages credibility, which drives denial.
Corruption of global institutions (such as the WHO, in light of COVID origins) and the understandable yet also uncomfortable 'Don't Look Here' approach to NIH, Lancet relationship with Wuhan Biolab Research (it's complicated) generates deep suspicion, and fosters denial.
Big Pharma + McKinsey designed scheme to addict millions with opioids without real consequences, and subsequent embracing of Big Pharma during COVID on totally unquestionable terms aka 'Trust The Science!', although rational from a policy perspective (it's a national emergency), is again, a huge driver of suspicion and therefore denial.
Political voices basically have no credibility in most situations and won't be able to convince anyone remotely skeptical.
I think things like 'Housing Insurance' frankly is one of the better means of social interdiction, it hits people right in the pocket book, and I would hope insurance companies just send out the letter with the graph saying 'well, this is where the weather is going, this is the expected damage, so this is your rate'. That's not political logic.
Oil companies did their own research and came to the same conclusion about climate change. But then they decided to lobby against effective mitigation. You're just regurgitating their propaganda.
The wolf is here and has been here. It's eating more and more sheep every year. But the sheep at the other end of the pasture don't know anyone who's been eaten, so they think the whole idea of the wolf was a scam to steal their grass.
It's up to you if you want to, in your head, define climate change as something that's always a little bit worse than what exists today, but that's not what anyone else means.
Let me be clear: climate change is driving massive disasters around the globe and has been for years. We're in it. It will get worse, but we're in it.
If the current state of the world is what climate change looks like, it's no wonder climate doomsayers are a laughing stock. There are so many more significant issues in the world.
> Everyone acts like 20 years from now gas will be more expensive and we’ll get some coastal flooding. These people are hopelessly optimistic. it’s going to get really bad once the dominos start falling.
They're right... if they're from 30 years ago. Popular conception of climate change is wildly out of touch with reality, which is why you're right that it's going to get really bad really fast. Instead of adapting, we're largely ignoring or bandaging problems which continue to get worse.
If eco warriors rationally believe this fear mania, then why are they not screaming for a Nuclear Energy revolution aka large scale builout over the next 20 years to literally save the planet?
Because we could absolutely do it, we wouldn't need to invent a single iota of new tech.
It wouldn't even be that hard - we need to pick up where we left off in 1985 when the 'eco warriors' stopped the buildout.
Why does the current Administration believe in 'science' only when it suits them?
Far from not being listened to - the green movement absolutely killed nuclear development and research in the 1980's and continue to fear monger about that issue, in places like Germany, the fear is generationally entrenched.
The buildout curve grows rapidly in 1980's and 1980's and then drops to 0 in the early 1990's [1].
Were the USA to have 'kept the pace' on that buildout, 60-85% of current electricity generation in USA would be supplied by Nuclear, much as it is in France.
The denialism of the green crowd is existentially damaging to their credibility.
With respect to climate change, far from 'not being listened to' - they're the most influential NGO movement maybe in history (aside from religious movements) - and influence government policy all over the world, at the highest levels, towards a fundamental reshaping of the economic basis.
Mixed in with the 'climate movement' are all sorts of other ideologies, particularly those against consumption etc. which gives you hints as to why they won't chose a relatively clear 'almost solution' to their supposedly existential problems.
If there's a funny bit of history it's that Greenpeace has caused climate change. They saved the Whales, which is nice, but they killed Nuclear (and continue to hold it back) which is bad.
Look at the data from the EIA. Look at those numbers, rate of buildout, and the % contribution made to US energy generation mix. Extend the growth phase (which stopped in 1990) out 20 more years. What is the result?
The result is relatively easy reach to Paris targets.
The "green warriors" today want all of us to go vegan, fly less, bike everywhere, live in dense cities, and buy new clothes once every 5 years. How do you rate the chances of them succeeding at any of those things, like they supposedly "killed nuclear power"?
Clearly someone else, with actual power and influence, wanted to kill nuclear. The environmentalists made for a convenient scapegoat. You fell for it too.
If the claims of climate change people were true, that we are facing existential destruction in short order - then how is it possible they are denying a tried and true solution?
We could have reached 'Paris targets' long ago were we to have kept deploying Nuclear installations, in the terms that we understood decades ago. With fewer accidents. Etc.
The denial of a tried and true solution to this supposedly existential crisis destroys their credibility, and therefor their claims. That's not to say clams aren't valid, but that we can't trust the vanguard of the people behind the climate movement, obviously.
It's incredibly naive (but maybe understandable) for people to not understand that the issue of climate change is hugely politicized and ideological, and because of that, it's hard to make heads or tails of a lot of information.
People running around screaming that the sky is falling - and not talking about Nuclear as part (possibly the basis) of the solution - are spreading irrational fear and hysteria. There's no reason to talk about 'mass flooding' if we can solve the problem in a fairly straight forward manner.
But its overall meaning was not clear, and it context was not clear. English isn't machine code. "Loopholes work under tyrants" is a valid and meaningful English statement but it doesn't have any meaning to this conversation and if I said it as part of my argument you would not know how it contributed to my argument; it is effectively nonsense.
> People running around screaming that the sky is falling - and not talking about Nuclear as part (possibly the basis) of the solution - are spreading irrational fear and hysteria. There's no reason to talk about 'mass flooding' if we can solve the problem in a fairly straight forward manner.
That's a complete non-sequitur. But first, I apparently have to say that people can share one idea and not all their ideas. For example, we both probably believe that using the internet brings us value, since we're doing it. But we disagree on other things! So I wouldn't call us "the internet people." Similarly, there's no such thing as "climate change people." There are people who are concerned about climate change.
Now, the fact that many of them teamed up to kill nuclear is indeed a big problem. But, it is not reasonable to dismiss the dangers of climate change just because that happened. As you say: we're probably worse off due to nuclear disinvestment... making the dangers even greater. So we still need to seriously work hard to address climate change rapidly. Even if it's too late for nuclear, climate change is still a problem. I don't know what your actual position is - what change you'd want to see in the world. None?
Finally, I realize I'm probably wasting my time. When you talk about people "running around screaming that the sky is falling", that's a strawman, it's disingenuous, and it tells me you have no respect for a viewpoint opposing yours. Please take note that I'm not deploying hyperbole and metaphor to make your side sounds stupid, I'm just engaging your words and ideas.
"Volume that can flood a defined area A to depth B" isn't a totally unreasonable way to measure large volumes of liquids that are replenished by falling from the sky over an area.
Of course it's a bit odd because it uses acres and feet for the area and depth, instead of reasonable units like meters, but those are just the usual strange units.
The point is that because our unit of area, the acre, has a very difficult conversion from our units for length, and there are even extremely difficult conversions for different scales of length, we invest yet another unit.
Whereas in a more rational system, the unit for volume would be based on the unit for length in such a way that one could easily convert square-kilometer-inches into cubic meters without a calculator, for example.
I would contend that in the context of reporting specifically on a water shortage, a unit like km^2*cm is actually superior to m^3. First of all, that conversion is actually nontrivial to do in your head. Yes, it's easy enough if you're focused on it it (factor of 10,000). Someone who doesn't frequently convert volumes could easily have an off-by-1000 error while casually reading an article. This is a kind of error that science teachers see all the time.
Second, the direct "depth of flooding" value is useful both on the production side (rainfall) and for two of the largest consumers (agriculture and lawn care). The conversion therefore needs to happen twice, which is one of the usual thresholds for delaying the conversion into M-K-S.
Using awkward units of measurement that have little compatibility results in a multiplication of even more awkward units.
If you don't have a good, easy way to convert between acres and square feet, you instead need to imagine some unit custom built for the application. So rainfall is typically measured in inches, crop areas in acres, simple we will just invent an acre-foot and now people can convert their rainfall needs into water amounts. Maybe.
It's typical to measure large surface areas in acres and the depth of water in a foot. So this seems like a very appropriate unit of measurement. An acre of water a foot deep.
It makes thinking about large volumes of water easier - especially in the context of lakes and rivers. I have no clue how to begin thinking about 5,000,000,000 kiloliters or 130,000,000 gallons. But I can visualize an acre, and I can visualize a foot.
Plus, think about rates of change. If 5 acre-foot of water is moving through a channel every hour, and you have a 500 acres reservoire, then the water level drops by 3 inches a day.
To be fair it's really just an application of the same strange units. Once you've committed to acres for land and feet+inches for rainfall, acrefeet is the only option you've really got for volume of rainfall. We have to fix land (square kilometers) and rainfall (millimeters) before we can fix volume of rainfall (cubic meters).
But your equipment for handling water is almost certainly going to measure things in terms of volume/minute, where the volume unit will not be acre-feet. Perhaps it's gallons. Or hogsheads.
The acre-foot is a useful measure only for certain scales of volumes, but there's a need to convert between small and large scales of volumes all the time.
If we didn't have the metric system, sure, the acre-foot makes sense to use. And in the metric system, perhaps people will occasionally talk in terms of hectare-cm instead of liters or m^3 (I don't know enough about non-US water systems to know what they typically use). But regardless of liters or m^3 or hectare-cm, these can all be converted by moving a decimal point rather than multiplication or division with multiple significant figures.
We have a better system, we have just chosen not to use it.
It's not strange. It's an emergent domain-specific measurement that means something to practitioners within that domain.
What's strange is chopping off the head of a bunch of French aristocrats because ergot poisoning drove you mad, and then replacing old emergent domain-specific measurements with something new because those old measurements just aren't rational, and you're clearly very rational, obviously, because what could be more rational than tearing a bunch of people from their homes and chopping off their heads? Their world order was clearly arbitrary and irrational, and evil! So with that oppressive old world order extinguished, you're now impelled to conjure new, more rational unit definitions like "one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris", which is in no way arbitrary, and is of course very rational and sensible.
And from this day henceforth, the ploughman shall no longer measure his land in terms of the area that a pair of oxen can plow in a day (1 acre), but in terms of the square of "one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris" - the meter! The meter is rational, scientific, even noble, yes indeed.
Most water usage in western states goes towards agriculture. Only a small portion goes towards municipal uses. The real savings are cutting down on waste in ag, or rethinking certain crops.
I know it is a delivery issue not supply, but it is amazing to see how much freshwater US has. US has 5 times the renewable freshwater per person as China and almost 8 times as India. US and Canada have been blessed with freshwater resources.
They mention that permits would require a sustainable water source other than groundwater. What would such a source be? Surely any water collection system would be preventing water from reaching the water table (intuitively, I am not an expert)?
Buying river water rights from someone that has an existing claim (rather than just installing a pump and taking 'free' water from the aquifer). It's not that there isn't any water at all, it's just that the water is spoken for (frequently for relatively low return activities like alfalfa farming).
The article says that they're going to require new houses to draw 100% of water from the Colorado river, and that Phoenix is one of the fastest growing cities in the US.
Of course, Arizona has simultaneously promised to cut usage of river water.
I'm guessing the local government is betting that possession is 9/10ths of ownership when it comes to water rights, and they plan to simply ignore interstate water rights moving forward.
won't this create a market for water rights? provided rights are limited and transferable, we would expect that higher value use cases would purchase the rights over time.
Good luck with that. We getting a good view how markets with constrained supply work with Ozempic. On one side you have people with diabetes and circulation problems who need it as a medication to keep all their bodily appendages, and on the other side are have Elon Musk & friends who push it as if it were stimulant because they can't control their food intake.
Now try this with water. Agriculture vs golf course communities, good luck!
On average, the excess energy in the atmosphere from global warming will suspend too much water vapor in the sky, creating second order problems. The amount of suspended water will be more than enough for household usage.
I have no idea if averaging too much atmospheric water globally does anything to help Arizona though.
Water recovered from sewage streams. This is how the Palo Verde nuclear plant, 45 miles from Phoenix, is cooled. It's the only large nuclear power plant in the world not located near water.
This means Phoenix would have more water if they sourced their power from elsewhere, for example from solar, since they wouldn't have to evaporate their sewer water to keep the nuclear plant running. Cooling the plant evaporates up to 100 million cubic meters (80,000 acre-feet) of water a year.
This isn't water that goes through the steam turbines. It's water that's used on the other "side" of the condenser to condense the water that went through the steam turbines. This water is, in turn, allowed to evaporate, carrying away the waste heat (as latent and sensible heat) into the environment. Recondensing the evaporated water would just produce that heat again.
The water going through the steam turbines themselves is highly purified and gets reused many times.
It would be possible to design a nuclear power plant that's air cooled, but it would be more expensive, and would likely require a reactor operating at a higher temperature with a higher exhaust temperature.
any more development in the fast-growing city must rely on other sources of water -- such as under-strain rivers.
BestPlaces.net tells me Phoenix averages 9 inches of rain annually and another site (below) suggests rainfall varies from 3.3 inches to more than 21 inches across the state.
My recollection is that off-grid Earth Ships only need 10 inches of rainfall to have adequate water supply using catchment systems and relying on gray water for things like irrigation.
Fresno, California has a rich history with regards to water development and has increased groundwater levels in some years. Anyone working in this area or interested in this issue should look up the book about that history. I believe it's called "Water for a thirsty land" and has some subtitle. (I've said this before and linked it before.)
The US overproduces food to an absurd degree and isn't even remotely close to maximizing it's ability to grow it.
Anyway, Ag shifted production to the Southwest because when you don't pay the actual value of the water, it's great - lots of sun, long growing season, basically free water = cheapest production.
When water costs money....you'll see quite a bit of that production shift back up north.
Arizona is in for a healthy dose of reality much sooner than everyone thinks. It's great that they are making any effort at all to limit development based on resources actually available to support it, but there are tons of loopholes.
As mentioned elsewhere, agriculture and industry are the real problem. You have nonsense like this going on:
Tangential but RealLifeLore did a video a while back[1] outlining how Las Vegas manages water intake from Lake Mead and the Colorado River by minimising waste and having extremely efficient water processing facilities which then feed water back.
Maybe there are lessons to be learned there rather than simply taking more.
Not every problem is the result of climate change. They're low on water in southern Arizona because theyre trying to build large settlements in a desert. The ground water is drying up because people who live there are sucking it out. It doesn't take a complex phenomenon to explain that deserts are dry and inhospitable.
>Human-caused climate change means the once-bountiful snowpack that feeds the river has dwindled.
Really? "human caused"? Let me remind the author (if he reads these comments) the Earth's climate it changing all the time. Also the whole topic is a magnet for disinformation by ruthless interest groups (nation states trying to protect themselves and harm their enemies, political organisations, financial lobbies). So sorry, but I'll not believe any research in the field that isn't personally verifiable (all data and code open) also even without all the meddling interest groups do climate research/simulation is hard. Wake me up when we have some concrete results we can predict (for example drought/flood patterns), then I'll consider it more seriously.
For anyone quick to label me an" anthropomorphic climate change denier" let me say I don't deny greenhouse gases cause warming, but there are two important unknowns. First how much of current climate change is caused by anthropogenic co2/methane and how much is caused by natural processes? What positive and negative feedback loops are at play planet wide? We are very far from being able to answer it with any certainty.
So, an argument someone could make, until we know the impact for sure isn't it prudent to limit our greenhouse gases emissions just in case? To which I say yes, it is. And I'm all for it (nuclear and hydro power, electrification etc), but we can't shoot ourselves in the foot to scratch an itch. Yes, we should endeavour to limit greenhouse gas emissions, but when other countries (China) are emitting more and more are we to voluntarily deindustrialise ourselves in the name of being green? No way.
The same pattern repeats in other states, where the water laws were written with a presumption that farmers get to use as much as they want for anything they want.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...