Water crisis coming in 15 years unless the world acts now, UN report warns(theglobeandmail.com) |
Water crisis coming in 15 years unless the world acts now, UN report warns(theglobeandmail.com) |
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.
That implies that poor people have a higher reproductive rate - which I believe is true. A shortcut is to offer birth control to poor people. Many of them don't actually want a bunch of kids, but when you're poor there's not much to do and sex is free.
I agree it'd be nice to bring people out of poverty, but shouldn't we stop creating more people in poverty too? Prevention is cheaper than a cure.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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...
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.
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]
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.ht...
[2] http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/07/28/137209/same-progr...
Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
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?
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.
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...
And these things always come true exactly as predicted because, you know, progress doesn't continue along, Moore's Law doesn't continue along.
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.
$0.58/m3 seems pretty cheap to me.
http://www.tampabaywater.org/tampa-bay-seawater-desalination...
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0320-drought-e...
A ton of water is used to grow Alfafia. There is no way it's profitable if you had to desalinate it first.
I guess we'll be laughing in 15 years though
There is a theory that if we continue making the Gulf warmer by putting so much salt in, it could be a catalyst for plunging the world into an ice age. Who knows if that's true.
Already here in New Zealand we are exporting some of our fresh water to very rich people over in Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries. Can't link the source, it was a court news article about some guy who assaulted someone. He was exporting prime NZ lambs, and water tankers...
A previous comment I made, with quote from National Geographic about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2094701
[1] http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/environment/waste-dump-threaten...
However... it doesn't mean much that salt is in the water already. You're taking the water out, but leaving all the salt. That can't be good at all.
Just look at the U.S., where birth control is cheap, plentiful, and legal...yet there is still incredible social pressures working against its availability--even basic stuff like sex education, family planning, and condoms.
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.
http://scienceline.org/2011/07/lawns-vs-crops-in-the-contine...