Tag: water

Atmospheric rivers

the solution to the california drought: atmospheric rivers:

Geologic evidence shows that truly massive floods, caused by rainfall alone, have occurred in California every 100 to 200 years. Such floods are likely caused by atmospheric rivers: narrow bands of water vapor 2 km above the ocean that extend for 1000s of km.

in fact, this happened in 1862

The cataclysm cut off telegraph communication with the East Coast, swamped the state’s new capital, and submerged the entire Central Valley under 4.5m of water.

2023-05-05: Also known as an Arkstorm.

Climate change is expected to increase the risk of severe flooding from a hypothetical ARkStorm, with runoff 200 to 400% above historical values for the Sierra Nevada in part due to a decrease in the portion of precipitation that falls as snow, as well as an increase in the amount of water that storms can carry. The likelihood of the event outlined in the ARkStorm scenario is now once every 25-50 years, with projected economic losses of over $1 trillion

Peak Environmental Impact

if true (requires a lot more study) this would be major good news

It is now conceivable that the human race will reach “peak impact” before the end of this century.

The decoupling is a breaking of the link between economic and population growth on the one hand and resource use on the other. Some decoupling indicators from the report: The per-capita farmland requirement has declined by half in the last half-century. In absolute terms, cropland has expanded 13% and pasture 9% in that time period, but the sum of the 2 has remained stable since the mid-1990s. Total water consumption increased by 170% between 1950 and 1995, but per-capita water consumption peaked around 1980 and declined thereafter. The least decoupled environmental impact is greenhouse gas emissions from energy: global per-capita emissions increased by nearly 40% between 1965 and 2013.

Free diving

Water had some powerful, unknown capacity to slow humans’ hearts, and the blood in their bodies began flooding away from their limbs and toward their vital organs. He’d seen the same thing happen in deep-diving seals decades earlier; by shunting blood away from less important areas of the body, the seals were able to keep organs like the brain and heart oxygenated longer, extending the amount of time they could stay submerged. Immersion in water triggered the same mechanism in humans.

Halophytes

you don’t need desalination for agriculture if you go for plants that can tolerate salt water. there are 1000s of them.

More than 97% of the water on Earth is saline. Wouldn’t it be cruel if nature had locked up the vast bulk of the planet’s vital fluids in a form that no plant could drink? Well, as it happens nature is not quite that cruel. Of the 400K flowering plant species around the world, 2600 do drink seawater. They are halophytes, meaning ‘salt-plant’, and they might just be the answer to a question surprisingly few governments have yet asked: namely, how can we put our planet’s practically infinite volumes of saltwater to good use?

Drug Take-Back Day

The Next National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day is scheduled for October 26, 2013. One or more of your local pharmacies will likely accept your old pharmaceuticals free, no questions. It disposes of them safely and keeps them out of landfills or sewers where they apparently are having ever-worsening effects on water supplies — for example putting female hormones from birth control pills into what you drink from the tap. Go through your cabinet!