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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?
"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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
Readit News
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...
* 72% Agriculture * 22% Municipal * 6% Industrial
[1] https://www.arizonawaterfacts.com/water-your-facts
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.
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.
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).
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.
'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.
1. https://santabarbaraca.gov/government/departments/public-wor...
California's population peaked sometime between 2018 and 2020 (depending on the data source), and has been consistently falling since then.
Deleted Comment
> 2073
Lines up with Fallout
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!
Because... that's not true.
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.
I don't think the dust bowl is a good indication. Compared to ocean warming and acidification, it was a relatively local problem.
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.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/ins...
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.
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.
Even if the wolf comes, nobody will take them seriously.
> I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two
I've heard this regularly since the 80s. Go rewatch An Inconvenient Truth and see how it lands.
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.
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?
Or maybe there's more than 'science' going on ...
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.
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.
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.
There's probably a lesson for system design here.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23655640/colorado-river-wa...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_r...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator
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.
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.
Like, I dunno, put a hat on it to condense the water? Does it necessarily need to be boiled off to the atmosphere?
(Not that I think retrofitting a nuclear plant is trivial)
Deleted Comment
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.
https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Arizona/yearly-averag...
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.)
https://waterdata.usgs.gov/az/nwis/water_use?format=html_tab...
They are consuming 1195.15 + 987 Mgal/day of groundwater + surface water, and are supplying 963.30 Mgal/day to domestic users.
Industrial uses 6.12 Mgal/day, mining uses 68.3, livestock uses 38.8, aquaculture 34.5, and irrigation uses 4528 Mgal / day.
So... huh. The more I look at it, the less the data makes sense or adds up.
Anyway, it does look like they could just take water away from farmers, and let people elsewhere run out of food, California style.