What do we think about seawater desalination? Liberals say that it's the solution for California's water woes, but I've heard valid critique that desalinating on a meaningful level would fuck with the ocean environment... which of course would rubberband in bad ways.
I'll admit that the logical conclusion of desalination or open-ocean-rainwater collection, which would be the greening of all deserts on earth, might possibly fuck with the ocean. Because 1% saltier is still 1% saltier.
However, it's still possible to make huge changes while having little effect on the ocean. A rainwater harvesting dam on the Bohai Sea, used to green an area the size of the UK, would have little effect on the worlds ocean overall.
Uhh, wouldn't that necessarily cause extinction of species that live in those deserts? I'd at least be on board for doing it to the extent that we undo our own damage... but like, the world is supposed to have some deserts.
I don't think humans use enough water to fuck with the ocean on a global scale, but the area around the plant could be negatively affected. It's probably possible to treat the brine, but that costs money, so some do just dump it.
So, this series of paintings actually has a whole bunch of lore behind it in the descriptions - it seems to be set after some kind of climate catastrophe, and a bunch of the paintings are covering various efforts to tackle it. From the description of this specific one (with a very clunky machine translation):
China’s coastline will return to the level before the glacier collapse; after that, these large desalination hubs only need to run at full capacity on a regular basis to stabilize and replenish Tarim Lake, Qaidam Lake and other east and west water [the translation butcheted this part, maybe it was meant to be "eastern and western lakes"?]
The water level at the destination of the diversion project will be in an unsaturated state for most of the rest of the time, providing some fresh water along the line as a flexible supplement for local production and domestic water. Even so, the work of Lao Liu is not easy: the maintenance of the halophyte purification pool and the operation of the system terminal are inseparable from them.
The next painting in the series mentions:
in 2066, a plan to pump water from the Great Western Basin and the embankment to restore China's original coastline was put on the agenda. The plan to divert water to the Western Great Basin was called " "Water diversion from east to west", the seawater will first be processed by the seawater desalination hub to become clean fresh water that meets safety standards, and then it will be lifted step by step along the aqueduct under the push of the pumping station, and run westward all the way;
The situation seems to have been pretty bad - "glacier collapse" doesn't exactly sound nice, and apparently China's whole coastline got wiped out by the rise in sea levels. Some of the other paintings talk about massive "immigrant cities" having to be built to house all the people displaced by the flooding. It seems like they they're trying to restore the coast, and deciding that they might as well make use of the water that they're pumping out by desalinating it. After the process is done, the plants will be reduced to running at lower levels.
I'm not sure about the tech behind this and how sci-fi the concept actually is, but I guess the ocean enviroment is already kind of fucked at this stage. There's some talk of embankments, so it might be that they've walled off the section of the ocean covering what used to be Eastern China, and are only pumping out and desalinating it while not touching the rest of the ocean. I'm not sure, I haven't read all of the descriptions (and I can only read them through shitty machine translation, which isn't always comprehensible)
What do we think about seawater desalination? Liberals say that it's the solution for California's water woes, but I've heard valid critique that desalinating on a meaningful level would fuck with the ocean environment... which of course would rubberband in bad ways.
It's based.
All the world's deserts could be greened, and the resulting water shadow would only leave the oceans 1% saltier
green land also has something like 100x more biomass than ocean per unit area
Good to know. Then I'm more mad at governments for not trying this.
Fun fact: if the US spent as much %GDP as Saudi Arabia on desalination, an entire new Colorado River could be created
:angery:
I'll admit that the logical conclusion of desalination or open-ocean-rainwater collection, which would be the greening of all deserts on earth, might possibly fuck with the ocean. Because 1% saltier is still 1% saltier.
However, it's still possible to make huge changes while having little effect on the ocean. A rainwater harvesting dam on the Bohai Sea, used to green an area the size of the UK, would have little effect on the worlds ocean overall.
Instead we’re using our water to feed their cows
Uhh, wouldn't that necessarily cause extinction of species that live in those deserts? I'd at least be on board for doing it to the extent that we undo our own damage... but like, the world is supposed to have some deserts.
Yeah, but there are tons of deserts that are man made from over farming and deforestation. Plenty of arid lands that are only recently arid
I don't think humans use enough water to fuck with the ocean on a global scale, but the area around the plant could be negatively affected. It's probably possible to treat the brine, but that costs money, so some do just dump it.
So, this series of paintings actually has a whole bunch of lore behind it in the descriptions - it seems to be set after some kind of climate catastrophe, and a bunch of the paintings are covering various efforts to tackle it. From the description of this specific one (with a very clunky machine translation):
The next painting in the series mentions:
The situation seems to have been pretty bad - "glacier collapse" doesn't exactly sound nice, and apparently China's whole coastline got wiped out by the rise in sea levels. Some of the other paintings talk about massive "immigrant cities" having to be built to house all the people displaced by the flooding. It seems like they they're trying to restore the coast, and deciding that they might as well make use of the water that they're pumping out by desalinating it. After the process is done, the plants will be reduced to running at lower levels.
I'm not sure about the tech behind this and how sci-fi the concept actually is, but I guess the ocean enviroment is already kind of fucked at this stage. There's some talk of embankments, so it might be that they've walled off the section of the ocean covering what used to be Eastern China, and are only pumping out and desalinating it while not touching the rest of the ocean. I'm not sure, I haven't read all of the descriptions (and I can only read them through shitty machine translation, which isn't always comprehensible)
That's cool! I wonder if this is connected to some other story or just the artis.