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Water.

repoman said:
huh,

You do realize that in about 500 million years the sun will get hot enough to make almost all multicellular life extinct? It would take intelligent life of the time to make the Earth go further out in orbit to ameliorate it.

At any rate, I need to start going back to websites like resilience.org that talk about getting ready for the shit to hit the fan. It is as about as positive and mainstream as those types of sites get.
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Only 500,000,000 years?! PANIC NOW!!!1!!!eleven!
 
repoman said:
huh,

You do realize that in about 500 million years the sun will get hot enough to make almost all multicellular life extinct? It would take intelligent life of the time to make the Earth go further out in orbit to ameliorate it.

At any rate, I need to start going back to websites like resilience.org that talk about getting ready for the shit to hit the fan. It is as about as positive and mainstream as those types of sites get.
Click to expand...

And here I was worrying about having to renew my lifetime fishing license that expires on 31 Dec. 2399.
 
bilby said:
The sun produces vastly more energy than we could ever use.

Call me back in 4,000,000,000 years, and I will start to worry then.

Sure, we might need a few decades to get the collection of solar energy organised, but there is plenty of Uranium to fill the gap.
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So what do you think the effects of covering great deserts with systems to exploit this great photon source? Wouldn't be anything like the consequences of pumping water into the Libyan desert or the infinite ground water in CA and other places, or, the damning of major rivers for irrigation and flood control would it? I'm sure we got that atmosphere can handle a bit of engine pollution right.

Your nuclear parry was really funny as was your bit about us panicking about something about as far away as multi-cellular life. Not the same funny, but, funny.
 
OK; I just saw this article from the NYT, headlined:

California Imposes First Mandatory Water Restrictions to Deal With Drought

Assuming that this is not a lame April Fools gag, and CA has not previously had any mandatory restrictions in place, they have a serious credibility problem claiming that they have a drought emergency.

Speaking as a resident of the world's driest continent, I can tell you that if you are still letting residents water their lawns with potable town water, you either don't have an emergency, or you don't have a clue.
 
bilby said:
OK; I just saw this article from the NYT, headlined:

California Imposes First Mandatory Water Restrictions to Deal With Drought

Assuming that this is not a lame April Fools gag, and CA has not previously had any mandatory restrictions in place, they have a serious credibility problem claiming that they have a drought emergency.

Speaking as a resident of the world's driest continent, I can tell you that if you are still letting residents water their lawns with potable town water, you either don't have an emergency, or you don't have a clue.
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Lawns are stupid,no matter where you live.Americans use 400 gal/household/day.I see a lot of room for conservation in western USA.Is waste water to potable on par with desal?
 
bleubird said:
bilby said:
OK; I just saw this article from the NYT, headlined:

California Imposes First Mandatory Water Restrictions to Deal With Drought

Assuming that this is not a lame April Fools gag, and CA has not previously had any mandatory restrictions in place, they have a serious credibility problem claiming that they have a drought emergency.

Speaking as a resident of the world's driest continent, I can tell you that if you are still letting residents water their lawns with potable town water, you either don't have an emergency, or you don't have a clue.
Click to expand...
Lawns are stupid,no matter where you live.Americans use 400 gal/household/day.I see a lot of room for conservation in western USA.Is waste water to potable on par with desal?
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That depends on what treatment the waste water is currently getting; Many modern waste-water treatment plants in Australia produce very clean water indeed - in some cases, potable with little or no further treatment. I don't know what they are like in the US. Often the waste-water from one town goes into the river, and is extracted, treated and used in the next town downstream, with no special additional treatment beyond that used for river water where no town exists upstream.

If the outfall water from the waste-water plant is taken up for treatment without enough intervening river to give the bacteria time to eat the remaining pollutants, and without sufficient sun exposure to kill any pathogens - for example if a town recycles its own waste-water, or if two towns are close together on the same river system - additional treatments such as UV sterilisation or even reverse osmosis might be needed.

As a result, typically the costs for recycling of waste-water are smaller than for desalination; often considerably smaller.
 
repoman said:
huh,

You do realize that in about 500 million years the sun will get hot enough to make almost all multicellular life extinct? It would take intelligent life of the time to make the Earth go further out in orbit to ameliorate it.
Click to expand...

Why does everything always happen to ME?
 
bilby said:
bleubird said:
Lawns are stupid,no matter where you live.Americans use 400 gal/household/day.I see a lot of room for conservation in western USA.Is waste water to potable on par with desal?
Click to expand...

That depends on what treatment the waste water is currently getting; Many modern waste-water treatment plants in Australia produce very clean water indeed - in some cases, potable with little or no further treatment. I don't know what they are like in the US. Often the waste-water from one town goes into the river, and is extracted, treated and used in the next town downstream, with no special additional treatment beyond that used for river water where no town exists upstream.

If the outfall water from the waste-water plant is taken up for treatment without enough intervening river to give the bacteria time to eat the remaining pollutants, and without sufficient sun exposure to kill any pathogens - for example if a town recycles its own waste-water, or if two towns are close together on the same river system - additional treatments such as UV sterilisation or even reverse osmosis might be needed.

As a result, typically the costs for recycling of waste-water are smaller than for desalination; often considerably smaller.
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I have a friend (fondly known as "Doctor Stink") who was head of the waste water treatment facility for a county just north of Atlanta. Georgia. In the 1990s, the discharge from his plant was cleaner than the county water supplied to households. The drinking water was just pumped from the aquifer and tested daily but not treated. He was cited by the EPA because the discharge was dumped into the Chattahoochee River. The citation was over concerns that it was diluting the river with water that had no nutrition for, algae, river plants, or fish. So he was forced to stop processing the waste water to that level... go figure.
.
 
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Is there another location that California should models its agriculture on?
 
Blood moon was amazing here in SouthEastAK.
I can derail my thread,right?
The moon made life possible on this planet.
Tides,water,life.
Most media said 5 min.
Here it was two hours start to finish,As i type this moon just moved out of the shadow.
Mark:5:22 AK time.
 
fromderinside said:
bleubird said:
http://www.sawmillcove.com/board/2015/032515/ABWI Letter to City of Sitka Mar.pdf
Shipping cost?
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A lot less than the cost of ground systems amortized over a hundred years or so and the costs of negotiations with countries and states through which such a system would be constructed. Probably a lot less than oil being shipped for Saudi Arabia.
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But still vastly more than desalination. Modern desalination plants produce drinking water at a total cost of less than a tenth of a cent per litre. You can't collect, treat and ship water from a few thousand km away that cheaply.

Hell, just the wharfage fees for bulk liquids at most major ports are more than that.
 
bleubird said:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/11/walmart-sourcing-bottled-water-california-drought
One more reason not to shop there.
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It is true that Walmart bottles the water sold in the Sacramento area from the Sacramento municipal water supply. However your link seemed to be trying to imply that Wallmart is shipping California water across the US while California was battling a drought. A little googling indicates that Walmart uses municipal water in the area that it is to be sold such as the Dallas, Texas water supply is used to bottle water sold in the Dallas, Texas area. The same for other areas of the country. This make sense as it would be stupid to bear the expense of shipping water across the country. If the CBS investigators had bothered to check, they would have found that other (not just Walmart) water bottlers were also using the same source.

The fact that most bottled water is bottled from the local municipal water supply is why I have always been amused that people buy bottled water because they think it is healthier than their tap water when it is actually the same water in most cases.
 
skepticalbip said:
The fact that most bottled water is bottled from the local municipal water supply is why I have always been amused that people buy bottled water because they think it is healthier than their tap water when it is actually the same water in most cases.
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It's usually filtered to improve the taste.

It's the same reason we use a reverse osmosis unit at home.
 
repoman said:
huh,

You do realize that in about 500 million years the sun will get hot enough to make almost all multicellular life extinct? It would take intelligent life of the time to make the Earth go further out in orbit to ameliorate it.

At any rate, I need to start going back to websites like resilience.org that talk about getting ready for the shit to hit the fan. It is as about as positive and mainstream as those types of sites get.
Click to expand...
If by some miracle humans are alive in 1 million years they sure would be able to deal with a bit of more sun, launching bunch of mirrors in space or something.
 
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