Lake Mead and Climate Change

Celticguy said:
yeah desalination is not new. Saudi Arabia started doing it decades ago but they had the money to pay for it. I do think they've figured out cheaper ways of doing it now whichi is a good thing because not only is the world staring down the barrel of not enough food, we are woefully short on water as well. It aint just SoCal.
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The Colorado river is fresh water. You don't need to desalinate it.

Plenty of food grows all across the States. The SDTC has managed to destroy much of it's ranches and farms through tyranny and mismanagement of water resources.
 
Celticguy said:
what I was referring to was a plant (factory, not flora) that takes salt water, removes the salt and outputs potable water. No idea what they did with the leftover salt. Prolly dumped it out in the desert.
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It goes back in the sea around the plant...which is why salt concentrates around the plant and kills aquatic life.
 
Palm Springs sits atop Artesian wells; Is there a water supply problem in that section of CA? (according to leftist goobers)?
 
Guille said:
I gotta say...you sound a lot like those people saying mankind is destroying the atmosphere. Whatever salt does accrue won't affect anything more than the local area. If it matters at all.
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That's true, but remember this is being offered as a 'green' alternative to other water sources.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
No doubt climate change is part of the problem but the major problem is twofold, IMO:

1. Population explosion. Not just California either.*

2. California tree hugger laws that prevent building more water reservoirs to accommodate the increases in population. The water has to come from somewhere and Lake Mead is “it”.


* https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-population/
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California doesn't get water from Lake Mead.
 
Walt said:
Most of Alaska is a desert. It is a weird type of desert where there is lots of frozen water on the ground. Tundra often has very little rainfall, but what little water is put into the environment gets frozen and stuck there.

Global warming is going to change all that in ways we cannot conceive of yet. Alaska is one of those danger zones.
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It is not possible to measure the temperature of the Earth.

No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth. You can't create energy out of nothing. You are still ignoring the 1st law of thermodynamics.
 
Phantasmal said:
He is exceedingly ignorant concerning Alaska, there were areas of AK that never thaw completely in the past, but now climate changes, as you stated, thaw does occur deeper than it did at one time
Permafrost temperatures at 1 m below ground in central Alaska have been warming since the 1960s and were reaching near to the melting point in the mid-1990s. There has been a retreat to colder temperatures (less than -1°C) in the last few years.


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https://www.pmel.noaa.gov › detect

[h=3]Arctic Change - Land: Permafrost - NOAA/PMEL[/h]
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Argument from randU fallacy. Making up numbers and using them as data is a fallacy, dude. I don't care if you or NOAA makes them up. It is not possible to measure the temperature of Alaska.
 
Mina said:
For many decades, the rate at which the water was replenished was far greater, allowing water levels to be maintained at a relatively stable level. Now that's no longer the case. Precipitation in the upper part of the river basin has declined dramatically.
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Not really. Usage has climbed dramatically though.
 
gfm7175 said:
Nope... not a single one. "Greenhouse gas" is nothing more than a buzzword created to peddle a science-denying, math-denying, logic-denying religion.[/quote

The Greenhouse Effect has been talked about since the mid-19th century -- first identified by Fourier. John Tyndall, in the 1850s, conducted experiments to measure how much various gases absorb infra-red radiation, contributing to that effect. Since then, there's been a massive amount of research into the area, and the idea that certain gases absorb infrared radiation and thereby slow their exit from our planet is not at all controversial among scientists.

Here is where you define your terminology and provide the specific mechanism by which "greenhouse effect" "occurs" without violating science, math, or logic.
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What makes you think it violates science, math, or logic?

Here is where you provide me with a valid dataset with regard to "greenhouse gas concentrations" over the last century and a half.
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Here you go:

https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/

More recently:

https://www.climate.gov/news-featur...ate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide

That's just CO2, but if you Google, you can find the others tracked, as well.

I suggest that you take a look at, and learn about, the laws of thermodynamics
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I know a lot about it. What, specifically, do you think I'm missing? The Stefan-Boltzmann law is pretty elementary stuff, and I don't know why you think it contradicts the mainstream scientific understanding of the role of greenhouse gases in climate change. It deals with radiant heat from surfaces -- basically just saying it's proportional to absolute temperature.

What I find is that a lot of conservatives with no real scientific education will be handed these terms by right-wing blogs (often run by non-scientists like Anthony Watts) and they'll assume they're things that would overturn climate science if only the climatologists understood them. But, of course, the kinds of concepts that trickle all the way down to the professionally ignorant Anthony Watts types are so elementary that they're understood by absolutely everyone actually doing work in the field.

For example, you'll see Stefan-Boltzmann is expressly used in mainstream climate science research papers, and by the IPCC's synthesis reports:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Chapter_07.pdf
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/32/2/jcli-d-17-0603.1.xml
https://www.jstor.org/stable/90013263
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/atmosphericwarming/climatsensitivity.html
https://web.meteo.mcgill.ca/~mhenry/files/henry_linear_rad.pdf

Anyway, the implication of Stefan Boltzmann is what I said earlier: that we are altering the atmosphere in a way that will bring us to a new equilibrium point for temperature. At some point the Earth, understood as a huge black body, will be warm enough that it will be radiating at a rate great enough to reach a balance with incoming radiation, and the temperature will stabilize at that new point. Mainstream climate science understands that. The issue is that the new point will be a lot warmer than anything civilization has every coped with, which will cause humanity and ecosystems catastrophic problems:

https://cen.acs.org/articles/84/i51/Earths-atmosphere.html

In fact, an understanding of Stefan Boltzmann is key to spotting where the right-wing amateurs go wrong when they argue the second law of thermodynamics makes it impossible for the (cooler) atmosphere to warm the (warmer) Earth. The point is that the speed at which the warmth of the ground travels into the atmosphere is altered by the temperature differential between them, so with the sun continually contributing more energy to the ground, if you slow that transfer to the atmosphere, because the atmosphere gets warmer, you wind up with the ground being warmer, too. Eventually you reach a new equilibrium point, but you may not like where it lies.
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