
A Quarter of Humanity Faces Looming Water Crises - johnny313
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/06/climate/world-water-stress.html
======
ChuckMcM
One of the more interesting (to me at least) aspects of the warming trend of
both the atmosphere and the oceans is that for each degree C increase in the
mean atmospheric temperature increases its water carrying capacity on the
order of 4.2 quadrillion kilograms. Rising ocean temperatures, combined with
rising air temperatures are increasing the rate of evaporation of sea water
into the air.

The effect of this is transporting more water in the air over longer
distances. This "side effect" of global warming will likely make _all_ of our
past observations of precipitation rates in any given region completely moot.
It also makes suspect any extrapolation of current precipitation trends into
the future.

My reading of the current literature suggests to me that we might have an
opposite problem, which is massive flooding in areas on a regular basis where
previously they considered such floods "100 year" or "1000 year" storms.

What every climate scientist I have talked with agrees with, is that the
current climate is being _destabilized_ relative to historical records. Thus
extrapolations become more and more uncertain (have larger error bars) as the
initial conditions drift further and further away from anything on record.

~~~
sak5sk
I wonder if it's happening already? Just last month we had record rainfall in
1 day that we'd typically get in a whole month in Kyushu, Japan.

~~~
lph
This area of Mississippi has been flooded for five months:

[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/03/yazoo-
backwa...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/03/yazoo-backwater-
mississippi-flooding-months)

------
johnohara
This National Geographic piece about David Bamberger and the Selah Ranch
Project in Texas bears watching.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSPkcpGmflE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSPkcpGmflE)

Surface water from rivers, lakes, streams, and reservoirs garner attention
because they are visible and make the effects of changes and shortages easier
to understand.

But a much more difficult crisis may already be upon us in the form of aquifer
depletion and may require a complete paradigm shift in how we approach
conservation and usage.

------
marmaduke
It would be nice to be able to look more closely at the data here. What makes
up this scalar 'water stress'? Maybe those areas using the available water are
efficient?

As other commenters point out, there's a 2nd order effect: if you live in a
low stress area, near (in a transportation sense, not Euclidean distance) a
high stress area, you're bound to have problems unless border control comes to
rescue.

I should have paid more attention in geopolitics class..

~~~
theandrewbailey
I'm wondering why areas along the Mississippi River and near the Great Lakes
are considered stressed.

~~~
Bartweiss
That's a good question, I had to go poke at the original publication and tool
to get some idea. This looks like a very good database, but the NYT is being
misleading when it cites "high stress" and then only gives examples that are
actively running out of water.

The actual definition of water stress used is:

> _Baseline water stress measures the ratio of total water withdrawals to
> available renewable water supplies... Available renewable water supplies
> include surface and groundwater supplies and considers the impact of
> upstream consumptive water users and large dams on downstream water
> availability. Higher values indicate more competition among users._

So the first note is that this is measuring sustainability, not risk of water
shortage; it doesn't factor in that Lake Superior has ~800x the current volume
of Lake Powell. And it's meant to study competition for water rather than
actual deficit, so 'high' stress is 40%-80% usage, and 'very high' stress is
>80% usage. (In fairness, >80% is _likely_ unsustainable because we don't
capture water as it arrives. Drawing 100% doesn't mean a state-wide
rainbarrel, so water will still reach surface plants as wells run dry.)

Second is that it's not clear how rainfall onto the lakes is being assigned.
Michigan is "high" in the middle and "low" around the edges, so maybe it's
being assigned to the nearest land area without accounting for piping and the
usage compacts that govern where it goes? That wouldn't matter in most places,
but Lake Superior in particular would distort things hugely.

Third, these are watershed-level colorations. If you zoom in on the dark red
along the Mississippi, it turns out to be Jonesboro, Arkansas. That's a
hilly/mountain region with flatter land on either side, and a bunch of
manufacturing. As soon as it's streams hit the White River watershed, it drops
back down to yellow. If they're drawing hard without pumping water uphill they
might get into trouble, but things would still be ok downstream because no one
on the Mississippi is relying on that area for water.

[https://www.wri.org/aqueduct/](https://www.wri.org/aqueduct/)

------
munificent
This is likely an unpopular opinion and one with many downsides we need to be
very alarmed about but I think we are going to find that if there is _any_
solution to this, the solution is going to involve a global government.

Climate change and water are Earth-scale problems. If we don't have an Earth-
scale organization that has real power working to solve those problems, we're
going to end up with a bunch of nations feverishly wasting even more of our
dwindling resources to try to push the suffering onto each other.

Do you want countries building desalinization plants and planting forests, or
do you want them accumulating missiles and building walls? Unless there is
some organization with enough power to prevent countries from fighting each
other, you're going to get the latter.

~~~
rsync
I disagree with your contention that water is an earth scale problem.

In fact, as someone charged with building and maintaining not only my own
water sources and infrastructure, but community water resources as well, I
would put forth that water resources - and their responsible usage - are
governed by very unique _hyperlocal_ conditions.

We all know that, for instance, the water resources and usage are different
between New York City and the Colorado River Basin - and we wouldn't expect
usage and sharing agreements between those two locales. But are you aware that
similar scale differences in water resources and usage can exist within the
same county ? Physics and economics make them just as impractical to share and
manage.

There may indeed be drivers of global governance - and I typically find them
distasteful - but I don't think this is one of them.

~~~
xboxnolifes
> are governed by very unique hyperlocal conditions

Yes, and what happens when 1 area does not have available water, another does,
and the area with water does not want to share?

~~~
rsync
"Yes, and what happens when 1 area does not have available water, another
does, and the area with water does not want to share?"

That is a real problem - and should be addressed - but the physics and
economics dictate that the sharing need be _relatively_ local.

So I would agree that it is a governance issue, but it is not going to be a
_global_ governance issue.

~~~
munk-a
It is a global governance issue since, much like your relative who's house was
wrecked in a hurricane, the rest of the world will need to pick up the pieces
when water availability collapses. I'm not against that sharing personally,
but we as a world need to all get together and ensure global stability because
otherwise a problem like this will be like falling dominoes where the
additional water burden will spread and exacerbate the issue.

------
pimmen
I’m from Sweden. We have massive fresh water sources and most projections of
the future show us retaining our water advantage while the rest of the world
suffers through more intense droughts.

Why do I deserve all this water just because I was born here? Why doesn’t
someone born in a water stressed environment deserve more water? Water is not
a luxury, and we can’t easily make more of it, so I just don’t understand how
we can knowingly transition into a more unfair world than ever and not feel
bad about it.

~~~
Bartweiss
> _Water is not a luxury, and we can’t easily make more of it, so I just don’t
> understand how we can knowingly transition into a more unfair world than
> ever_

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here.

Water is logistically hard and expensive to transfer; sustaining a place like
Las Vegas is quite possible, but it relies on massive infrastructure
development and expenditure to move water around. Selfishness is certainly
part of the problem, from allotment-preservation in Colorado to international
politics in Turkey. But to a significant degree, the core problem is that
people simply live and use water in different places than it falls.

As far as an argument for allowing immigration, water fairness makes sense.
But if we're talking about sharing water, I'm not sure if a lack of will is
the central problem?

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xvilka
Collecting rainwater on the building roofs is a right solution, also putting
the trees on these roofs. And of course, desalinating - a lot of the cities
from the red zone are nearby seas or oceans.

~~~
fooblitzky
Desalination on a scale sufficient for a city requires an extraordinary amount
of power. The plant in Queensland uses: "...around 3.58 kilowatt-hours (kWh)
of electricity for every cubic metre (kilolitre) of water it produces"[1]

That's not going to be affordable for many poorer countries. It's expensive
enough that Queensland only turns that plant on for emergencies.

The CO2 emissions would also only intensify the problem.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Coast_Desalination_Plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Coast_Desalination_Plant)

~~~
Retric
That sounds much worse than it is. Outside of farming a cubic meter is a lot
of water.

Desalination costs ~3$ per 1,000 gallons of which around 40% is electricity
costs, that’s generally affordable for most areas based on consumption and
local economic conditions. Though again, not for farming.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Which source are you using for that number?

~~~
Retric
Several sources list 3$ as the lowest all inclusive price. Though notability
these systems are much more costly when run intermittently.
[https://www.advisian.com/en-us/global-perspectives/the-
cost-...](https://www.advisian.com/en-us/global-perspectives/the-cost-of-
desalination)

The issue is just keeping them on standby is expensive. So, if you only need
one for 6 months every 3 years you end up paying a lot more per m3 of water.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Hmm. That link seems to use a paper for its source, titled "Technical review
and evaluation of the economics of water desalination: Current and future
challenges for better water supply sustainability".

I tracked down a copy of that paper. It opens with:

"The cost of desalinated seawater has fallen below US$0.50/m3 for a large
scale seawater reverse osmosis plant at a specific location and conditions
while in other locations the cost is 50% higher (US$1.00/m3) for a similar
facility. In addition to capital and operating costs, other parameters such as
local incentives or subsidies may also contribute to the large difference in
desalted water cost between regions and facilities. Plant suppliers and
consultants have their own cost calculation methodologies, but they are
confidential and provide water costs with different accuracies. The few
existing costing methodologies and software packages such as WTCost© and DEEP
provide an estimated cost with different accuracies and their applications are
limited to specific conditions. Most of the available cost estimation tools
are of the black box type, which provide few details concerning the parameters
and methodologies applied for local conditions."

I read through the rest of it. To the extent that it offers cost comparisons
of some large scale SWRO projects, they seem to be self-reported and come from
projects in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Oman, and Australia. This leads me to a
couple of concerns WRT the construction and operating costs of SWRO projects:

(a) that a comprehensive, independent, apples-to-apples accounting of the
costs of these projects has not yet been done;

(b) that some of the long-term costs are being externalized, _especially_ the
expected impacts on local ecological systems that become the necessary dumping
grounds for the wastewater;

(c) that the costs to date are severely location-specific, and do not address
for instance trying to transport seawater a mile uphill as needed in many of
the areas expected to or currently experiencing severe freshwater instability.

Clearly SWRO is a viable option in specific areas that have nearby access to a
suitable water source, good power infrastructure (or solar availability), a
lack of freshwater availability, and an appropriate wastewater treatment
strategy (or, more likely -- and sadly -- loose regulations that obviate the
need to address this).

But calls for SWRO as a worldwide, one-size-fits-all, cheap solution are
misguided and misinformed, IMO. Mostly I worry that "just build desal" will
frustrate efforts for conservation and improving existing infrastructure,
especially in places where desal isn't a viable option anyway.

~~~
Retric
A cubic meter of water is 264.17 gallons. So, 50c per gallon is ~2$ per 1000
gallons. 50% more is 0.75$ per cubic meter (not 1$) or 3$ per 1000 gallons.
Though if it’s 100% more that’s 4$ per 1,000 gallons.

That paper is also from 2012, but I generally agree with your conclusions.

------
ddmma
Nestles just launched worldwide delivery of plastic botles using drones
[https://www.nestle.com/aboutus/overview/businesses/nestle-
wa...](https://www.nestle.com/aboutus/overview/businesses/nestle-waters)

~~~
techrich
They are the worst for water issues.

------
amitport
And another quarter* faces the ramifications of that water crises: war +
massive immigration

*I don't really have an estimate but a lot IMO

~~~
izzydata
Sounds like an endlessly cascading problem that will effect the whole world
eventually. If we have more consumption than is sustainable then it is going
to run out eventually.

------
cushychicken
_The Water Knife_ by Paolo Bacigalupi is a great near-future sci-fi read on
this subject.

------
chr1
Is there ongoing research on methods to control weather on local level? Most
suggestions i have seen are things that are meant to change the temperature of
earth as a whole like build sunshade in L2 point, randomly spray aerosols to
make it colder everywhere. But there must be ways to change the local weather
with smaller and smarter methods, (maybe aerostats, solar updraft towers,
short lived aerosols?)

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irrational
I live in Western Oregon where for much of the year we have an abundance of
water falling from the sky. We already have tons of people moving to the area,
but I wonder if the number of people moving to areas like ours is going to go
up tremendously.

~~~
gremlinsinc
Ironic if there's a mass Exodus to Oregon/Washington just before the next
Cascadia earthquake/tsunami wipes off half the two states. Guess that would be
nature's way of enforcing population control.

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kiliantics
It would be great if nytimes really cared about these issues and used its
power to convince people of the real changes that need to be made to society.
Instead, they run pieces that side against those that are working hard to make
these changes:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/opinion/climate-change-
gr...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/opinion/climate-change-greta-
thunberg.html)

------
cracker_jacks
Has one of the fundamental components (water) for farming changed at all in
recent years? Perhaps there hasn't been enough of a market force for
innovation after the advent of irrigation.

~~~
nradov
Farmers in many areas have long been pumping out groundwater from wells at
unsustainable rates. In recent years some of those wells have started running
dry, or governments have imposed restrictions.

~~~
munk-a
A lot of farmers in the US pay heavily subsidized prices for water, this
market inefficiency is just going to lead to sadness down the line - either
farmers are getting a really good deal or residential customers are being
heavily exploited (or, most likely, both).

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User23
On the plus side, hydroengineering is one of the very first technologies human
beings mastered. This is an engineering problem, and it's one we can solve.

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HighPlainsDrftr
Around the rocky's - I've noticed that storm drain systems are always a huge
piece of infrastructure. They seem to dump to the local river. Why don't the
cities harvest that water and treat it instead of dumping it into the river?
They may be able to build retention ponds and hold on to it for a while. Treat
it later. No need to just toss it.

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thomasmarriott
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsbad_Desalination_Plant)

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jaimex2
It's more a reproduction/migration crisis really. These cities have all grown
above what their local resources can provide, its time to cut back.

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GrryDucape
So, based off the map, the Indian subcontinent is basically fucked right?
Although I am surprised by places like Italy or Peru.

