
Some of the World's Biggest Lakes Are Drying Up - prostoalex
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/03/drying-lakes-climate-change-global-warming-drought/
======
siculars
Call me naive but I read the article as consequences of acute human expansion.
Virtually every example was followed by explanations along the lines of “man
made canals, irrigation, mining...”

I really think technology and better civil planning will be the way to fix
these problems. Technology will cause the cost of renewable energy to trend
towards zero while better civil planning will apply that energy to pump water
from oceans to where it is needed by people. Eventually there will be success
stories that will be copied around the world. Israel has had considerable
success in water conservation and is considering replenishing the Dead Sea via
canals.

If we can build oil pipelines from Canada to Texas eventually there will be a
model that says we can build water pipelines from the pacific north west to
Phoenix and Las Vegas. Governments around the world will either do something
along these lines or they will not. Surely some will. Those that do will still
be here long into the future, those that don’t will not.

~~~
eloff
China has invested billions in constructing mammoth aqueducts to do just this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Transfer_Project)

[https://www.gokunming.com/en/blog/item/4038/china_considerin...](https://www.gokunming.com/en/blog/item/4038/china_considering_plan_to_make_xinjiang_desert_a_new_california)

Meanwhile in Western Canada, we steadfastly refuse to sell water into the US,
despite all of our fresh water running into the Pacific Ocean anyway...

~~~
graeme
In Canada there exists a widespread belief that if you start selling water,
you _have_ to sell it.

I am not sure this is correct, but it is widespread, and probably affects
willingness to sell anything.

[http://www.cbc.ca/radio/the180/more-on-nafta-and-water-
parti...](http://www.cbc.ca/radio/the180/more-on-nafta-and-water-partisanship-
in-government-and-should-expats-be-able-to-vote-1.3163823/the-relationship-
between-nafta-and-canadian-water-1.3164244)

~~~
radford-neal
It's nonsense. Even if NAFTA somehow forced the provinces to sell water at
market rates to anyone who wanted to buy it, the revenue would accrue to the
provincial government. Nothing would stop the provincial government from
deciding to distribute this income as a dividend to all citizens. The end
result is that the citizens of the province could definitely out-bid
foreigners for the water, since the money they pay comes right back to them.

------
spodek
You can look for causes all you want. They all lead to human population
growth.

Talking about it could possibly lead to finding something to do about it,
which would mean deliberately lowering the birth rate. How? I don't know, but
the alternatives are 1) hoping we get lucky and don't overshoot Earth's
carrying capacity or 2) letting nature lower our population for us.

Regarding option 1, everyone knows population growth rates in many places (not
everywhere) are declining, but the rates have nothing to do with Earth's
carrying capacity, so it would only be luck if we stabilized below the
carrying capacity. If we've already overshot it, lowering rates won't prevent
option 2.

Option 2 means people dying prematurely from disease, famine, war, pestilence,
etc.

Are there meaningful third options? Going to space or Mars doesn't lower the
population here, and it presupposes that people could manage population growth
on the spacecraft and early colonies. If we can there, we can elsewhere.

So however challenging figuring out how to lower the birth rate is, it seems
the best option of the three. It seems like talking to you kids about birth
control. It's easier not to talk about it, but the parents who don't do it end
up with grandchildren sooner than they expect, and less cohesive families
since they were chosen by circumstance, not deliberate choice.

~~~
mikeash
A third option is to increase Earth’s carrying capacity. I don’t know how, but
the capacity depends on technology and resource use, so it should be possible.

~~~
graeme
We have been doing that. But one problem is that it's easy to fool ourselves:
you can temporarily raise carrying capcity by eating capital.

So, we catch many more fish now, for example. But we are catching at faster
than replacement rate, depleting the natural capital stock.

Carbon energy + space in the atmosphere for CO2 is another variety of capital
stock which we have used for temporary carrying capacity gains.

There are also long run carrying capacity improvements in the mix. General
efficiency improvements fall in this category.

------
verelo
I have to admit i know nothing about this, so i want to ask what feels like a
dumb question: What stops water from evaporating into space? I feel like the
answer is something simple like "gravity", or "condensation", but we seem to
think Mars once had water, so where is it now, and will that happen here too?

~~~
cstejerean
Gravity and a magnetic field. Gravity keeps the atmosphere from floating away,
and the magnetic field protects it from getting stripped by solar radiation.
The problem on mars is he magnetic field.

~~~
verelo
Magnetic field, ah! Right so, interestingly does that mean a polar shift (that
every now and again people rave about) might have larger implications than
breaking electronics? Ie massive water loss? I feel like it would depend what
the poles look like after the shift, is it likely the field could be weakened
or would it just flip? I should probably try learn more about this.

------
joncrane
Where is the water going, though? Isn't water a zero-sum game in the sense
that Earth is a closed system?

~~~
anvandare
Just like energy and entropy, it becomes harder to harvest efficiently.
There's still just as much water, it's just not easily accessible. The
difference between the water in your glass and the water in the cubic foot of
earth after you spill your glass on it. You can't drink from the latter.

The water cycle does the collection for us (lakes, rivers, aquifers) but we're
draining them faster than they can recharge, particularly problematic are the
melting glaciers (in the Himalayas) and the aquifers:

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

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-
environment/wp/20...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-
environment/wp/2015/12/03/alarming-research-says-humans-are-using-up-far-more-
water-than-previously-thought/?utm_term=.129e41e12062)

[http://lcluc.umd.edu/hotspot/glacial-retreat-
himalayas](http://lcluc.umd.edu/hotspot/glacial-retreat-himalayas)

[https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/11-percent-of-
disa...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/11-percent-of-disappearing-
groundwater-used-to-grow)

[https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4626](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4626)

~~~
joncrane
Thank you.

------
lisper
Surprised no one has mentioned Cape Town yet:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cape-town-
drought-d...](http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cape-town-drought-day-
zero-climate-change-global-warming-south-africa-a8236511.html)

------
libertine
You don't need to go to South America, Asia or middle East - it's happening in
Europe and no one seems to notice.

Look at Portugal and Spain, it's becoming a desert - the day of the cold wave
the south of Portugal and Spain had the same temperatures of some country's in
Africa.

~~~
narag
Spain mainland is separated from Africa by a mere 14 km strait, so no wonder
temperature is similar, not talking about Canary Islands that are like a
thousand km further to the south.

Southwest mainland is becoming a desert indeed, but that's nothing new. Most
classic spagetti westerns were filmed there.

It's Sahara crossing the sea and a good thing for "plastic sea" (greenhouses).
Almería provides several vegetables harvests a year that our European
neighbourgs appreciate very much.

Just 200km west, you have permanent snow and big woods.

~~~
libertine
Uh, neither Spain or Portugal has ever had the same climate has the north of
Africa - not at least in the recorded history.

Here's an example of the 27th of February:
[http://images.meteociel.fr/im/8481/temp_eur2_crn3.png](http://images.meteociel.fr/im/8481/temp_eur2_crn3.png)

~~~
mseebach
Climate != weather.

I'm sure you can find plenty of examples in recorded history when those areas
had roughly the same weather.

~~~
libertine
I know the difference - but when a pattern of similar weather is noticed in
the past 5-10 years, it's more than just weather, I believe it's climate.

What worries the most isn't how warm or cold it guets, it's precisely how dry
it is.

~~~
mseebach
No, you don't know the difference when you talk about climates and then link
to the weather for a single day as supporting evidence.

~~~
libertine
The day was an example among a period of years of extreme drought.

Drought is the outcome of years of low precipitation - it's not one day, one
week,one month or one year. The recovery won't come in the same time period I
said in the previous sentence. It will take years of rain to refill what was
lost, not to mention there might be erosion already that have made some
riverbeds/lakes permeable again, so water will not be held there.

The spring of the main river in the Iberian Peninsula has dried. Many other
springs of secondary rivers have dried as well.

It's not weather. It's climate change.

~~~
mseebach
I don't know who you're debating. Your original comment used a reference to
the weather to argue a point about climate. You can't do that, as your follow
up comments clearly explain.

~~~
libertine
I can do this: > You don't need to go to South America, Asia or middle East -
it's happening in Europe and no one seems to notice.

First sentence commenting an article about drought in several continents, yet
they didn't mention Europe. So I stated such thing is happening in Europe.

> Look at Portugal and Spain, it's becoming a desert - the day of the cold
> wave the south of Portugal and Spain had the same temperatures of some
> country's in Africa.

In this sentence I state the example of Portugal and Spain - and gave an
example of a day of extreme cold, snow and rain in Europe and parts of that
territory (the iberian peninsula) had a day with temperatures similar to parts
of Africa.

Saying I can't use weather to argue about climate is the same thing as saying
I can't talk about anything which is the outcome of something else.

I'm not saying that because of that specific weather event in that day (or
days) it set the climate for that region - I say it has a point of data. I
gave you more - which is a clear example of a long term effect resulting from
climate change - the drought of the main river.

Do you want more data points?

------
teslabox
How much of the missing water is actually due to higher temperatures, and how
much is due to people siphoning water from the aquifers that feed the lake?
This article mostly focuses on "climate change" hysterics, but also
acknowledges the siphoning problem.

A HN comment [0] linked to a TucsonWeekly [1] piece about how Tucson used to
be an oasis. Similarly, the Salt River used to run year-round through Phoenix.
Las Vegas was an oasis too. Cattle and wells turned Tucson's river dry. The
Salt River is blocked by dams, where most the water is used for plants and
allowed to evaporate. Las Vegas' population vastly exceeds its natural water
supply. I don't think the disappearance of these cities' oases can be blamed
on "climate change".

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16118109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16118109)

[1] [https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/a-river-ran-through-
it/C...](https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/a-river-ran-through-
it/Content?oid=1068331)

The Israelis are experts in hydroponics, which uses a fraction of the water
used for irrigation. This is a more responsible way to use water in an arid
country.

If the problem causing these lakes to dry up is mostly "climate change", these
people's predicaments are hopeless. But if the problem is mostly irresponsible
use of the aquifers upstream from the lake, the problem is solvable.

~~~
woodandsteel
>This article mostly focuses on "climate change" hysterics

So what is your view on climate change? Is it that the climate is not getting
warmer, or it might be but we don't know if it is or it isn't, or it is
getting warmer but it is all due to non-human causes, or it is getting warmer
but it might be due in part to human causes but we don't know, or it is
getting warmer but it is beneficial? And all the views I just listed you think
are wrong, do you believe the people who hold them are irrational, and do you
argue against them?

Or is it that you don't care what people think and why, as long as they are
opposed to governmental actions like reducing carbon emissions and promoting
renewables?

~~~
cstejerean
One can fully agree that climate change is an important issue that needs to be
dealt with, yet still have a problem with it being waved around irresponsibly
on unrelated issues.

~~~
some_puffery
Right, I mean I'm a pretty hard core supporter of wildlands conservation, and
I think this overemphasis on and exaggeration about climate change is gonna
really hurt the environmental movement in about a decade.

Just like what happened with The Population Bomb and to a lesser extent Limits
to Growth.

------
sharpercoder
I am wondering if mass-scale manufacturing & construction can solve this
problem. Imagine large greenhouse-alike setups which spur vaporization,
siphoning fresh water off into a lake. The sun would passively vaporize
incoming salty water. Reaching m³s/minute of freshwater throughput would
without doubt require massive scale. Since freshwater demand is increasing and
supply decreasing, the economics of such project become more interesting every
month.

Will such plan work at all?

~~~
ojbyrne
This sounds like it has the same problem as salinization does. In most places
conservation is cheaper.

~~~
candiodari
... in the sense that the costs can just be imposed on people who can't defend
themselves. And at that point, cheaper, more expensive ... ah what's the
difference ?

I mean, that's a slightly different wording of the argument you're making.

In other words: this needs an economically viable solution. We need an
absurdly cheap way to refill the lakes. Conservation isn't that, but everybody
proposing it knows where the costs will go.

~~~
IntronExon
I’m curious who do you think is suffering now as a result of drought and
diminishing ecological resources? Who is going to suffer through famine and
drought? Your point is valid, but only insofar as people who can’t defend
themselves _always_ suffer. Every course of action hurts the group you’re
concerned about, but the most likely to succeed and least damaging is
conservation.

~~~
candiodari
Well the problem is the large cities taking up all capacity in the rivers and
the people who suffer are the people on the coastlines of those lakes.

The capacity in the rivers, by and large, is not taken up by people on those
coastlines.

And conservation, I bet, "somehow" misses this reality. So it attempts to
protect things like tourism income at the further expense of the victims. But
nobody, absolutely nobody is talking about denying cities the water they
depend on (which will dry up anyway, but not for a while yet ...).

You see the problem is not global warming. The problem is those cities and
countries that take away the resources these lakes depend on. If you calculate
the resulting change in precipitation from the 1 degree or so of temperature
change we've seen, that's not what's making the difference here. The
difference is those cities.

But of course, we "need to conserve". And what do we mean by that, exactly ?
Why, the victims of it, the people living on that coastline, those need to be
forced to abandon their lives, because otherwise the tourism that the rest of
country profits from (but not so much those people), could get hit ... first a
bit, then a lot. That's what we mean by conservation.

~~~
IntronExon
You didn’t even come close to addressing my question. I pointed out that your
concern for the helpless is an obvious canard in this context, and you took
that as a opportunity to engage in more ideological chatter.

