Is global warming even real?

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by Ilikeponies579, Dec 16, 2014.

  1. milkweed Valued Senior Member

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    You've probably already read this article (or something related) before but just in case...

    "... We are fighting Mother Nature... It's a battle we have to fight day by day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on victory"...

    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya?currentPage=all

    Every thousand years or so...

    A google maps satellite view shows how many cut backs/course changes are apparent.
     
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  3. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    wow, 1987---tempus fugit
    (time flies you say, but alas, it is we who fly, and time that stays)
    great magazine, i read it most nights
    I had forgotten some of that article,
    thanx
    (Re-reading on and off now)

    In our folly, we seek to control rivers, and never quite succeed all the time. For every problem we solve, another comes along as a consequence of our actions.

    I suspect that "steady state" or "climate equilibrium" are rogue concepts. Fun to contemplate, but not likely to occur on this planet.

    We are most likely still in an ice age, currently enjoying the relative comfort of an inter-glacial whose duration remains in doubt.
    We do not know why we are in an ice age, nor what signs will manifest on our way out.

    Meanwhile, we speculate about short term "climate change" floundering about in our ignorance and fear.
    The more we seek to focus on one thing, the less we see of the interplay of myriad complexities of dampening and feedback mechanisms of a very fluid atmosphere/biosphere.

    Whither hence?
     
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  5. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Good read on Ocean Salt Water to drinking water by desalination here: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20150426-column.html#page=1

    SUMMARY by Billy T: To recover large cost, the drought must not end in couple of decades. Also just collecting rain from N. CA street run off, cleaning it, and piping it to S. CA is more than 10 times cheaper (assuming it still rains on streets there few decades hence.)
     
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  7. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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  8. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Certainly that can be the most economical way to store surplus, clean, fresh water as your first link shows. But in which month does Southern California have surplus water of this quality to store? The first link does not even give a hint as to where the water for ground injection would come from.

    The second link is just a list of about 22 other water related links, but none of their titles hints at where or when S. California would have quality water to store.
    It is sort of like Keynesian economics: A great idea that all will follow when in times of need (economic stimulation or droughts) but no one will follow in times of surplus (Excess capital or water generation).

    What we need is a time machine that sends some wise leaders and engineers back a few decade when CA had water surpluses it could store. But they would need to be both wise and powerful persuaders to get the public to increase its taxes, storing water in a time of large water surpluses. Congress will not save dollars, but spend them, when taxes exceed necessary expenses.)
     
  9. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    cleaned up waste water, agricultural runoff, etc are good candidates for recharging of aquifers-----there is exponentially more water, and storage potential within the basin aquifers than in all of the rivers and reservoirs.(up to 26x the reservoirs). (first link above, take the links on the left side of the page)

    I would like to see federal $ going into recharging the ogallala aquifer. We pump far more out than natural recharge can replenish. If we've a severe drought and we need it, better we start preparing now.
    Much like maintaining extant infrastructure, the earth is our greater infrastructure and needs conscientious care, rebuilding, and maintenance.
    Failure to plan is planning to fail.
     
  10. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    No one is questioning the aquifer's storage capacity. I'll grant it is 26 times greater than all the CA reservoirs. I question where the water to be stored will come from. Thanks for guide to the links. Here is what I learned there (at: http://www.montereyherald.com/20140...linas-area-runoff-for-irrigation-domestic-use):

    "County water agency board member Mike Scattini, a Salinas Valley grower, said he "sympathizes with the Peninsula {Monterey area} but the reality is our seawater intrusion problem is not solved yet" and suggested that the valley's access to recycled water from the treatment plant is "threatened.". "To think about solving someone else's problem when our problems are not solved, that's a mistake," he said..."

    Billy T's Interpretative summary of your link (correct me if I'm wrong):

    So much ground water has already been extracted that the produce growers of the Salinas Valley are seeing crop yields decline due to salt water seeping into their soil, so they have been ALREADY PUMPING INTO THE GROUND recycled water from the treatment plant. Now Monterey area wants to claim, via the courts, if not by other means, some of that water from Salinas Valley treatment plants.

    I.e. there is no "surplus water." There is a dispute about how water currently being pumped into the ground by Salinas Valley should (or should not) be shared. I don't care how this dispute is resolved (I live in Brazil.) but think the vast majority of American would oppose giving some of the recycled water from Salinas Valley's treatment plants to the people of the Monterey area as doing so would significantly increase the cost of vegetables, etc. (California supplies the US with about half the vegetables, sold in grocery stores.)

    Now the water tables are rapidly falling as ground water now supplies slightly more than half of Southern California's water consumption. If any surplus water does exist at any time during the year, it would be much cheaper and require no ground injection pump (or energy for them) to just use and or surface store * that "postulated surplus" and take less water from the ground every month. Storing water in aquifers ONLY makes sense if some months the natural supply gives a surplus, but that is not the case now.

    It was the case a few years ago, but Lake Mead is going dry and the peak spring flow of the Colorado River does not met the consumption demand - why ground water is now extracted every month as the spring peak flow is now much less.

    So again I ask: Where is the "surplus water" that could be used to replenish the ground water levels?

    * If it were true that in some month there is "surplus water" then it could be stored in any of dozens of resevoirs now going dry, like this one:

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

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    That is lake Don Pedro - Was "dual use" but now so low that house boats can't freely move without running aground so many are being taken out.

    Here is part of text associated with the photos (some from the five other sites visited by the newspaper photographer one very recent week-end.):
    " One weekend - five California lakes and rivers visited - and not a lot of water found. Reservoirs named Pine Flat, Millerton, New Exchequer (Lake McClure), Don Pedro and New Melones hold, when full, nearly seven million acre feet of water behind dams. These reservoirs are on the Kings, San Joaquin, Merced, Tuolumne and Stanislaus rivers, respectively.

    As of April 11-12 when these photos were taken, these reservoirs held in combined storage just 27 percent of their total capacity, or about 1.8 million acre feet of water. The lowest was New Exchequer at 9 percent. Don Pedro faired the best of the lot at 42 percent of capacity. "

    Read more here: http://westernfarmpress.com/irrigat...-closer-going-dry#slide-0-field_images-157691

    With more than 5 million acre feet of unused storage capacity now in just these 5 California reservoirs, why is more storage capacity needed?
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 27, 2015
  11. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    We have a severe drought. We can't recharge them - we use more water than we have.
     
  12. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    Do you guys have any idea how contaminated urban stormwater runoff and agricultural runoff are?
     
  13. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Very. They need to do R/O filtering on the runoff in El Centro to make the water usable again. On the other hand, the untreated runoff created a quite healthy delta ecosystem before the R/O plant was completed.
     
  14. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    Copper, Zinc, Nickle, Aluminium, Iron, sometimes Lead (used to be more common, has declined since being phased out of petrol), petroleum hydrocarbons, PAHs, Nitrates, suspended solids, microbiogical loading from fecal sources. And that's just from road surfaces, roofing, and green areas within the city boundaries... There's also inevitable runoff from industrial and storage yards as well as cross connections between the foul sewer and stormwater infrastructure...

    At times (and it doesn't take much) Urban stormwater runoff looks more like landfill leachate than potable water.
     
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Climate regimes stable for many thousands of years are the norm, in most places on this planet. They last long enough for large animals with slow reproduction cycles to evolve in response to them.

    The doubt is measured in thousands of years.
    We have a very good idea of why we are in an ice age, and quite a bit of information regarding the the "signs" of its changeover from one stable state to another (polar glaciers growing vs polar glaciers shrinking, for example, mark the two stable regimes).

    We are amid and facing a global climate change not only faster than anything we have record of, but in many respects larger. That's physics, not speculation. Whether or not it's going to be short term on the ordinary geological scale of global climate is one of the speculations - but it's going to outlast any of our grandchildren. And we are causing it - it's voluntary. The wisdom of doing something like that is, at best, questionable.

    The recent floods in Colorado, US western high steppe and montane, appear to have contaminated several drainage basins with large amounts of antibiotics of various kinds - and genetic surveys of this water have picked up significant quantities of sequences characteristic of bacterial antibiotic resistance.
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2015
  16. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Agreed. Of course, many of those are present in the runoff that creates the mythical Hollywood "clear, cold mountain stream."
     
  17. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Trippy You may know where as I am only guessing based on fact the energy requirements for RO production of potable water increases (linearly?) with the salt concentration of the NaCl in the source. This leads me to guess the lower concentration of the metals you list may not require as much energy in RO per liter of potable water produced (from say contaminated street run off of "fresh" water).

    Also a nearly completely WAG is that the energy requirement in RO removal of atoms, molecule, polymer unit or bacteria, is inversely (linearly?) with the mass (or atomic volume?) of the item being removed.
    Comments?
     
  18. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    True enough, or at least potentially true enough - there are parts of the US where the groundwater has the pH of battery acid, and other areas where there's enough Arsenic in the water to kill you, but the question remains of concentrations. At the end of the day, contamination due to brake linings is dependent on traffic flows.

    I've been doing a bit of work on these issues recently.

    Bacterial contamination is easy to remediate - an MBR, for example, will get bacterial contamination down to nearly drinking water standards, of course, there's also the problem (or potential problem) of viral loading as well.

    In principle it's kinda straight-forward. Fortunately for us for the most part, heavy metals tend to compartmentalize with the suspended solids - adsorbing onto the surface of clay particles. The problem then becomes how to deal with the sludge that's left behind - especially if you think about the stop-start traffic on LA free-ways during peak times, and the number of cars involved. It's all well and good to remove the contamination from the water, but if you're going to do that you need to plan on what you're going to do with the sludge you create in the process.

    If you can remove the suspended solids from the first flush of the rainfall, then you've removed something like 90% of the contamination from the water, but there are still follow-on issues to consider.
     
  19. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Which is a result of poor planning.
    We ain't reached that sorry state yet in the midwest........however, that day is coming, and when we lose the food production from the high plains because we've lost the ogallala aquifer, the next generation will feel the pain.
     
  20. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    And the effects of climate change. Warmer days = more evaporation and less retention even if rain stays the same (which it hasn't.)
     
  21. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    If'n you know the brakes are iffy: Don't tailgate!
     
  22. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    *** That is a powerful reason for CA to shut down ALL fossil fuel power generation - Replace it with other forms, ASAP. - - - I.e. Cooling towers, Don't!

    Billy T made parts bold or red as his comments too.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 29, 2015
  23. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    Dry hot climates, with plenty of sunshine, like California, can make fresh water by using solar evaporation of Pacific ocean water. On would pump the ocean water through greenhouse tunnels where the sun will evaporate part of the salt water, into fresh water vapor that is then condensed. We can use solar power to run the pumps.

    One would not want to evaporate the sea water all the way to make salt, since the higher the concentration of salt the harder it is to evaporate, thereby less water per watt of solar heat. Also, one does not what to accumulate salt because then one also needs to dispose of this. The idea is stay as water.

    The condenser is easy since the pacific ocean water is cold. The freshly pumped water will be the condenser for water vapor from hotter down stream; counter current movement of the vapor.

    A simple design is to pump the water, inland to a height, into an evaporation plain/pond. The sea water will then gravity feed back to the ocean evaporating along the journey back. The cold water feed pipe from the ocean, to the storage plain, will be the condenser that gives the fresh water. The water can be tapped along the way for farmers. The ocean water feed pipe gets colder and colder, as the vapor reaches the ocean outlet, allowing us to get every drop.
     
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