Is global warming even real?

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

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

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    Conceptually valid, but put some numbers in:
    I. e. how many square miles of evaporation ponds are required to supply only 0.001 part of the fresh water California uses daily (Evaporate it the day it is used)?
     
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  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Saudi Arabia and some other ME countries have been doing this for many years. So has the US military, on smaller scales. It is expensive, and the salt effluent is difficult to "dispose of" even in Arabian desert lands let alone California, but if the US can figure out some way to pay for it that would be an option.

    You do realize that you talking about socialism, right? There's no way private enterprise is going to pay for this.
     
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  5. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    I have a better idea - use salt water. Use salt water to flush toilets, wash dishes, fill swimming pools, run fountains and run showers. Pipe salt water to everyone. Locally they can put in evap distillers or R/O filters to give them a few gallons of freshwater a day for drinking, final rinse of people/clothing/dishes and cooking.

    The cost there is replacement of much of the internal plumbing of homes. Salt water works in copper pipes, but many of the fixtures currently used in homes would have to be replaced. Sewage treatment plants would also have to be upgraded to support processing of high salt waste.
     
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    An engineering nightmare, and an incredible expense.
     
  8. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    It is not socialism unless the process becomes too inefficient. If it is efficient, than the private sectors does it.

    All you do is pump water uphill to a collection area. The process will needs to output a liquid salt water stream, back to the ocean, to avoid having to dispose of salt waste. We can only take a small fraction of the water, so the returned salt water can be tidal mixed and will not impact the eco-system. If you do it right, you won't have too much environmental foot dragging that makes cost get too high, where you need socialism; socialism sabotage paid for by special interests who prefer big government.

    Picture large ponds on a hill with rubber membrane slide back to the ocean; the evaporator. This side is covered with clear plastic. There is also a secondary slide running parallel that will be the condenser. This is covered and insulated from the sun, but open to common air contact with the evaporator slide. The cold water feed that runs uphill, will be inside the secondary slide and is used as the condenser. All the water, both salt and fresh is flowing down hill, with most of the water back to the ocean, but with a smaller side stream of fresh water. We use solar power for the pump train, the rest is passive.


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

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    Answer post 461's question: How many square miles of evaporation pond needed to supply 0.001 fraction of CA fresh water needs?

    I would guess more than 1,000 square miles, based on the fact that the prevailing winds entering CA have just come from many millions of square miles of Pacific Ocean and more than half of CA's water needs are supplied now from wells.

    If my guess is even reasonable, then your suggestion is just more posted nonsense.

    To help with the calculation: From memory, so check it, each gram of 100 degree C water evaporated needs to absorb 540 calorie of solar energy, and you have none of that recovered, as I understand your idea.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 2, 2015
  10. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Yep, it would be hard. But it would solve the (rather absurd) problem we have now that we use treated potable water to do everything from wash the dirt off our clothes to flush our poo down the toilet.
    Well, that's the thing. We don't need fresh water for most of our domestic and industrial water needs. Cooling? Salt water works fine. Flushing? Washing? Fountains? Filling swimming pools? Pull it right out of the ocean.
    For potable water needs, do on site evap distillation. An old US survival distiller was an inflatable sphere 24 inches across and produced about 2 liters a day. (So 2 liters for .2 meters) I have about 65 square meters of solar on my house. So using the same (simple) technology and the same roof area I'd get 160 gallons a day - more than enough for drinking and final rinse.
     
  11. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I had not heard of it so searched and found:
    I can't follow their description. There is no mention of a black surface to absorb the sun's energy. The fresh water seems to come from the bottom of the big ball, but that also is where the sea water was poured in? What does the "separate plastic bag hangs from attachment points on the outer bag" do? What is the "outer bag"? How large is it? If it is a "ball" what and where is the "neck."

    Anyway manual reverse osmosis desalinators seem to be better - possibly as the yield will not decrease with distance from equator.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 3, 2015
  12. glomeat Registered Member

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    Those people who actually think that this is a scam need to take a look at the stats, carbon is increasing day by day due to pollution and Increasing temperature is actually the cause of melting Ice, There are even documentaries present on the net which explains the situation well.
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    That is false. It requires socialistic economic organization whenever the benefits are spread widely in time and space and unrecoverable by market exchange, but the costs are large and focused on the providing entity. Sewer and water systems are famous examples of this.

    Efficiency has nothing to do with private sector vs public sector involvement. If it did, the internal combustion piston engine would be a rarely encountered specialty power source built by NASA.

    There's nothing absurd about using clean water to wash things - especially people and their clothing, dishes, home surroundings, etc.

    If you want to use dirty water to flush toilets, which seems reasonable, the place to find it would be right there under the kitchen sink and shower drain - not an entire separate water system for the whole community.

    Yes, we do. Salt water works very poorly for almost everything people use water for, it's expensive to handle with machinery etc, and in large quantities it's a serious pollution problem in almost all terrestrial environments.
     
    Last edited: May 4, 2015
  14. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Agreed. And you can make salt water as clean as fresh water.
    We are putting in separate water systems as we speak to pipe reclaimed water around - completely separate water systems for whole communities. Apparently it's not that big a deal.
    Fortunately we have a sewer system to deal with the waste.
     
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    So you are treating the water, and piping it into the homes, via an entirely separate system that is used for what, exactly - flushing toilets into your separate salt water waste treatment plants? Filling swimming pools?
    Not salt water waste, you don't. You'll have to build one.
    That would make four systems, then - one each for pre and post use of salt and fresh water.
     
  16. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    Filling swimming pools. Providing feedwater for evaporative and R/O filters. Flushing toilets. Showering. Filling fountains or water features.

    Will it be expensive? You bet. But it's a solution to an otherwise intractable problem.
     
  17. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    23,198
    For at least the last 5 months (and still) Wife and I take shorter duration showers so we can catch all the water used in large cooking pot we stand in. That water flushes our toilet - we only use one of the four that is in the shower bath room. A second equally large pot is under the sink. I keep filling it with the water caught by the shower pot.
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    So the toilets are going to be on a separate wastewater handling system from the sinks and laundry, as well as the storm drains etc. You are replumbing everyone's house, to the street.

    And people are going to take salt water showers - so that water, also used to flush toilets etc, is treated to be potable barring the salt, and people are going to be happy rinsing off using carefully metered quantities from the drinking water faucet, using specialty soaps, and so forth.

    And all the fountains or other water features, re-engineered to handle the corrosion and salt buildup, now useless for birdbaths or animal attraction or any of the other traditional aspects, are going to be carefully piped to the salt water treatment center - can't get that stuff into the general environment.

    And people will be washing their cars, etc, using salt water carefully collected and piped into the salt water waste system.

    And so forth.
    You are building a entire separate and parallel water and sewer system, to handle maybe what - 5% ? - of the water demand .

    If lowering the freshwater demand by that little would solve this problem, there are far cheaper and more convenient ways to do that.
     
  19. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    Yes, you are adding a second water-distribution system.
    "Specialty soaps?" If you like. No need, but some people might enjoy that I imagine.
    It's not treated to be potable - no one will be drinking it. It is simply treated to be safe for casual contact (like bathing.)
    Yes. We are also building a desalinator that cost over half a billion to handle only 10% of our water demand. Enough of those 5% and 10% solutions and you've solved most of the problem.
    There are a great many ways to solve the problem. All of them solve a small part of it, since the vast majority of our water use is for irrigation. Fortunately, the largest user of water in California is farms - and they are one of the few industries that has the space available for solar desalination.
     
  20. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    8,466
    from a biography of Michelangelo Buonarroti:

    An old man was pissing into the arno
    when asked why
    he said that his grandson's barge was aground on a sandbar near pizza
    and, well
    "every little bit helps".
     
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    If you can't drink it, you can't bathe in it safely - even adults, let alone children. Barring the salt, of course.

    And a second collection system, and a second treatment system on both ends. All of this engineered to withstand salt water.

    Salt water plays havoc with shampoos, soaps, etc. Try it. Also, rinsing the salt off with fresh water is normally a near necessity.

    US aircraft carriers, for example, use salt water for flushing toilets and almost nothing else. Even the fire fighting gear uses fresh water - salt water is corrosive.

    So you've solved most of your problem with large scale desalination, infrastructure in place and easily expanded - why not expand that a little bit, rather than adopt these extraordinarily expensive and inconvenient methods for dealing with the last few percentage points?
     
  22. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,635
    And yet millions of people swim in salt water. Are you claiming they are doing something unsafe?
    So apparently using salt water for some uses of potable water makes enough sense that the US Navy does it - even with the two supply systems, two disposal systems, extra care taken to prevent corrosion etc.
    Because it takes enormous amounts of energy - energy that is effectively wasted if the original salt water can be used instead. We need to consider every possible solution to the problem.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    And in untreated fresh water.

    People drink untreated fresh water as well, and usually come to no harm whatsoever. When swimming, swallowing water is common - fresh or salt - so no one should swim in water they wouldn't drink (barring the salt itself), but you wouldn't usually want to swim in water that is actually unsafe to drink.

    And yes, they are taking a mild risk - much more than mild if they were to bathe themselves and their children in it from a tap, which is more dangerous than swimming in the water from that same source.

    btw: Your edit job there may create the impression that I was claiming water undrinkable for any reason including salt was risky to swim in. Surely that was unintentional, so my reply here assumes good faith on your part.

    Not potable water, no. But otherwise - Yep. Very little extra infrastructure involved, on a ship. For starters, they don't need two supply systems - the salt water supply is the only one, so all they have to do is divert it to whatever it's good for.

    So even in the cheapest possible circumstances, where the salt water is right there and they have to pipe it anyway, where fresh water has to be distilled with nuclear power, where there are no plants or animals or anything to worry about, where salt pollution is not even a shadow of a worry, there isn't much use for salt water. You can flush toilets with it, and that's about all.
     
    Last edited: May 6, 2015

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