WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2022 - WATER

 WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2022 - WATER

For the past ten days, I’ve written about technologies.  Today is a variation on that.  WATER.

I am not a scientist (okay, I might be able to say I’m a computer scientist, but that’s not the same).  I haven’t studied global warming, but my somewhat uninformed brain says “I think that is true, but I really haven’t dug deeply into global warming to really know”.

And, that is somewhat true as I write about water.  Three factors - are drought; polluted waters, and desalination of seawater.

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DROUGHT

With technology, you can pretty much do what you want.  But with the weather, we have little control.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have timely rain?  To not have tornadoes or hurricanes? But, we can’t quite do that (yet anyway).

Farmers do have some leeway over drought in certain areas.  There are aquifers deep under the ground and farmers can tap into the water source and irrigate.  If you’ve driven (or flown over) irrigated land you can see the circle where the water reaches the plants.  But, some aquifers are drying up from too much use.  

A similar example happens when homeowners want to make their yards look good and set their sprinkler systems to do that.  My opinion is if there is a serious drought, I’d rather support agriculture than support landscapes and backyard swimming pools.

Some areas are always in drought mode (like Southern California), and water taken from Lake Mead is piped into the Central Valley to irrigate the crops.

Is the day coming when we can control the weather?  Some futurists think so.  We can ‘seed’ clouds so they release their moisture.  

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POLLUTED WATERS

There are some cities in the United States with polluted rivers - in particular, Flint Michigan, and Jackson Mississippi.  Recently the water situation at Camp Lejeune has become an issue.  

Companies dump chemicals, pollutants, garbage, and all kinds of junk into rivers.  Yes, there are rules and regulations.  The EPA - environmental protection agency is to monitor lakes (and more), but the task is pretty big.  With technology, rivers, lakes, and streams, can have monitors that keep careful track of polluters.  There is supposedly politics involved as well as Flint and Jackson have large minority populations and bias and discrimination do occur.  

Landfills are designed to hold toxins from leaching into the water table - but sometimes those safeguards fail.  If we could control the weather we could control pollution better.  For example, if we could control hurricanes, the damage to the environment and drinking waters from Hurricane Katrina wouldn’t have occurred.

Following this theme, there are garbage dumps in the ocean.  For example, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers an estimated surface area of 1.6 million square kilometers, an area twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France.

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DESALINATION OF SEAWATER

Some areas of the world use desalination of seawater  - that is finding ways to take the salt and other chemicals in seawater out and then use the water for people and crops.  Saudi Arabia has desalination to help the desert country keep water flowing.  San Diego California also has desalination plants.

The problem is that it is very expensive to take the salt out of the seawater.  Plus what do you do with the piles of salt and chemicals that you take out of the water?  

About 71 percent of the Earth's surface is water-covered, and the oceans hold about 96.5 percent of all Earth's water.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have a cheap way to take the salt out of seawater?  

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The culprit in some of these discussions is greed.  I want bigger crops - so I have to irrigate.  My herd releases methane and lots of manure - and that goes into rivers - but I make good money on having a big cattle feedlot.  

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Most scientists talk about global warming. Can it be solved?  Can technology help?  Some businesses are typing to be ‘carbon neutral’ - that is not releasing carbon back into the atmosphere where it adds to the greenhouse effect.

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Just like the famous line, 'water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink', in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, water is around us but is often not clean or safe enough to drink.  

It will not be in my lifetime that we get better controls on weather and drought.  It might be in my lifetime that we can provide clean (or cleaner) drinking water to Flint, Jackson, and other such places.  I have hope that in my lifetime a cheap, reliable method will be found to desalinate seawater.  I’m sure scientists are working on it.

WATER is essential for life - and is often taken for granted.  Let’s be good stewards of our planet!!!

LOVE WINS!!

Karen Anne White, November 2, 2022, ©