ITEM DETAILS
video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ALeNj7cp_s
The existential risks and opportunities with freshwater and saltwater
Nature, the environment, society
Our Water Crisis Is WAY WORSE than You Think... Here's Why
Without water, there is no life.
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Freshwater
For humans, freshwater is required to survive.
In August 2018, USA TODAY produced and released this report:
'Pumped Dry: The Global Crisis of Vanishing Groundwater'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q
They went all around the world to figure out how quickly groundwater is being depleted in major agricultural regions. The results were *not* good.
The video i selected for this storypost, called 'Our Water Crisis Is WAY WORSE than You Think... Here's Why', was produced and released 6 years later in October 2024.
"Weathered is a show hosted by weather expert Maiya May and produced by Balance Media that helps explain the most common natural disasters, what causes them, how they’re changing, and what we can do to prepare."
The most striking part of the evolution over 6 years is how little we've been hearing about this problem. Perhaps not so surprising given that the fascists worldwide are busy monopolizing the headlines, mostly complaining about how they're being unfairly treated when it's really their incompetence and stupidity that's holding us back form solving real problems.
Addressing the issue of water is highly complex:
freshwater usage:
20% recreational and industrial
80% agricultural
* if you pump too much groundwater, the ground fissures
* this decreases the overall level of the ground, making it more prone to flooding
* the climate is warming
* higher temperatures make the earth dry out, with moisture escaping into the air
* as the atmosphere warms, it can hold more water
* so it becomes a bigger sponge
* which means rain events become more severe
* leading to more flooding
* in most places around the world, the policy with groundwater is "first come, first served" (what could go wrong...)
* pumping groundwater willy-nilly leads to aquifer compaction (a proxy for land subsidence, where the elevation of the ground gets lower and lower)
* the more compaction, the less water the aquifer is able to hold
So now you can't grow as much food, there is not enough water for taps to keep running, and over time the aquifer doesn't get replenished fast enough. Excellent recipe for civilizational collapse due to the mismanagement environmental resources.
And then in the United States specifically, there's the obsession with lawns. For an in-depth description of that fiasco, see this video by Climate Town, released 2025-10-02:
'America's Dumbest Crop'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLYMjPNppRQ
Hard to summarize the stupidity of the lawn situation.
Besides unilaterally stopping spending so much resources to maintain lawns of non-native grasses that are poisoning the groundwater, what are the solutions?
For once, technology and specific applications of machine learning can be very useful because we can do detailed mapping of the land.
* stop growing crops in the wrong places
* focus on making more money by using less land
* over the entire corn belt, we could remove 30% of the land from production, with just a small reduction in yield
* universally adopt managed groundwater recharge
* but water seeps into the ground slower than we pump it out
* embrace the flooding
* distribute the flood water to strategic recharge locations
Seems like the Native American tribes had it right al along when it came to living in harmony with nature rather than try to bend nature to human will -- which always works for a little while, then has catastrophic consequences when it stops working.
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~~~~~~
Saltwater
Saltwater is not drinkable, and cannot be used to water agricultural crops.
On the other hand, tidal and wave energy are readily available, and the largest source of energy on the planet that can be used without creating any risk of nuclear winter.
Better yet, desalination -- removing the salt from seawater, turning it into freshwater -- has the potential to provide a significant part of the solution to the water supply problem.
Both these technologies have a long way to go in order to produce truly climate-neutral results, but there's a lot of very clever engineering being done already.
Here at two videos on these topics from content producer Undecided with Matt Ferrell:
2025-05-06
'How Waves Could Quietly Overtake Solar & Wind'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1pxV7Nro34
Company working on harnessing wave energy:
CorPower - https://corpowerocean.com/
2025-05-13
'How Deep Sea Water is Now Drinkable'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu_IcFpEkg0
Companies working on removing salt from seawater:
OceanWell - https://www.oceanwellwater.com/
FSubsea - https://www.fsubsea.com/
Flocean - https://www.flocean.green/
Waterise - https://www.waterise.com/
The planet is never going to run out of tides, waves, and saltwater. So if we can figure out how to tame that resource, even a little bit... we have a chance at humankind surviving.
~~~~~~
~~~~~~
Freshwater
For humans, freshwater is required to survive.
In August 2018, USA TODAY produced and released this report:
'Pumped Dry: The Global Crisis of Vanishing Groundwater'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q
They went all around the world to figure out how quickly groundwater is being depleted in major agricultural regions. The results were *not* good.
The video i selected for this storypost, called 'Our Water Crisis Is WAY WORSE than You Think... Here's Why', was produced and released 6 years later in October 2024.
"Weathered is a show hosted by weather expert Maiya May and produced by Balance Media that helps explain the most common natural disasters, what causes them, how they’re changing, and what we can do to prepare."
The most striking part of the evolution over 6 years is how little we've been hearing about this problem. Perhaps not so surprising given that the fascists worldwide are busy monopolizing the headlines, mostly complaining about how they're being unfairly treated when it's really their incompetence and stupidity that's holding us back form solving real problems.
Addressing the issue of water is highly complex:
freshwater usage:
20% recreational and industrial
80% agricultural
* if you pump too much groundwater, the ground fissures
* this decreases the overall level of the ground, making it more prone to flooding
* the climate is warming
* higher temperatures make the earth dry out, with moisture escaping into the air
* as the atmosphere warms, it can hold more water
* so it becomes a bigger sponge
* which means rain events become more severe
* leading to more flooding
* in most places around the world, the policy with groundwater is "first come, first served" (what could go wrong...)
* pumping groundwater willy-nilly leads to aquifer compaction (a proxy for land subsidence, where the elevation of the ground gets lower and lower)
* the more compaction, the less water the aquifer is able to hold
So now you can't grow as much food, there is not enough water for taps to keep running, and over time the aquifer doesn't get replenished fast enough. Excellent recipe for civilizational collapse due to the mismanagement environmental resources.
And then in the United States specifically, there's the obsession with lawns. For an in-depth description of that fiasco, see this video by Climate Town, released 2025-10-02:
'America's Dumbest Crop'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLYMjPNppRQ
Hard to summarize the stupidity of the lawn situation.
Besides unilaterally stopping spending so much resources to maintain lawns of non-native grasses that are poisoning the groundwater, what are the solutions?
For once, technology and specific applications of machine learning can be very useful because we can do detailed mapping of the land.
* stop growing crops in the wrong places
* focus on making more money by using less land
* over the entire corn belt, we could remove 30% of the land from production, with just a small reduction in yield
* universally adopt managed groundwater recharge
* but water seeps into the ground slower than we pump it out
* embrace the flooding
* distribute the flood water to strategic recharge locations
Seems like the Native American tribes had it right al along when it came to living in harmony with nature rather than try to bend nature to human will -- which always works for a little while, then has catastrophic consequences when it stops working.
~~~~~~
~~~~~~
Saltwater
Saltwater is not drinkable, and cannot be used to water agricultural crops.
On the other hand, tidal and wave energy are readily available, and the largest source of energy on the planet that can be used without creating any risk of nuclear winter.
Better yet, desalination -- removing the salt from seawater, turning it into freshwater -- has the potential to provide a significant part of the solution to the water supply problem.
Both these technologies have a long way to go in order to produce truly climate-neutral results, but there's a lot of very clever engineering being done already.
Here at two videos on these topics from content producer Undecided with Matt Ferrell:
2025-05-06
'How Waves Could Quietly Overtake Solar & Wind'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1pxV7Nro34
Company working on harnessing wave energy:
CorPower - https://corpowerocean.com/
2025-05-13
'How Deep Sea Water is Now Drinkable'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu_IcFpEkg0
Companies working on removing salt from seawater:
OceanWell - https://www.oceanwellwater.com/
FSubsea - https://www.fsubsea.com/
Flocean - https://www.flocean.green/
Waterise - https://www.waterise.com/
The planet is never going to run out of tides, waves, and saltwater. So if we can figure out how to tame that resource, even a little bit... we have a chance at humankind surviving.
Planet Earth
2014 to 2025
PBS Terra
episode of Weathered: Earth’s Extremes series ~~ originally released 2024-10-02
machine learning | technology | entrepreneurship | civilizational collapse | groundwater recharge | flooding | extreme weather events | Global warming | land subsidence | land management | agriculture | video | water | water management | seawater | freshwater | aquifer | groundwater | tidal energy | wave energy | desalination | reverse osmosis | deep-sea reverse osmosis | saltwater
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