So it's "breaking down" and "malfunctioning" relative to the water needs of the humans living in the affected areas. So this is not in fact any meaningful step change in the system, unless you see providing comfortable amounts of fresh water to all humans living in those specific areas as its purpose.
There's some cruel irony in the planet getting hotter not just making it rain more and making rain happen on land.<p>I do wonder what the state of desalination is. I have read a bit about brine management out of curiosity , but I really have a hard time understanding what can be done about it. If someone figured out how to make concrete from brine or something could we be doing a lot more desalination?
> That’s the conclusion of a new report published this week by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water—a group of leading scientists and economists formed in 2022 whose mission is to assess the state of Earth’s hydrological systems and how those systems are being managed. The results are not encouraging. The report finds that demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by more than 40 percent by the end of the decade, mostly due to stresses caused by climate change.<p>We're marching ourselves straight into disaster that will affect hundreds of millions of people. Are we ever going to wake up and do something about it as a species?
Not just this water cycle will be disrupted, most of the other “stable” cycles on which the global ecosystem and the human civilization are based on will get disrupted too. Pushing the system off balance will make things harder to survive with, with our population numbers or with much less than that.<p>And those disruptions also cause increasing effects, more humidity in the air also accelerates global warming, water vapor is also another greenhouse gas, a pretty powerful one.
"Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!" Immortan Joe, tech visionary and innovator
Elon Musk is worried about “population collapse” in countries<p>Perhaps he’s underestimating the amount of resources needed per person and the garbage each person produces<p>Our planet had under a billion people for every century except the 20th and 21st, right?<p>What was so bad about that? The idea that less human scientists, workers means less innovation, productivity is not necessarily true now in the age of automation and AI.<p>The way I see it, people having less children across the planet may be the best way to rebalance this phenomenon.<p>One third of arable land is desertified. Insect and other species are plummeting. The world is being converted to monocultures and farms. And we are here talking about having more babies for the sustainability of .. social security schemes?