https://www.europesays.com/1984542/ Nuclear Energy Expansion Faces Water Resource Challenges #EnergyPolicy #EnergyProduction #nuclear #NUCLEARENERGY #NuclearPower #NuclearWaste #RenewableEnergy #SmallModularReactors #SMRs #WaterResources #WaterScarcity
https://www.europesays.com/1968701/ The Dying Land: Iraq’s Environmental Emergency #baghdad #deforestation #desertification #Environment #HighTemperatures #Iraq #pollution #TheDyingLand:Iraq'sEnvironmentalEmergency #WaterScarcity
#WaterScarcity on the Rise: #Rivers Drying at Record Rates
by Vivek SainiVivek Saini, October 8, 2024
"Rivers worldwide are drying up at the fastest rate in 30 years, posing a critical threat to ecosystems, agriculture, and human populations. In 2023, unprecedented heatwaves, prolonged droughts, and erratic rainfall patterns resulted in the most severe year of water depletion in three decades, according to World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reports. This alarming phenomenon is a direct consequence of climate change, worsened by unsustainable human activities, raising the spectre of widespread water scarcity.
A Crisis Accelerating: Rivers Drying at Record Rates
"The world’s rivers, crucial lifelines for billions of people, have shown alarming signs of depletion, with some drying up completely. The WMO’s recent State of the Global Climate report revealed that rivers in Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia experienced their lowest levels since the early 1990s. Rivers like the #Yangtze, #AmazonRiver, and #Danube can no longer support the #ecosystems and communities that depend on them for agriculture, drinking water, and transport.
"The impact of climate change, marked by rising global temperatures, has played a significant role in this crisis. The warming of the Earth’s surface increases the evaporation rate from rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, intensifying water loss. Regions already prone to droughts, such as the Middle East, parts of Africa, and southern Europe, face even more severe shortages due to intensified drought cycles. In 2023 alone, the Danube, Europe’s second-longest river, saw record-low water levels, which crippled shipping routes and threatened agricultural output in countries like #Hungary and #Romania.
"This drying trend is not limited to one region. The #ColoradoRiver continues to shrink in the United States, causing severe #WaterShortages for millions in states like #Arizona and #Nevada. Similar trends have been observed in the #IndusRiver in #SouthAsia, which supports millions of people in #Pakistan and #India. These drying rivers are a wake-up call for the global community to address water conservation and management issues before irreversible damage occurs."
Read more:
https://climatefactchecks.org/water-scarcity-on-the-rise-rivers-drying-at-record-rates/
#ClimateCrisis #WaterIsLife
The consensus of experts was that the combination of the winds, unseasonably dry conditions & multiple fires breaking out one another in the same geographic region made widespread destruction inevitable.
The article highlights many valid points, but the bottom line is that there was nothing that could’ve stopped the devastating tragedy. The destruction, suffering, & death toll continue to rise.
#CAFires #ClimateCrisis #Drought #WaterScarcity
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/10/us/california-la-fires-emergency-prep-invs?cid=ios_app
Pour celles et ceux que ça intéressent, les incendies en Californie cette semaine m'ont rappelé les remarques d'Elisabeth Anker dans son excellent livre, Ugly Freedom, sur l'accaparement de l'eau et les justifications de cet accaparement par les résidents (richissimes) de Rancho Santa Fe.
On lira un long passage traduit ici :
Et un extrait ci-dessous :
"Les habitants de Rancho Santa Fe peuvent sembler excessivement égoïstes, motivés uniquement par l’irresponsabilité et la cupidité, mais l’enjeu est bien plus important que la psychologie personnelle. L’accent mis sur la psychologie occulte la vision du monde plus large et partagée qui influence leurs actions. Une histoire de liberté populaire et largement appréciée sous-tend toutes leurs revendications et leur confère une lisibilité politique. Pour les habitants de Rancho Santa Fe, l’utilisation de l’eau est une forme de liberté qui implique le choix individuel de consommer des ressources naturelles que l’on paie. La liberté consiste à extraire des biens précieux du patrimoine commun sans se soucier des autres ; c’est la capacité de payer, et non le bien collectif, qui détermine la liberté d’action. Dans cette version de la liberté, les frontières territoriales délimitent la pratique de la liberté : les frontières souveraines, à la fois du soi et de la propriété – des espaces privés et autodéterminés sur lesquels on a autorité – fixent la limite de la liberté. La liberté est enfermée dans un moi individuel et une propriété personnelle, barricadée contre les autres dans une affirmation de séparation. La responsabilité s’étend aux quatre acres de la propriété privée, mais pas au-delà, qui semble séparable des lacs bas et des collines desséchées immédiatement adjacents."
"Outside Corpus Christi, TX—where water is so scarce they hand out shower timers at HS football games—Musk is building a $1B lithium refinery -could need 8M gallons of water a day."
-C Webb
#Tesla doesn't have a contract for the water needed to operate the FAC, presenting a hurdle for CEO Musk’s goal of turning lithium into chem. products used to make EV batteries.
Trump/Abbott will ensure: #Musk gets what he wants.
#Deregulation harms, kills...
#USPol #WaterScarcity
https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/musks-massive-tesla-lithium-plant-hunts-for-water-in-drought-hit-texas-2025-01-08
"One of the reasons that datacenter operators have gravitated toward evaporative coolers is because they're so cheap to operate compared to alternative technologies.
"It is always of a higher coefficient of performance (COP), meaning less energy required, to evaporate water, regardless of what cooling medium is being utilized," Shelnutt said.
In fact, COP, which refers to the amount of heat removed for a given amount of power, for evaporative cooling comes in at 1,230 while dry coolers and chillers manage a COP of about 12 and 4, respectively, he explained.
In terms of energy consumption, this makes an evaporatively cooled datacenter far more energy efficient than one that doesn't consume water, and that translates to a lower operating cost.
The challenge is that not every location and climate is well suited to evaporative cooling. In hotter climates where water is either scarce or places with high humidity where evaporative coolers are ineffective, chillers, which function similar to your AC unit, may be used instead."
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/04/how_datacenters_use_water/
While Trump & Republicans deny the climate crisis, disasters remind Americans why the US government should be mitigating climate change. Republicans aren’t just ignoring CC, their agenda includes rewarding more fossil fuel drilling, which will increase GHG emissions, removing safeguards & regulations that Pres Biden put in place, & possibly defunding FEMA.
“Palisades fire: Evacuations, road closures, shelters.”
#USPol #ClimateCrisis #California #Drought #WaterScarcity
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-07/palisades-fire-evacuation-road-closures-shelters
CA farmers could soon enjoy bumper crops thanks to Trump’s pledge to lift water restrictions. But who'll pick them if he follows thru on his deportation threats?
The country’s largest AG constituency backed Trump re his promises to “open the faucet” & deliver more water to the C Valley. Now it’s reckoning with an uncomfortable contradiction: he also campaigned on mass deportations of undoc. #immigrants *at least half of CA's AG workforce.
#MassDeportation #WaterScarcity https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/26/california-farmers-trump-water-workers-00195839
Shaping the Future: International development through sustainable solutions [Advocacy Lab Content] https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/special_report/shaping-the-future-international-development-through-sustainable-solutions/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=dlvr.it #Economy #waterscarcity
Freshwater is scarce, worldwide.
"An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth's total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since. Reporting in Surveys in Geophysics, the researchers suggested the shift could indicate Earth's continents have entered a persistently drier phase."
#Water #WaterScarcity #ClimateCrisis
https://phys.org/news/2024-11-nasa-satellites-reveal-abrupt-global.html
@PaulWay
I especially like your fourth point. This is not well understood in the electorate and polies probably don’t either (mouthing corporate energy producers‘ talking points).
There is another important point that is not discussed widely, and that is the ‘cooling’ cycle of nuclear reactor energy production. It takes a lot of ‘clean’ water and the evaporation rate is no inconsequential in an arrid country like Australia. How much damage would be caused by nuclear power station ‘water licences’.
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #DataCenters #ChatGPT #Water #WaterScarcity: "You may be hungry for knowledge, but your chatbot is thirsty for the world’s water supplies. The huge computer clusters powering ChatGPT need four times as much water to deliver answers than previously thought, it has been claimed.
Using the chatbot for between ten to 50 queries consumes about two litres of water, according to experts from the University of California, Riverside.
A pre-print study from the academics, which was released last year, estimated that one 500ml bottle was used for this volume of queries, but they have now discovered it underestimated the problem.
Technology companies developing powerful artificial intelligence use water for cooling, power generation and in manufacturing chips.
The study, entitled Making AI Less Thirsty, looked at an earlier version of ChatGPT (GPT-3) and will be published in the Communications of the ACM magazine."
#Mexico #DataCenters #BigTech #WaterScarcity #Energy: "In a nondescript building in an industrial park in central Mexico, cavernous rooms hold stack after stack of servers studded with blue lights, humming with computations and cooled by thousands of little fans and large vents blasting great columns of air across the room.
“Datacentres are the lungs of digital life,” says Amet Novillo, the managing director of Equinix Mexico, a digital infrastructure company, as he stands in the middle of the airflows that stop the hardware overheating.
Datacentres are clustering in the state of Querétaro, where Amazon, Microsoft and Google are among those lining up multibillion-dollar investments. Amazon alone has said it will invest $5bn. The government heralds the industry as a new driver of economic growth – but in a drought-prone state where the electrical grid suffered blackouts this summer, critics want to know how strained infrastructure will find the extra water and energy it needs.
Similar debates are playing out across Latin America, where datacentres are springing up to meet the needs of an expanding digital world."
#AI #GenerativeAI #DataCenters #Water #WaterScarcity: "The building of new data centres is increasing demand for water resources. Some data centres are presently located in areas of water stress or are likely to be in the future. Developing cooling technologies which minimise or do not require water is becoming increasingly important. Perhaps AI will find a scalable solution to this problem."
Instead of #AI, #crypto & the other scams that #TechBros are running, they should be working on our survival; innovative tech for crops, water, greenhouses, food, energy, housing, building back ecosystems, urban & rural planning, ...
"Model results for SSP2-RCP4.5, SPP2-RCP8.5, and SSP3-RCP8.5, respectively, project: (a) substantial declines, as measured by GCal, in global food production of some 6%, 10%, &14% to 2050…”
#Cllimate #Technolocy #Ecosystems #WaterScarcity https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-65274-z
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #DataCenters #BigTech #Energy #WaterScarcity #FossilFuels #ClimateChange: "Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities. It is hardly news that the tech bubble’s self-glorification has obscured the uglier sides of this industry, from its proclivity for tax avoidance to its invasion of privacy and exploitation of our attention span. The industry’s environmental impact is a key issue, yet the companies that produce such models have stayed remarkably quiet about the amount of energy they consume – probably because they don’t want to spark our concern.
Google’s global datacentre and Meta’s ambitious plans for a new AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) further underscore the industry’s energy-intensive nature, raising concerns that these facilities could significantly increase energy consumption. Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues in drier parts of the world. Before making big announcements, tech companies should be transparent about the resource use required for their expansion plans."
Eating no/or less meat saves an incredible amount of water, & helps #climate #waterscarcity.
"Cherish that hamburger. It cost a quarter of the Colorado River.
Researchers found that alfalfa -used as feed for beef & dairy cows -sucks up more water than all the cities & IDUs in the CO River Basin.
Water use in the basin needs to drop by 22% to 29% to stabilize historically low reservoirs.
Water users across the basin would need to cut consumption by 2.4-3.4M acre-ft-"
https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/research-colorado-river-water-use-cherish-hamburger/
Why is the #UK facing #WaterShortages despite record #rainfall?
#ClimateBreakdown, an increasing population and a lack of new #infrastructure are factors contributing to #WaterScarcity
UK at risk of summer #WaterShortages and #HosepipeBans
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/01/why-uk-facing-water-shortages-despite-record-rainfall-explainer
#ToryPoliciesInAction #Privatisation #UnderfundingPublicServices
