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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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You are drastically underestimating how much saltwater the earth has.
Yeah, here are some numbers for scale:
There are about 1,335,000,000km^3 of water in the ocean. Humans use around 4600km^3 of water annually. That is only 0.000345% of the volume of the ocean.
But have you considered we fuck up the environment every where we go? I get theres a lot of salt water but nobody is going to convince me there are no consequences for mass desalination. Nothing is consequence free here. There is a price for everything we take.
Do you think the salt is just going to get loaded on rockets and sent to the sun?
The earth is a closed system, the salt and the water will eventually make it back to the ocean.
No, I don't think that. I think we will desalinate the ocean enough for it go up by the few degrees it needs to kill most ocean life. Probably over the span of a few decades. But go off on how this is consequence free i guess.
Again, you grossly underestimate the sheer volume of our planet’s oceans.
Again, climate change is effecting the ocean the most. If it is already strained, and for the next 100 years we start mass desalination in developed nations, what do you think will happen to the already rising and deadly temperatures? If they are already approaching dangerous levels, and desalination raises the temperature, what will happen? I'm not misunderstanding here, I'm telling you once this picks up en masse there will be consequences.
Yep so u pump the salt water into the desert where evaporation makes salty and the water evaporates into the atmosphere.
The point is, this is a solution to a problem now and probably in the near future. 100% of the world won't be desalination. This is literal drops in the bucket compared to other resources we take from the earth that are impossible to replenish.
With desalination, don't worry about the freshwater. Worry about the brine.
Freshwater from seawater isn't going to do anything more than is currently happening with however an island gets its water.
But brine? That needs to be carefully reintroduced to the ocean (or evaporated on salt flats to farm salt).