Comment by FredPret
3 days ago
Doesn't pass the sniff test:
From what I can glean from Google, the sun moves 1500 cubic kilometers of water from the ocean into the air every day, around 500,000 cubic kilometers a year (ie, a stupendous amount).
Apparently around 10% of that makes it up the various mountains and comes back down as rivers - that's 50,000 cubic kilometers.
And for scale, human "consumption" is 5000 cubic kilometers.
I agree we should be careful and intelligent about how we use water and where we get it from, but I fail to be alarmed.
Every degree of global warming raises the amount of water the air can hold by 7%. That's what's going on in California recently. We only need to put our finger on the scale to really fuck things up. We don't have to stand on it.
Also heat island effect. We don't have to move the needle in Yosemite to make downtown LA into a death trap.
What's your tidy "Me worry?" explanation for aquifer depletion?
Degree C/K or F/R?