I think you're still calling for water to be pumped out of the Snake at the time that the Snake region is in drought.
Yes. We have millions of souls living in areas of this country that only habitable with a steady input of power and water. And fortunately water = electricity with hydroelectric and Canada has all the water we could probably ever need. It's well worth our effort to maintain top relations Canada. Could prove to be beneficial to lots of people and wildlife.
It's just one of many ideas under consideration. If it's not feasible, obviously the solution will have to come from elsewhere.
And here is a gigantic failure on your part. One can not use reservoirs as an indicator of either rainfall or water levels. And the reason for this should be immediately obvious to anybody who knows how that works. Because reservoir levels are entirely controlled by man. The amount of water in them can have absolutely nothing to do with the rainfall or any other natural patterns. If you want to get an idea if an area is really having a drought, look at the level of natural lakes, and not man made ones. Want to know a standard pattern of most reservoirs? It's rather simple, they fill up in the spring, and by the end of fall most are empty. This is because for the vast majority of them, they are primarily constructed to prevent flooding. And they empty them in the fall to prepare for the winter storms and snowmelt the next year. Of course, they also serve other reasons like capturing and holding water for irrigation and power generation, but their main and primary purpose is actually to prevent flooding. Until a few years ago I lived less than a mile from the Oroville dam. And we would always laugh as reporters would come up in the fall and show the reservoir almost empty and stating that is proof we were in a drought. The fact is, they drain it every fall. The last of the lake is generally emptied from September through October to help the salmon that are going upstream for their spawning season. And by having an empty reservoir they will continue up the original stream course and spawn in year round streams instead of temporary inlets created by the lake. Plus of course to capture the massive amounts of water from the winter storms and snowmelt. I was there when the Governor almost destroyed the dam and most of the area downstream was evacuated. It had been empty just a few months before, yet by February it was already overtopping the dam! During most of the winter and early spring that is the norm. Higher than normal water levels as they gauge how much to hold in it so it will be as full as possible at the end of spring, then have enough water to last for the rest of the year. But here is the thing, that is entirely controlled by humans. 100%, and has little to nothing to do with any kind of rainfall. Want to see if an area is really is "drought", look at the natural lakes. And there are a hell of a lot of them. Redfish Lake, McCall Lake, Salt Lake, Lake Tahoe, the Great Lakes, the list just goes on and on. Are the levels of those lakes decreasing? Because those will really let you know if rainfall has actually changed. Lake Tahoe is a great benchmark for the Sierra Mountains. And the record high of that lake is 6,231 feet in 1907. The lowest, that is 6,220 in 1992. That is a lake where man has little to no influence at all on the level, and the largest difference on record is a whopping 11 feet. I used to sail regularly on both Redfish Lake and Lake McCall. Normal differences in water levels was maybe a foot from year to year. So you want to talk about lower lake levels, fine. I can do that all day long. Simply pick lakes that are natural, and humans have no influence on their levels. You can't pick an artificial lake that is normally emptied in the fall as part of its normal operation and expect to be taken seriously at all. Because I can guarantee that almost every man made reservoir at this time is at almost historic low levels. That is because it is winter, and they need the capacity both to capture rainfall from any storms that come through now, as well as the snowmelt in the spring. That is how they work. What, are you not even aware of that? Obviously not, or you would not insist on looking at things like reservoirs. And stabilizing water levels in the Salt Lake will help nothing. Because the salinity is only going to increase over time. And yet once again, that is what is killing the lake. Not lack of water. That lake has been dying for over 15,000 years now.
Sure, help nature and accelerate the natural course of events for the lake. Kill it. Create a new lake elsewhere and divert the water into that. Stock it with fish and aquatic plants that could survive in it. Then drain the last of the Salt Lake, and cover it with a hundred meters or so of dirt and rock. Sequester it away, and in a few million years it will be yet another salt dome underground. Like those that dot the planet everywhere from Florida to New Mexico and Colorado. The fact is, the lake is dying. Just as Lake Manly died. The difference is that it is taking longer because there is still a lot of water flowing into it. But nothing will change the fact it is dying. And that is the ultimate fate of all endorheic lakes. Either they eventually create an outlet and waterflow allows them to sustain their salinity levels. Or they simply die and vanish. Or over time their salinity increases more and more until they can no longer sustain any meaningful life. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/9/10/798 And it is not unlike the issues of silting in reservoirs. Much like salinity in an endorheic lake, when reservoirs are built on naturally silt laden rivers (like the Nile and Colorado), they tend to capture huge amounts of sediment behind the dam. Eventually silting it in to the point that it is no longer effective. Just as the minerals and salts eventually choke a lake with no outlet that has a large water flow. And remember, all of Lake Bonneville was like the Salt Lake is now. What do you think the Bonneville Salt Flats are? An over 5 foot thick layer of salt, that is great for shooting movies on and testing high speed vehicles. Or go to Central California, where Edwards Air Force Base is. That used to be Lake Rogers, another massive Holocene epoch lake. Now long dead, but the flat bottom is perfect for use as a giant runway, which is where the earliest space shuttle landings were held at. Not all that unlike the Bonneville Salt Flats. The continent is literally full of such dead lakes. The Salt Lake has simply held on for longer than any of the others. And eventually, it will meet the same end. That is simply nature.
Fake news it was a resounding success with the point brilliantly captured in exquisitely simple and easy to understand terms. Fake news. The low levels are what is exposing the heavy metal mudflats, and it's this exposure that allows the heavy metals to be swept up and spread all over the people and wildlife in the area, to their great detriment. You're lost again. Adding water will stabilize water levels, and if more water will even raise water levels, and every bit of water coverage reduces the surface area of these dangerous mudflats. Are you blindfolded or something, because you are aimlessly wandering all over the place. The Great Salt Lake is a natural lake. Fake News. It will prevent more mudflat with heavy metal contamination from being exposed. Now you are muttering about salinity again. No one is trying to remediate the salinity of the Great Salt Lake. Fake News. Lack of water is what is exposing the heavy metal laden dirt flats.
And you continue to miss the fact it is not the water levels at all, it is the salinity. And nothing will stop the salinity from increasing. https://phys.org/news/2022-10-great-salt-lake-path-hyper-salinity.html https://www.livescience.com/56941-great-salt-lake.html Now, how are you going to stop that 2.2 million tons of salt from entering the lake and making it more salty every year? Since it was first "discovered" by Europeans, over 200 million tons of salt has been added to the lake. Only a few decades ago there was still a healthy fish population there that could survive the high salinity, they have almost all died. And you want to introduce even more water into it, which will only in the end increase the salinity even more and faster. I mean what I say, some people just do not comprehend science at all. And will do anything they can to avoid seeing the truth. You can point it out 20 different ways, but they think their "beliefs" is all that matters.
Five and half million years ago? In the Mediterranean Sea? I was just talking about Salt Lake's mudflats being exposed by falling water levels, with dust storms spreading heavy metals all over the nearby human and animal populations. Stabilizing water levels will prevent it from getting worse, raising water levels will reduce the exposure. That's all. I'm partial to Himalayan salt. I also understand that salt mines high in the Himalayas were once under ocean waves, driven skyward when the Indian Sub-Continent rammed the Eurasia, a process that continues pushing up the Himalayas, but that's not the topic here.
Again, uniqueness, or lack of it, makes no difference in the threat it poses to the human and wildlife populations in the area.
I don't understand your concern about uniqueness. The Salt Lake situation is serious in terms of impact on humans now and into the future.
Reminds me of post modernists, how they think. which goes something like 'there are no truths' 'everything is subjective'.and toss in several paragraphs of philosophical gobbledygook. I'm not a fan of that kind of thinking, though there is such a thing as subjectivity, one must use one's common sense when recognizing it. Postmodernism is controversial because of its influence on academic fields such as literary criticism, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Postmodern theorists have introduced new methodologies, such as deconstruction, discourse analysis, and cultural relativism, which challenge traditional ways of understanding texts, societies, and cultures. Some critics argue that these approaches are obscure, jargon-laden, and disconnected from reality, and that they have contributed to the fragmentation and politicization of the humanities and social sciences.--ChatGPT
It is mostly sea water which is useless for human consumption or farming. I don't know how much of the planet is covered by fresh water but it is likely trivial.
~ In San Diego California they operate a desalination plant that turns ocean water into purified drinking water. Of course the California Coastal Communist Commission has to justify their existence by trying to stop further expansion of these facilities. The dumbing-down of American society continues unabated ...
Converting sea water to fresh water is expensive and uses energy. It doesn't change the fact that most of the water on the planet is not fit for human consumption or farming.
~ That is the purpose of desalination. The more it's used the less it will cost. Energy is cheap. Common sense does not bode well in big government . Maybe it's better for government to just continue to be stupid — that's cheaper. We can always have another "war" ...
There are environmental issues with desalinization. For example, what do you think happens to the impurities left over from the process?
How do you justify that idea that "the more it is used the less it will cost"? The reason desalination plants are not built include the price and location of the resulting water, the cost of energy, and the question of what to do with the concentrated brine and other material that is extracted. This material is an environmental hazard.
It would be certainly be interesting to see a ChatGPT account interact with this forum I'm disappointed with @(original)late for failing to follow through on his assertions about his version of science in this thread. F'g man up and admit you're bending stuff and then move on to have an honest discussion about it, was all I was hoping for. I mean really, just look at the section of my OP in blue. Super easy to shred. I mean, well, ugh, just the first sentence implies that there is no truth in anything and that everything is dependent upon the perspective of every individual. As I've argued before, ask Nagasaki and Hiroshima whether or not their cities suffered science that was based on human perspective, or actual natural phenomena independent of human connotations with language and perception. Sheer bs. Not my science.
I don't believe that's a good argument. Scientists were nowhere near unified on the idea of creating a nuclear weapon. The impulse was more of a response to the fact that Germany was known to be working on such a weapon. That would have changed world history in an absolutely horrible way. The idea of using it to slaughter mass numbers of humans was PURELY a political decision based on military advice on how to terminate Japan - which was already hemmed in and economically throttled.
All true but the idea was that slaughtering the residents of a couple of cities would cause fewer deaths than an invasion of Japan. I think that is correct.
That kind of logic raises deep philosophical and religious issues. Also, there is the problem of whether there were only two options - a troop invasion (resulting in huge death on both sides) or the slaughter of the inhabitants of those two significant cities.
