[HN Gopher] How the Water System Works
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How the Water System Works
Author : SCEtoAux
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-05-01 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thenewatlantis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thenewatlantis.com)
| latchkey wrote:
| Funny, I've been to the hotspring in the photo.
| uoaei wrote:
| Crab Cooker, yeah?
| m3047 wrote:
| > There is so little fresh surface water on Earth that if you
| collected it all into a ball, it would barely reach across New
| York City.
|
| I'm not sure what this means. I think we could drop New York City
| in one of the Great Lakes with little problem... or drop Moscow
| in Lake Baikal if you prefer.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I think the interpretation is "take the volume of fresh surface
| water on Earth", then "make that volume into a perfect sphere",
| and the diameter of that sphere is smaller than NYC.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I don't think that is even true. This may refer to the total
| volume of potable water. between the great lakes and
| Antarctica, there is lots of non-salt water out there. Easy
| google results show 35 million cubic kilometers, which is a
| rather large sphere.
|
| https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/volume-of-
| sphere-...
|
| A 35 million cubic kilometer sphere would be roughly 400km
| across. NYC is big, but not that big.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The volume of the Great Lakes, per Wolfram Alpha [1], makes
| a sphere ~22 miles in diameter. The Great Lakes is ~20% of
| the world's surface fresh water.
|
| Your number of 35 million cubic kilometers includes the
| Antarctic ice sheet, but the definition of "fresh surface
| water" sounds to me like it intends to exclude the ice
| sheets from the list.
|
| [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28volume+of+great
| +lake...
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| Great article.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Water is why life never left Earth. We would already be living on
| Mars or the moon if there was just a lake or two of water. Water
| got what plants crave.
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/scientists-grow-plants-...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAqIJZeeXEc
| brainzap wrote:
| plants also like sun and gravity, and wind
| viccis wrote:
| >Although a dozen or so Johnny Appleseed festivals are still
| celebrated, he is less likely to be found in children's books
| today.
|
| Is this true? Grade school was full of Johnny Appleseed facts
| when I was a kid.
| lubitelpospat wrote:
| If irrigation consumes 75%, and industry consumes another 20 -
| how can household usage be at 10%? I feel like these numbers are
| a little misleading.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Without digging into the validity of the numbers, it doesn't
| seem so odd to me. Agricultural and industrial uses of anything
| are on a huge, well, industrial scale, and domestic uses are
| numerous but relatively small in comparison and people tend to
| overestimate them because these uses are what most of us more
| directly and frequently observe.
|
| It's sort of like CO2 production. Many people get encouraged to
| do their nearly symbolic reduction "contribution", while real
| CO2 production remains the same or rises since something like
| 80% of all emissions are generated by just a few dozen
| corporations globally.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Their point is the numbers don't add up to 100%. And it's 5%
| over so can't just be a rounding issue.
| mmooss wrote:
| > 80% of all emissions are generated by just a few dozen
| corporations globally.
|
| Which ones?
|
| > Many people get encouraged to do their nearly symbolic
| reduction "contribution"
|
| I think that's a fallacy of the climate change denier crowd,
| who go from 'it's not happening' to 'humans aren't causing
| it' to 'there's nothing we can do about it' or 'there is
| nothing you can do about it'. It's also a fallacy of the
| right that collective action by the left is powerless - it's
| an effective fallacy, because many on the left believe it!
|
| What amount of GHG emissions is from consumers?
| roxolotl wrote:
| This article reminds me about how much I hate bottled water, in
| places where potable water is cheap and plentiful. It's such an
| incredibly cynical thing that many American families, again those
| who have cheap potable water, go through cases of water a week.
| "A spring in every home" like the article says is a modern
| miracle. It's one of the things that if someone was brought here
| from even just the 1800s they'd be focused on. And yet we've
| managed to build a market primarily focused on recreating
| scarcity of fresh water.
|
| I don't know what that says about us. It doesn't make me feel
| good though.
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