Question regarding the Water Cycle

[Jean in Newcastle]

If the water cycle ends up essentially recycling every drop of water, why are there concerns that we will run out of water?

(Note:  I am not interested in the politics of water and my water bill alone is a good reason to restrict our water consumption.  I am just interested in the science of this.)

[shawthorne44]

 

People are nuts.    

Also, the 'running out of water' can happen in a local way.   For example, California dumping their sewage into the bay rather than treating it and reusing it, which I think is bat-poo crazy.  Watering the lawn, can make the water seem to disappear.  People on a well, which is in danger of running dry.  

But, in reality the only real, problem is when some of the water becomes so polluted that it can't be used.  

[AmandaVT]

I haven't heard concerns that the Earth will run out, but more that there will be the Haves and the Have Nots with water. So some areas will have more frequent droughts and others more frequent floods and some more frequent both. I probably shouldn't be replying though because my water cycle knowledge is about as sophisticated as the average 3rd grader.

[Pen]

Some water is actually being lost to things like gel absorption diapers, iirc.

 

but also aquifers and similar fresh water sources can get severely depleted and even if their water is ultimately “recycled” if it becomes rain over ocean, or flash floods that ultimately sweep out to rivers and sea, it doesn’t help with needed fresh water.    Salt water is part of water cycle, but not so helpful for drinking, irrigation, etc.  

[TechWife]

6 minutes ago, Pen said:

Some water is actually being lost to things like gel absorption diapers, iirc.

 

 

I don’t think that water is really lost, though - it evaporates as the diaper dries or it is absorbed by dirt if buried in a landfill. It just takes a long time. 

[Guest]

I don’t think it’s so much no more fresh water exists. It’s the distribution of who doesn’t have enough water and who has too much. If five hundred farmers are all trying to irrigate from a stream in a low-rainfall area, that’s where it becomes a problem. And if streams and rivers dry up or diminish, the wildlife relying on that water source also suffers. 

And of course, polluted water helps no one. I remember reading about some bodies of water in the southern US so polluted the frogs were born without eyes. And many other similar negative effects. 

[TechWife]

1 hour ago, AmandaVT said:

I haven't heard concerns that the Earth will run out, but more that there will be the Haves and the Have Nots with water. So some areas will have more frequent droughts and others more frequent floods and some more frequent both. I probably shouldn't be replying though because my water cycle knowledge is about as sophisticated as the average 3rd grader.

I think you are right. It will also be a question of who the haves are. Does industry get the water? A lot of water is used in manufacturing.  If they do, are they responsible for cleaning it? How will they clean it? Who will make sure they cleaned it? Where will they clean it? This is where the EPA comes in.

If farm A gets the water because they are upstream (or because they are a corporate farm and lobbied their state legislators), what happens to farm B that is downstream in times of drought?

Should industry have to give up water during times of drought so that farms have water to grow food? What about if the industry is, say, making chemotherapy drugs. Does that change the policy? What is more important, chemo drug  manufacturing or farming food we can all eat? Does it matter if the farm has a grain crop or a grape crop that primarily goes to wineries?

If industry gets the water, then John Q Public isn't getting the water. How is John Q. Public going to have water to drink and meet sanitation needs? What if he wants to fill his swimming pool or wash his car? Should his swimming pool take precedence over the water for the wheat farmers? What about the grape farmers that are supplying wineries? The coca-cola bottling plant?

There are a lot of nuances to these decisions. Some companies have, some do not. Some people have, some do not.

[73349]

It's just that water being present on Earth doesn't equal water being potable and accessible to each person.

Some parts of the US, for example, are rapidly taking out aquifer water that took many thousands of years to fill up. The water is still on Earth, but rain is not going to filter down into their ground fast enough to replenish it & continue to supply a large population. There may be perfectly lovely water a few hundred miles away, but it's expensive, energy-demanding, and inconvenient to truck in most or all that the community needs. The other solution is to use expensive, energy-demanding, high-tech techniques like they do on the space shuttle, where (as one astronaut put it) "Yesterday's coffee becomes tomorrow's coffee."

[Wheres Toto]

Agreeing with others that it's not about the quantity of water, it's about the quantity of non-polluted, drinkable water in the right places.

[shawthorne44]

2 hours ago, HeighHo said:

the evaporated fresh water may land in the salty ocean.  

at some point, we are going to need desalinization to increase. unless of course the weather changes and we get snowpacks or rain that will recharge the areas that are drying up. 

Intellectually I know this is true.  But my non-logical heart doesn't believe it.  I go out to the animals twice a day and I can't go without rain boots.  The other day I actually thought, "Well, at least the mud is frozen"    We have a new stream through our back yard.   And this is Texas.  Our baby goats are cranky about the mud.   They don't like wet hoofsies.  
 

[Pen]

3 hours ago, TechWife said:

I don’t think that water is really lost, though - it evaporates as the diaper dries or it is absorbed by dirt if buried in a landfill. It just takes a long time. 

 

Maybe the issue was pollution of the water used in manufacturing and in the plastics parts breaking down and leaching into groundwater after use. 

[Pen]

7 minutes ago, shawthorne44 said:

Intellectually I know this is true.  But my non-logical heart doesn't believe it.  I go out to the animals twice a day and I can't go without rain boots.  The other day I actually thought, "Well, at least the mud is frozen"    We have a new stream through our back yard.   And this is Texas.  Our baby goats are cranky about the mud.   They don't like wet hoofsies.  
 

 

I am in the wet PNW — lots of rain...  but still troubles with aquifers, snow pack, etc —. The sources that supply most water for drinking and irrigation.  

 

“Running out” as  Like the Ancient Mariner? 

“Water, water everywhere , 

and not a drop to drink “

???

[shawthorne44]

Although, who built the reservoir?    This is coming from a Texan where lakes are man-made.   I lived in the area a long time and I've seen suburbs pop-up outside established areas.  THEN worry about water rights.  
The lake I drive over as part of my commute is fuzzy.   Not from pollution.  But, from the top of the trees from before the land was turned into a lake.  

[TechWife]

43 minutes ago, Pen said:

 

Maybe the issue was pollution of the water used in manufacturing and in the plastics parts breaking down and leaching into groundwater after use. 

Quite possibly. I don't think we pay enough attention to the effect manufacturing has on the environment.

[Tanaqui]

Skipping to the end, the existence of water isn't the concern - indeed, as the ice caps melt we're going to have more liquid water than we know what to do with!

The concern is the usability of water. To be useful, water needs to be freshwater (not salt or brackish), without contamination, and in the places we need it to be.

Right now, lots of farms and lots of people are situated either in places that are very sunny and rely on water from resevoirs or rivers, or places that are near rivers. Or coastal areas - most of the world's population lives near a coast. With climate change, one thing we can count on is the weather getting out of whack. If the snowpack fails in Colorado, and 10x the population is trying to tap the river for their farms and pools, the people at the furthest end of the river are going to have nothing to drink and no way to water their crops. If there is an enormous hurricane and my neighbor's pig farm gets drenched, I'll have entirely too much water and it'll all be full of fecal matter. If the factory next door keeps on putting their waste into the water because that's how they've saved pennies every year since regulations were introduced, my children will all suffer from lead poisoning and I'll probably get cancer.

Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

Edited March 22, 2019 by Tanaqui

[regentrude]

The Earth as a system is not running out of water. But we can't control where the water is going to available. It'll rain somewhere, but not necessarily where we need it. The rains that drench Bangladesh won't help the drought in California.

That completely aside from question of water pollution.

 

[Carol in Cal.]

Water is essential every. single. day. to sustain life.

So if it's hard to come by, say, or you can't get pure water for a week, it has the same effect as if the world runs out. 

Here in the Bay Area of CA, there is almost no rain for 4-7 months per year.  We have aquifers and dams holding back water, and those help to see us through, but a major component of our household water is planned to be snowmelt from high peaks in the Eastern part of the state.  So, if the snow melts earlier than it used (as has happened a lot in the last 20 years or so), there is no place to 'hold' it, and it flows down through the state in rivers and eventually out to sea.  We depend tremendously on gradual snowmelt, and when that goes away or goes bad we don't really have much of a back up plan.  Plus a lot of our biggest aquifers have been depleted by excessive 'mining' and droughts, to the extent that some of them have collapsed.  That means that they cannot be naturally refilled, which would be more normal.  This is quite serious.

Now, there are things we can do.

We could, for instance, put up solar panelled 'roofs' over our big canals.  This would produce energy AND reduce evaporation during transport.

We could implement desalinization, although we have very sensitive and well preserved coastlines, and the disposal of very salty effluents from systems like that would not be as easy as flowing it back out to sea.  And also, those kinds of facilities are expensive.

Or we could encouraged distributed systems of pulling drinking water out of the air during our pretty reliably cooler overnight hours for each household.  While this would not be a huge amount of water, it would be helpful if it went into broad use.  And also we could start using gray water more effectively and more commonly.  

People complain that we need to build a lot more dams to manage our needs, and there is an argument to be made for that, but our track record in taking care of our infrastructure is so poor that I would oppose this.  I simply don't believe that a state whose newest dam had known, serious problems with structural integrity due to poorly build spillways (not repaired yet, despite it being two entire years since over 150,000 people had to be evacuated due to imminent flood risk) and whose levee 'system' is considered one of the top three most likely devastating, fatal failure risks in the COUNTRY (right up there with New Orleans and one other that I forget) (oh yes, and the New Orleans prediction happened exactly as feared, and we have done nothing to improve our levees since then), again, I do not believe that we have any business building more dams.  So there you go. Catch 22.

And people are pouring into the state every day to live here.

So, yeah, we have enough water, on average.  But we don't have reliably enough to drink every day for the foreseeable future.

Edited March 22, 2019 by Carol in Cal.

[Ausmumof3]

9 hours ago, Jean in Newcastle said:

If the water cycle ends up essentially recycling every drop of water, why are there concerns that we will run out of water?

(Note:  I am not interested in the politics of water and my water bill alone is a good reason to restrict our water consumption.  I am just interested in the science of this.)

Like any cycle it can be used up faster than the system can recycle it.  So you end up with only polluted water.   So yeah eventually it will be clean and returned to the system but in the meantime you have no clean potable water.

Kind of like the grocery shopping cycle in my house 😆 I buy every week and we eat over the week but sometimes the kids eat all the packet food and the fresh stuff gets spoiled and we run out 😆

[Ausmumof3]

Also have you all seen that video where they pour a cup or water over a planted box versus an unplanted one.  Our paddocks are like that now - totally bare from grazing.  Thankfully we also have small pockets of scrub.  When it rains on the bare overgrazed paddocks it runs off very quickly into dams and out down to the oceans whereas where there is tree/forest area a lot more is retained in the soil and pockets of leaves and bark and it slows down the run off process.

[Carrie12345]

My teens have grown up active in our environmental education district, so they know more than I do.  Our house is on a well, on a mountain. I (mostly) love that.  But we were one of 3 houses on about a 7 acre area when we moved in. Now we’re one of 6. The space the new houses take up no longer filters water. The space around the houses can’t absorb the excess (roof runoff) 100% efficiently.  Some puddles in the street, some works it’s way down the mountain.

Three houses paved their driveways last year. My (unsaved) driveway is extra muddy now, there are bigger puddles, and probably more runoff.  The less permeable we make the earth, the less efficiently it does it’s job. That’s certainly not the only problem, but it does make me concerned about my well, and we are not in a serious drought area. 

(Our community college has a mostly permeable pavement parking lot. It’s SO cool!)

[Arcadia]

Safe drinking water is what is insufficient.

From StateHouseNews (saw on Nova Education Facebook page) https://www.statehousenews.com/mobile/?mode=email&select=2019492&db=a&key=ba425c

”Currently, Massachusetts has an optional lead testing program but not all schools participate. The program does not require that any action be taken if high lead levels are found.

Of the 980 schools that have participated in the optional program and 43,000 taps tested since 2016, 59 percent of taps tested positive for lead, the report said citing state data.

The bill would establish the lead level standard for schools and child-care centers of one part per billion, so any water that tests to have lead levels higher than that would be deemed unsafe.

For comparison, the report stated that Leicester Memorial Elementary had a tap that tested at 22,400 parts per billion.

Dr. Sean Palfrey, medical director of the Boston Lead Poisoning Prevention Program at Boston Medical Center, spoke about the dangers of lead poisoning for children.

"What we know about lead is that even at the tiniest doses it is toxic," he said.

...

When the Brockton school district tested the water in its buildings, 400 of the samples came back positive for lead. Deputy Superintendent of Operations Michael Thomas drew on the district's emergency contingency budget to address the problem. Since then, the school district has replaced over 100 water fountains and over 300 faucets across 23 buildings, he said.””