I know we need to conserve water and such but why? Doesn’t it eventually flow back into the ground or evaporated and rained back down regardless of how it’s consumed, so it’s a cycle? Do we lose a bit per cycle?
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The water cycle works on a planetary scale, and sometimes on smaller local scales, but isn’t guaranteed to work for any given locale.
For instance, in the San Francisco Bay Area, we get water from melting snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Treated sewage, runoff, and unused water flow into the ocean, where it is carried away. Maybe it gets turned into rain in Hawaii or something, but we’ll never see it again. The ocean is too cold and the currents too fast.
In a place like Florida, the warm ocean is constantly “sweating” its water back into the air, making it humid, and every cold front sparks fresh rain.
Also, I’m not sure how much it matters, but there is the fact that California (for example) grows a lot of produce with local water, then ships that produce to other states. However that produce breaks down, the water released will probably never go into a sewer or drain in California.
So yeah, the water is conserved on a planetary scale, but unfortunately not always in the right place for whoever needs it.
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