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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Thanks for all the responses everyone
The element? You’re right. The amount of H2O is pretty steady. Only a few reactions like electrolysis actually destroy or create water molecules.
But when people talk about wasting/conserving water, they specifically mean clean drinking water.
If we consume water faster than it falls from the sky (which we do), then we end up draining our lakes and reservoirs dry, until there legitimately isn’t enough useable water to sustain our habits.
Tech vs cost issue. There is plenty of h2o on earth. It’s just not in readily consumable or usable form. Once these problems are solve without affecting nature, water shortage will become a problem of the past.
Some of the fresh water we get comes from rain, but some also comes from melting glaciers. Those glaciers were formed during the ice age and once they’re gone, they’re gone until the next ice age.
It helps to be very accurate: we run out of *usable* (safe for drinking or irrigating, not salty) water in the right *place* (where people live and work) at the right *time* (all seasons for drinking, growing season, etc.). It’s actually quite a challenge to have *enough* water that satisfies all three requirements, because once you use water, you have to transport and transform other water from somewhere else, and that can cost an insane amount.
Water comes from two types of sources. Surface water and ground water.
Surface water comes from stuff likes lakes, streams and rain. It’s easily accessible water.
Ground water comes from the ground. If you dig down into the ground there is water that will leak out, this is how wells work.
The thing that is special is that ground water can be pumped out but can’t be pumped back in. Essentially if you take ground water out then it’s out, and if you pump out too much ground water then you run out of water until nature naturally replenishes it. So if you use a lot of ground water and then there is a drought or a forest fire or something similar then youre just ouf of water.
Surface water on the other hand is basically renewable. If you pump water out of a stream, shower, and then pump it back into the stream then it largely makes no difference to the amount of water.
So it largely just depends on where you live and where you get your water from.
Ofc there are other aspects to it like the energy required and water treatment necessary to clean the water but the water itself doesn’t disappear.
Its not water in general that we run the risk of running low on, its easily-accessible drinking water. There’s tons of water on the earth, but most of it is in a place that is not easily accessible or in a form that is not readily drinkable.
One reason that not all of the usable drinking water is being cycled back into the system is that we’re doing stupid stuff with it. For example in Texas they’re taking fresh drinking water out of the aquifers and then mixing it with a bunch of chemicals to make it undrinkable and injecting it into the ground to fracture the rocks to release natural gas deposits. We can’t get the majority of that water back and if we could it has been made toxic to humans. That means the water didn’t go back into the cycle to fall as rainfall and replenish the aquifer, removing it from the fresh water cycle that we rely on for drinking water.
We won’t run out of water. What we can run out of is cheap drinkable water and and cheap irrigation water. You can’t use salty water for irrigation, nor drink it, without a lot of processing that costs money. There is a certain amount of water available from natural cycles that we can use, but if we use more than that we have to spend money processing less suitable water. So just imagine the cost of water doubles. That impacts not only usage at home, but also the cost of nearly all food. So if we can fit our usage into the natural cycle, things are cheaper and easier.
That said, I feel like this ship has sailed. I don’t see mankind fitting within the natural cycle indefinitely. So we’re going to have to get better at water processing. Huge scale desalination is going to be super important over the next 50-100 years.
it’s Clean water we will run out of. Any manufacturing plant is dumping process water into a source of drinking water.
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