From my understanding, water has a pretty complex life cycle that can boil down to (hehe) this : it’ll move around in the ground and in the air forever, sometimes passing through alive creatures in the process.
But water is water, if I buy 100L of bottled water and pour it to the ground, is it really wasted? It’s just moving through the cycle and it’ll come back just as clean eventually. The waste is financial for me or for the cleaning process in the water treatment plant. But really the water on the planet is always the same amount, right? It’s finite, but both abundant and “self cleaning”, no?
When I see the rivers being dry I can’t help but think the water is just elsewhere, which is just a matter of reaching it.
Bonus question : How does toxic waste affect that cycle? Is evaporating enough to be clean again?
In: 65
>it’ll come back just as clean eventually.
Your “eventually” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It might not precipitate out as rain for 1,000 years or more – and when it does, if it falls over the ocean then it’s not going to be available as drinking water anyway.
So yes, over a timespan of millennia there is always “enough” fresh water on earth. But that sort of timespan is irrelevant to most living things on earth, who will die if they don’t get water for a week, let alone for the next thousand years.
The issue isn’t water, it’s clean water. We have limited ability to clean water but the big problem is desalination (removing salt). When it rains that water doesn’t just go to us in our taps it goes to crops, sewage etc. Removing salt from water at scale is very difficult and expensive so we are basically relying on rain water and recycled sewage. When there’s not a lot of rain, supplies drop
> eventually
This is the key word here. If I waste a liter of water today and I only get that water back in a month, then I have one less liter of water for a month.
If instead of a liter of water you have billions and billions of liters, then you have a sever water shortage.
To add to what others already said, most water on Earth is in seas and oceans. However it is “salty” water and [getting most salt out of seawater is not really a cost-effective process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination), at least with current technology.
Answer:
The water you pour from the bottle takes 50,000 years to complete its journey.
In the meantime you are down 100ml of water. If 9 billion people did that, we’d all die of thirst before the water returned.
The issue isn’t the lack of fresh water, it’s the lack of CHEAP fresh water. We can make as much of it as we want and transport it anywhere. The problem is the cost. As the easy to obtain water starts to run out, we will build the infrastructure to obtain and transport fresh water. It will be an expensive drain on economies, but this is what we (humans) do when we start running out of a vital resource.
The plot thickens – they just reported that all rain worldwide is now contaminated with cancer-causing “forever” chemicals and is not safe to drink. https://phys.org/news/2022-08-rainwater-unsafe-due-chemicals.html
The issue isn’t that the water just disappears. It’s that we need it where humans can drink it and it’s not getting there.
The surface of the Earth is mostly non-drinkable oceans so any rain that falls there is useless to us for drinking/food/etc.
Then there’s the issue of humans settling where water was never terribly plentiful. Places like Phoenix or Los Angeles have tons of people but not very much fresh water so it has to be pumped in from elsewhere.
Add to that the fact that weather patterns are shifting and places that once got just enough rainfall aren’t getting nearly enough. [Lake Mead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Mead) is the man-made reservoir created by the Hoover Dam. It hasn’t been at full capacity since the 1980’s and has recently been dropping rapidly, currently sitting at ~25% of it’s total capacity.
Then you have places like Chicago and Cleveland that are on very large freshwater lakes. They aren’t likely to run out of fresh water any time soon but that doesn’t do much for the people living thousands of miles away.
“Toxic waste” is a blanket term that covers a large variety of pollutants. Most of them don’t evaporate with the water but some may. However, surface-level pollutants can filter down into the soil and contaminate underground water supplies. Once that happens, you can’t really get it out so the water has to be filtered, possibly at great cost, before humans can use it.
1% of Earth’s water is fresh land water. The other 99 is in glaciers or the ocean. So the water may take a long time to “come back around”. Mean while you can only use as much clean water as your water treatment plant outputs.
The water is moving. We have infrastructure(designed to store, transport and treat) in areas no longer receiving the same volume of water. That volume has move geographically. Meaning it falls somewhere else now. And that original area we started with does not have access to this water.
So water is not gone. It is inaccessible.
People talking about clean or dirty is irrelevant. There is NO water we cant clean. Cost would be the issue. Even then that cost will come down at some point. Or the need will be greater.
Dirty water only matters when you are incredibly poor. Even then, we’ve done alot of work at getting clean water to developing countries.
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