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"I swear, arguing with you is like arguing with an ignorant 3 year old child who knows nothing. Sometimes I think you cannot be real. You must be a "bot" programmed to say stupidly-irritating things just to start arguments." Said GW.
So why bother?
We could just stick to the subject of Mars exploration and eventual settlement.
I see that Space X has just landed a reused first stage for the first time. That's another step on the way. Hooray for Mr Musk.
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GW and Tom,
This thread was much more interesting when it was still focused on the science of global warming / climate change, rather than mega-scale engineering projects that we've never attempted for lack of technological capability to do so.
Tom,
Flights of fancy into the wonderful world of tomorrow are fun to daydream about, but the problems before us may not wait for centuries of technological advancement. There is no practical way, at present, to do what you proposed. GW's response to your proposal was a truthful statement about our present engineering capabilities, however roughly worded.
GW,
Getting upset over the musings of the daydreamers amongst us is counter-productive. Whether you fully understand the thinking of other people or not, there are quite a few people on this planet who still think flying machines are "magical" and may have had a bit of pixie dust sprinkled on them. A little bit of imagination, backed with a healthy amount of "engineering pixie dust", may be required to solution major problems.
All,
At some point in the future, we may require the capability to literally move mountains. It's pretty clear that the technology doesn't presently exist. Rather than throwing our hands up in the air over what seem to be intractable problems, maybe it's worth the effort to figure out exactly how we could go about some of these proposed mega-scale engineering projects. That said, mega-scale engineering projects are a topic for a different thread.
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Well, we are capable of moving mountains at the moment. It would just be very expensive to have all those trucks and diggers at work long enough to do it, so why bother?
Use what is abundant and build to last
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Kdb512 is right, this thread was supposed to be about global warming. There's two issues: (1) whether or not humans have anything to do with it, and (2) what might we do or not do about it. The warming itself is real, especially in the last 50 years or so. It opposes the trends predicted by the best models we have: Milankovitch orbital cycles for ice ages, and a roughly 500-year-period possible variability to our sun, on the scale of the Little Ice Age.
As the thread title implies, there's suspicions about the quality of the temperature data used to justify calls for action. Some of that is based on stolen emails. I'm sure there were some not above-board things, just as there is in every endeavor. A lot more is misinterpreted devil's advocate conversations, which is an integral part of the peer review process, but easily misinterpreted out of context.
Because of all the inferences and proxies to the temperature records, and because of how hashy and noisy those data inherently are, I prefer to base my own judgement on something else: the behavior of ice, coupled with verified fundamental physics. The ice (especially ice on land, the real threat) has been mostly melting, when our two best models predict it should be forming. Physics says (1) it takes heat to melt ice, which has to be coming from somewhere, and (2) adding certain gases to the air raises the required surface and near-surface temperatures required to reach a re-radiative energy balance.
We have various records to show that atmospheric CO2 has been increasing over the last couple of centuries, with a really exponential increase in the last 50 years. That's observation, not prediction or correlation. Also, we have been accelerating our use of fossil fuels as our population has exponentially increased over those same couple of centuries (a simple observation of historical fact). Burning fossil fuel puts CO2 in the air, a matter of simple chemistry.
From there it is no great leap to wonder if the warming might in part be due to our human activities. Some may overstate this, but, regardless, the consequences of sea level rise are great enough to make it prudent to consider this as a real potential shoot-yourself-in-the-foot situation. It warrants investigation at the very least, not dismissal as too expensive to bother with, or as some sort of conspiracy theory plot.
That investigation has been going on for some decades now. While not unanimous, the overwhelming majority of scientists working in the field or closely-related stuff (the ones most qualified to judge, one would expect) all agree that human activities are a big part of the climate warming we are seeing. Yeah, some of them work for funding that influences conclusions, but not all.
They got there mostly with temperature data and computer climate modeling, neither of which I personally trust very far. I got there by the ice behavior route. But the point is, I reached the same conclusion they did, just by a different route. I am not alone in using the ice behavior route, that's how this anthropogenic warming thing actually got started, over a century ago.
When you get the same answer by two different routes, it's time to start trusting that answer more.
I disagree with with all the sky-is-falling stuff, not because it might not be true, but because I think it is too late already. The ice ages cycled between low-to-high 200's ppm CO2 (so the "system", whatever that really is, is sensitive to that chemistry. Since the industrial revolution, we seem to have pushed it over 300 by the late 1950's, and past 400 by last year.
Based on the geology, it takes millennia for this "system" to equilibriate, once disturbed. Many things over the eons seem to act as disturbances. The last time CO2 was near 500+ ppm, Earth was completely deglaciated in the Paleocene-Eogene thermal maximum. With mass extinctions, too.
So the threat is very real. Whether we can do anything to mitigate it, I don't know, but I am sort of doubtful. Most of the scientists are not doubtful. They recommend trying. I actually agree, because we might succeed, or we might buy some time to adapt.
For doubters, I recommend you do the little trade study matrix. It will tell you whether to act or not. Oversimplified as a do/do not, true/not true 4 cell matrix:
………………………… act……………not act
Anthro real………..lose$..........lose$, lose lives
Anthro not real….lose$...........sitting pretty
Your choices are the columns (as shown), not the rows. Mother nature chooses the rows, and does not tell you which she chooses, ahead of time. (After the fact is too late.) Your only choice is which column you choose: act or not to act. You strike out the entire column containing any cell whose consequences you cannot abide. My own choice was not to lose lives.
What the science is trying to tell everybody is that the “anthropogenic warming is real” row is a lot more probable than the “not real” row. That makes “losing $, losing (millions+) lives” more probable than “sitting pretty”.
What the recent history of moving to natural gas instead of coal, plus adding wind and solar, tells us is that the $ we lose by acting will be less than we feared.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-03-31 11:42:41)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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From Nasa sites:
NASA’s analyses incorporate surface temperature measurements from 6,300 weather stations, ship- and buoy-based observations of sea surface temperatures, and temperature measurements from Antarctic research stations. The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere. Most of the warming occurred in the past 35 years, with 16 of the 17 warmest years on record occurring since 2001.
Land Surface Temperature Anomaly [Day] (1 month)
https://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/view.php? … OD_LSTAD_M
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 … 115506.htm
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/
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GW and Tom,
This thread was much more interesting when it was still focused on the science of global warming / climate change, rather than mega-scale engineering projects that we've never attempted for lack of technological capability to do so.
Tom,
Flights of fancy into the wonderful world of tomorrow are fun to daydream about, but the problems before us may not wait for centuries of technological advancement. There is no practical way, at present, to do what you proposed. GW's response to your proposal was a truthful statement about our present engineering capabilities, however roughly worded.
GW,
Getting upset over the musings of the daydreamers amongst us is counter-productive. Whether you fully understand the thinking of other people or not, there are quite a few people on this planet who still think flying machines are "magical" and may have had a bit of pixie dust sprinkled on them. A little bit of imagination, backed with a healthy amount of "engineering pixie dust", may be required to solution major problems.
All,
At some point in the future, we may require the capability to literally move mountains. It's pretty clear that the technology doesn't presently exist. Rather than throwing our hands up in the air over what seem to be intractable problems, maybe it's worth the effort to figure out exactly how we could go about some of these proposed mega-scale engineering projects. That said, mega-scale engineering projects are a topic for a different thread.
Trying the cool the entire planet is a megascale project all on its own. Reducing out carbon footprint might not accomplish anything, the Earth could still warm up in spite of it, and if the ocean levels rise, the amount of effort spent in reducing our carbon footprint will be money that would not be available to us in dealing with the rising ocean level. So it seems to me that liberals are proposing that we cool the Earth as a means of storing water at the poles, s they are reaching for a second order effect rather than just storing the water itself. If we just let the ice melt and the ocean levels rise, then we simply move our population to higher ground, but the liberals are saying most of our population is too primitive and dumb to do that, they have lived in their mud huts on the shore for generations, and they can't afford to move their mud huts, so they'll just get washed away when the ocean rises and they will drown.
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coal power: air pollution with a typical coal plant generates 3.5 million tons of CO2 per year but it does not stop there as the other outputs as So2, Nox, mercury and Particulate matter for soot and ash.....
Burning coal is also a leading cause of smog, acid rain, and toxic air pollution. Some emissions can be significantly reduced with readily available pollution controls, but most U.S. coal plants have not installed these technologies.
So man is not just controlling one global warming pollutent Tom when we are looking at global warming. Here is some more damaging actions of burning just coal: cadmium, other toxic heavy metals, and trace amounts of uranium; hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds (VOC), which form ozone and arsenic, which will cause cancer in one out of 100 people who drink water containing 50 parts per billion.
Even larger list with more details to how it effects man....
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/En … ts_of_coal
http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/coal-fir … plants.pdf
impacts of just particulate matter
Health Effect Incidence
Premature Death 23,600
Heart Attacks 38,200
Asthma Attacks 554,000
Hospital Admissions 21,850
Emergency Room Visits 26,000
Lost Work days 3,186,000
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"So it seems to me that liberals are proposing that we cool the Earth as a means of storing water at the poles, s they are reaching for a second order effect rather than just storing the water itself."
"Liberal" or "conservative" has little to do with the science of acting or not acting. Stop injecting politics where it doesn't belong.
I do observe that more conservatives reject the notion of acting to mitigate CO2 emissions than liberals. This has been true for decades. It has to do with which party historically favored corporate profit more. This irrationally ignores the science, and the basic logic of the little trade matrix that I posted just above.
The outcome "sitting pretty" favors higher short-term corporate profit, all three of the other outcomes involve loss of profit (if not outright destruction of economies and even civilization). But you cannot vote for that outcome without risking "lost $, lost lives", which as a worst case is the destruction of the economies and civilization. The selling point for this public policy position was always, and still is, that anthropogenic global warming is unreal or unlikely. The science I outlined says it is very real and very likely. The logic of the little matrix says you choose columns, not rows.
How politics gets into this at all, has to do with selecting something you can extremize to differentiate yourself from the other guys. The GOP made anthropogenic climate change denial a part of their political belief system, and to differentiate themselves, the Democrats went overboard the other way.
Both parties' positions on this issue are fundamentally irrational (although the GOP position looks even more irrational to me than the other side), but they are the source of funding for most of the research on it.
And THAT is how politics corrupts science!
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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"So it seems to me that liberals are proposing that we cool the Earth as a means of storing water at the poles, s they are reaching for a second order effect rather than just storing the water itself."
"Liberal" or "conservative" has little to do with the science of acting or not acting. Stop injecting politics where it doesn't belong.
I do observe that more conservatives reject the notion of acting to mitigate CO2 emissions than liberals. This has been true for decades. It has to do with which party historically favored corporate profit more. This irrationally ignores the science, and the basic logic of the little trade matrix that I posted just above.
The outcome "sitting pretty" favors higher short-term corporate profit, all three of the other outcomes involve loss of profit (if not outright destruction of economies and even civilization). But you cannot vote for that outcome without risking "lost $, lost lives", which as a worst case is the destruction of the economies and civilization. The selling point for this public policy position was always, and still is, that anthropogenic global warming is unreal or unlikely. The science I outlined says it is very real and very likely. The logic of the little matrix says you choose columns, not rows.
In one case you say we can effect the entire globe with our carbon-dioxide emissions, in the other case such as building mountains in Antarctica, you say that is "God's work" well which is it? Either we can affect the globe or we cannot! We can certainly start shoveling dirt in Antarctica right now, just as we can cut our carbon emissions right now, the technology to get a start on both exists today! Yet you say what I advocated is sheer folly, but you think our cutting carbon emissions will have an effect. How do you know? We haven't tried either! You want us to cut carbon emissions in hopes of cooling the Earth in hopes of freezing water at the poles so the oceans don't rise, that is a rather indirect means of solving that problem, don't you think? if the problem is global flooding, what is the most obvious means of solving that problem?
How politics gets into this at all, has to do with selecting something you can extremize to differentiate yourself from the other guys. The GOP made anthropogenic climate change denial a part of their political belief system, and to differentiate themselves, the Democrats went overboard the other way.
Its quite simple economic argument, would you rather buy a new car or house or cut carbon emissions with your money? You can't eat reduced carbon emissions.
Both parties' positions on this issue are fundamentally irrational (although the GOP position looks even more irrational to me than the other side), but they are the source of funding for most of the research on it.
You want to spend money to benefit some future generation that you will never live to see, or would you rather spend it on improving your own life. I'd rather not spend my money on something I cannot see or touch!
And THAT is how politics corrupts science!
GW
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coal power: air pollution with a typical coal plant generates 3.5 million tons of CO2 per year but it does not stop there as the other outputs as So2, Nox, mercury and Particulate matter for soot and ash.....
Burning coal is also a leading cause of smog, acid rain, and toxic air pollution. Some emissions can be significantly reduced with readily available pollution controls, but most U.S. coal plants have not installed these technologies.
So man is not just controlling one global warming pollutent Tom when we are looking at global warming. Here is some more damaging actions of burning just coal: cadmium, other toxic heavy metals, and trace amounts of uranium; hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds (VOC), which form ozone and arsenic, which will cause cancer in one out of 100 people who drink water containing 50 parts per billion.
Even larger list with more details to how it effects man....
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/En … ts_of_coalhttp://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/coal-fir … plants.pdf
impacts of just particulate matter
Health Effect Incidence
Premature Death 23,600
Heart Attacks 38,200
Asthma Attacks 554,000
Hospital Admissions 21,850
Emergency Room Visits 26,000
Lost Work days 3,186,000
How many lives does poverty take? How many lost work days are their because people don't have jobs cause the economy isn't growing? What are the environmental effects of radical Islamic immigrants from the middle east?
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I find it interesting that the United States chose not to repeal Obama-care. The United States is the only industrialized country in the world without a healthcare program. Several presidents tried to create one, but corporate lobbyists fought to kill it. They don't want their profits restricted, and don't care if American citizens die. When George H. W. Bush was president (Bush Sr), the New York State chapter of the American Medical Association lobbied to adopt Canada's healthcare system. President Bush said he wanted an American system, not to copy anyone else's anything. He authorized a study, and that was the last anyone heard of it. Obama introduced a copy of Mitt Romney's plan. At the time Obama said this was in the hope of getting bipartisan support; it failed, Republicans fought it tooth-and-nail. The current plan has failed miserably, but no one is willing to go back to no plan at all. Very interesting. So this is how America gets a modern 20th century healthcare system. Yes, this is the 21st century, but America is still struggling to get a 20th century healthcare system.
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I don't like plans which force people to buy something.
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Tom "Science" does not take anyone that live and puts them in a state of poverty thats political driven Economics.....
Again "Science" does not drive the economy as that is Political Economics for the United States Economies growth rate...
Finally "science " does not drive the islamic belief system as that is purely radicalism....
Sure Tom build your mountains but remember that will increase the CO2 into the atmosphere while it becomes a huge wall of funding to make a big hole for water to be frozen with in. The trouble is you still did not fix, slow, or find the reasons for why the ice is melting in the first place.
What "science" did do was to identify connections to what can cause a warming of air and subsequent melting of the ice, to which the reduction of it will slow the progress of the melting. Oh by the way we are not just targetting Co2 with the coal plants as I indicated how much more damaging the emissions are without regulations and filtering to lower the levels of pollutants.
"Science" has Identified the cause of the Ozone holes as well to which we have done the same thing with regulation and the changing of the product use to slow the damaging effects of what losing the ozone will cause.
So we pay now a little or we die a bit sooner rather than later as that time period could even be with in your own families life time or less....
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I don't like plans which force people to buy something.
Most states require you to have insurance if you drive so how is that any different....
The problem is the accountability of the insurance payment for the use of it for how much you have paid in and the other is the price gouging from the provider that is also causing the problem with the final issue if the high cost of the perscription medication if you do not have that as part of the insurance.......
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America is a federation of states. Why does the federal government have to run a healthcare system? If Massachussets wants to have government run hospitals, they can. If Texas wants to have a fully private system, so what? The only thing the federal government should be concerning itself with is getting out of the way - reforming the FDA, preventing patent trolls from jacking up the price of drugs etc.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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Tom Kalbfus wrote:I don't like plans which force people to buy something.
Most states require you to have insurance if you drive so how is that any different....
The problem is the accountability of the insurance payment for the use of it for how much you have paid in and the other is the price gouging from the provider that is also causing the problem with the final issue if the high cost of the perscription medication if you do not have that as part of the insurance.......
Well if you don't have insurance for your car, and you are caught driving it, your car is impounded, if you go to the hospital and you don't have insurance, what is the state going to do to you? Shoot you! Throw you in debtor's prison? Enslave you until you can work off your hospital bill? The problem is that assumes you are the property of the State. I think the Republican Party was founded on the principle that people are not property, you don't need a license to be a person, unlike your needing a license to have and to drive a car, your right to exist is not the subject of a license that is revocable by the state. There is another way, instead of putting a gun to someone's head and trying to force him or her to buy health insurance, how about the government simply put up the money to buy a health insurance policy for everyone, put it in a discretionary account such that you can only buy health insurance with that, that is each responsible citizen decides for him or herself or their dependents what health insurance is bought with that portion of the public money if no decision is made, the government automatically purchases a base plan for that person, thus everyone is insured without coercion. I think individual mandates requiring someone to buy something is unconstitutional, I disagree with Judge Anthony Kennedy, his judgement was results oriented rather than based on a reasonable interpretation of the US Constitution, what he did was wrong, regardless of his desire for everyone to have health insurance, this decision sets up a bad precedent, makes people property of the state!
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America is a federation of states. Why does the federal government have to run a healthcare system? If Massachussets wants to have government run hospitals, they can. If Texas wants to have a fully private system, so what? The only thing the federal government should be concerning itself with is getting out of the way - reforming the FDA, preventing patent trolls from jacking up the price of drugs etc.
Yes, I agree! The Federal government has gotten itself involved in too many controversial decisions and it needs to be reined in! That is why we need a Constitutional Convention of States to pass new amendments limiting the power of the Federal Government.
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The nation was born out of 13 colonies which at that time formed the America federation of states but by time we got to the civil war and had finished the american that we knew had changed to becoming the United States of America.....So if you like being an independant country like France or Austria or Italy with no common defending military, no common language keep it up and you will get your wish... but if you are truely America a country of united states then we need to move towards one law and not al set of different laws as what might be fine in one state could be totally a criminal act in another and a life sentence in another.....
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Creating an all powerful central government was a side effect of the Civil War, that wasn't why that war was fought! The United States of America did quite well for itself between the America Revolution and the Civil War, it experienced the greatest territorial expansion in those years!
This is the United States during the Civil War, as you can see, its all there except for Alaska and Hawaii. After we got this powerful central government, because of the Civil War, our territorial expansion was greatly curtailed, we just added two states after the Civil War, other states we added were from territory we already acquired from before the Civil War. The centralized "federal" government greatly curtailed our territorial expansion, had it not been for the Civil War, Canada and Mexico might have been added to the United States, but with the powerful central government we acquired, other states were deterred from joining, we have creatures like the European Union instead, which has a weak central government, it has expanded quite rapidly, the moment it gets a powerful central government like the United States has, its borders will freeze! Does anyone disagree with me?
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As usual, Donald Trump is completely upside down on the facts. Van Jones: Trump may have signed Earth's death warrant
In 2015, President Barack Obama created the Clean Power Plan to slow climate disruption. It was the first action ever taken by the US government to cut carbon pollution from existing power plants.
First, Trump says he wants to dismantle the Clean Power Plan because it represents what he calls "job-killing regulation." False -- limited losses in some sectors are dwarfed by gains in others.
2016 the number of jobs in solar grew 25% from the year prior, according to figures from the nonprofit Solar Foundation, while jobs in the rest of the economy had less than 2% growth. Renewable energy jobs now create jobs 12 times faster than the rest of the economy.
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As usual, Donald Trump is completely upside down on the facts. Van Jones: Trump may have signed Earth's death warrant
In 2015, President Barack Obama created the Clean Power Plan to slow climate disruption. It was the first action ever taken by the US government to cut carbon pollution from existing power plants.
First, Trump says he wants to dismantle the Clean Power Plan because it represents what he calls "job-killing regulation." False -- limited losses in some sectors are dwarfed by gains in others.
2016 the number of jobs in solar grew 25% from the year prior, according to figures from the nonprofit Solar Foundation, while jobs in the rest of the economy had less than 2% growth. Renewable energy jobs now create jobs 12 times faster than the rest of the economy.
Well in that case, a subsidy by the Federal government is not needed, Trump can take the subsidy away and see how well Solar power does then, if it can't compete, then its not a success! We've given Solar Power a good 8 years of subsidy, its time to stop, and let the economy grow for once! We don't actually know what the man-made component of global warming is, there could also be a natural component as well, something we wouldn't stop by curtailing carbon emissions. The Earth has its natural cycles, and if we wanted to stop those, cutting carbon emissions is not going to do it!
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Fine! Remove the subsidies for wind and solar. But, while you're at it, remove the subsidies for oil, too. All were intended to help new industries get started. Oil has had its start-up subsidies for 150 years now.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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For Tom, EPA chief admits climate change is real — but ‘the real issue is how much we contribute to it’ and I think if you really read some of our posts we are all in agreement that the % of change impact is what we are trying to pin down by controlling what we do contribute.....
The study concluded that it is 95 percent likely that more than half of the global temperature increase over the last 75 years is due to human activity.
Thats a huge % and its not none as you have been assuming.... Like I tried to pint out earlier that the output from burning coal we are not just limiting just co2 but many other compounds that effect global climate change....
Oh and if you what to take away subsides you can as GW noted start dropping them slowly to give them all a chance to react and see what will cost you more for the car or truch that you drive in the long run.....
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This article showed up on Yahoo:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/graphene-sie … 00721.html
A cheap way to make fresh water out of sea water, if there is global warming and it produces droughts, this would be a simple solution.
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That is Reverse Osmosis with a better (maybe) membrane. You will still need a powerful pump to push the water through it. This technology is widely used to purify or recover water for domestic and industrial use.
Regarding climate change, the main issue before us is that of flooding consequent on ice melting and ocean warming, not drought.
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