Under the Dead Sea, warnings of dire drought

[NickB79]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170322143139.htm

Nearly 1,000 feet below the bed of the Dead Sea, scientists have found evidence that during past warm periods, the Mideast has suffered drought on scales never recorded by humans -- a possible warning for current times. Thick layers of crystalline salt show that rainfall plummeted to as little as a fifth of modern levels some 120,000 years ago, and again about 10,000 years ago. Today, the region is drying again as climate warms, and scientists say it will get worse. The new findings may cause them to rethink how much worse, in this already thirsty and volatile part of the world.

"All the observations show this region is one of those most affected by modern climate change, and it's predicted to get dryer. What we showed is that even under natural conditions, it can become much drier than predicted by any of our models," said lead author Yael Kiro, a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The findings were just published in an early online edition of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Mark my words, the next great war will be fought over water.

[msongs]

1. or they can just desalinize water from the mediterranean sea nt

[NickB79]

2. If we invested tens of billions in solar panels across vast swaths of desert, yes

But we won't be doing that. Numerous nations in the region are already dangerously close to becoming failed states; Syria almost collapsed entirely in large part because of a serious drought, and threatened to take neighboring states down with it. The infrastructure demands of building hundreds of desalination plants and powering them with renewables is within our grasp technologically, but probably beyond our economic and political abilities at this point. At best, there will be a few major city/states like Dubai, UAE and Israel that will hold on via desal and brute force control of remaining water reserves, while the poor are left to die in the sand. Which will fuel mass unrest, climate refugees moving north, and more violence.

[NNadir]

3. Powering desalination plants with so called "renewables" is not technologically within...

...our grasp.

On this entire planet, we haven't demonstrated that we can produce even 10 of the 570 exajoules of energy humanity consumes each year.

Now we want to increase energy demand by desalinating water while assuming that what hasn't worked will work?

I note is after spending two trillion dollars on solar and wind alone in just ten years, combined they don't produce 5 exajoules per year.

They're useless.

The assumption that so called renewables will work, even though they haven't worked and aren't working is unrealistic and represents a form of denial that is a big part of why the climate is collapsing.

Desalination plants, in order to be economic, need to operate pretty much continuously. If they are powered on inefficient, unreliable, unpredictable, fragile, and expensive systems requiring redundancy to be continuous, they will fail.