Water Water Everywhere, Just Not In the Right Place

 

 

Everywhere on social media people are talking about how their area is intolerably hot, or the fauna around them or their family is burning, or the earth is so dry very little will grow.

Here in England we haven’t had it nearly as bad as other countries (yet), but already the hosepipe bans have begun.

However, we could have been even luckier if the privatised water companies hadn’t allowed such vast quantities of water to leak out of the outdated system of pipes. Added to our woes are the apparent inability to clean sewage from wastewater. It is simply dumped into rivers and the sea, while the owners are paid high salaries and bonuses for failing to do what they should be doing.

Life’s essentials should be in the ownership of the people. Profit should not be made on providing them.

But that is only one point I wanted to make about water.

With the world warmer than it used to be, and spells of extreme heatwaves (with the prospect of worse to come if we don’t all act fast), water is becoming both a problem and a partial solution.

Where life wants to be, it must have the right amount of water. Too little and it withers and dies; too much and it drowns. This is the same for humans, animals and plants, including crops.

You may ask yourself why we have both floods and droughts. Well, heat rises, taking water with it in the form of vapour. What water hasn’t been able to sink into the earth evaporates upwards, to the sky, forming clouds. The hotter the air, the more clouds (water vapour) will be able to stay up high, until it becomes too heavy and gravity takes over, the clouds burst and it rains.

The bigger the clouds, the more rain to fall down. It can overfill rivers and turn soil into a muddy slop that also reacts to gravity when a slope gives it a path downwards. And so we have mudslides. Drains block with mud and leaves, and any other debris swept along, and of course the rainwater itself. Roads flood. Water gets into buildings. People’s food and belongings are ruined, and so are homes. The shops are unable to trade. Schools may become unusable for a while, hospitals too. So far in England these dreadful events render people homeless until their homes can be dried out and made safe and furnished again, which is dreadful, but mostly temporary. But fields end up under water, so it’s no good, usually, for crops until the next season, and livestock have to be rescued or die.

As the heat has allowed clouds to stay together for longer, they drift on, leaving areas without rain.

Most things left to nature sort themselves out. But not when an excess of greedy humans come into the mix.

But those same humans can use water to mitigate the effects of the planet’s heating that they have caused, if they plan and act sensibly.

The water is still there, just in the wrong place or form.

The ice caps are melting, and the resultant water adds to the amount of seawater. But that’s salty, and there is a big risk that the sea will encroach onto the land where people live. We don’t want fuller seas, we want fresh water instead of droughts on the land.

Neither do we want floods covering our fields or towns.

We need clean, salt-free water to drink, wash and keep animals and plants alive.

We need water companies that can do the job and take sewage away, treat it and send it back to reservoirs or rivers, where it’s needed.

We need desalination plants to take the salt out of seawater, then pipes and canals to get it to where it’s needed. That would include across open countryside, for domesticated and wild animals (not forgetting the very important bees), and to irrigate crops and other plants, which we need a lot more of to absorb the CO2 in the atmosphere making everywhere so hot in the first place!

In the Middle East they use desalination plants. That’s how they are able to build and expand where they can live. They already exists; we know how to make them. We could probably improve them as we go along.

Go back to thinking about the wildfires. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a grid of fresh water with hydrants? Instead of having to use mainly planes and helicopters to hoist water up into the air and chuck it down onto the flames, imagine being able to attach fire hoses to hydrants out in the open country. It may be impossible to set them up everywhere, but it would help battle the flames. And what’s more, they could be used to prevent the soil and plant matter becoming so dry in the first place. Imagine people watering the Cairngorms as if they were gardens!

Where are the people coming from for all this work, I hear a voice shout out in the wilderness.

Well, if AI is going to do all our jobs (which I doubt), there’s one source. Another could be using prisoners as labourers. We could even use (dare I say the word?) immigrants, or at least travelling workers. Students are often happy to do a bit of grunt work for a fair wage. Maybe healthy young people could do some as part of a short spell of national service.

And who would pay for all this, asks the lady in front.

Once the desalination plants are installed, and the bones of the water grid (including for wastewater to be cleaned) has been set up, just think how much easier it would be to grow crops, and flower meadows for the bees, hedgerows between our crop fields for all sorts of wildlife, and shrubs and trees. Let your mind’s eye roam to a land that is green and full of life, and you’ll imagine the type of world that would stop messing with the climate in the first place.

Plus, water evaporates, and evaporation causes heat loss. We could even spread water about on dry roads and concrete and just let it do its thing.