Global Water Crisis Leaves Half of World Food Production at Risk in Next 25 Years (theguardian.com) 111
More than half the world's food production will be at risk of failure within the next 25 years as a rapidly accelerating water crisis grips the planet, unless urgent action is taken to conserve water resources and end the destruction of the ecosystems on which our fresh water depends, experts have warned in a landmark review. From a report: Half the world's population already faces water scarcity, and that number is set to rise as the climate crisis worsens, according to a report from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water published on Thursday.
Demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 40% by the end of the decade, because the world's water systems are being put under "unprecedented stress," the report found. The commission found that governments and experts have vastly underestimated the amount of water needed for people to have decent lives. While 50 to 100 litres a day are required for each person's health and hygiene, in fact people require about 4,000 litres a day in order to have adequate nutrition and a dignified life. For most regions, that volume cannot be achieved locally, so people are dependent on trade -- in food, clothing and consumer goods -- to meet their needs.
Some countries benefit more than others from "green water," which is soil moisture that is necessary for food production, as opposed to "blue water" from rivers and lakes. The report found that water moves around the world in "atmospheric rivers" which transport moisture from one region to another.
Demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 40% by the end of the decade, because the world's water systems are being put under "unprecedented stress," the report found. The commission found that governments and experts have vastly underestimated the amount of water needed for people to have decent lives. While 50 to 100 litres a day are required for each person's health and hygiene, in fact people require about 4,000 litres a day in order to have adequate nutrition and a dignified life. For most regions, that volume cannot be achieved locally, so people are dependent on trade -- in food, clothing and consumer goods -- to meet their needs.
Some countries benefit more than others from "green water," which is soil moisture that is necessary for food production, as opposed to "blue water" from rivers and lakes. The report found that water moves around the world in "atmospheric rivers" which transport moisture from one region to another.
The Up Side (Score:5, Funny)
Don't panic everyone. The good news is the billionaires won't suffer. In fact, they working right now with citizen advocacy groups like Project 2025 to make sure that we never receive any of the bad news, right up until we're being swept away by the flash flood, burning alive in a wildfire, or living in the landfills so generously provided to us by the billionaires from the leavings of their unbounded appetites and excesses.
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Great Lakes watershed [Re:The Up Side] (Score:3)
Notably, grain and meat prices would be almost entirely unaffected, because the areas that produce most of those commodities, have a large water surplus, and that isn't changing. The Great Lakes watershed, in particular, still has far more trouble with flooding, than with water scarcity
Just to be clear, do you know what area of the US the Great Lakes watershed comprises? How much of America's food do you think grows in the Great Lakes watershed?
https://www.erbff.org/blog/gre... [erbff.org]
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Re: The Up Side (Score:2)
Re:The Up Side (Score:4, Insightful)
Your point is pointless.
No, they don't have a vault full of gold. They still have billions in wealth.
Money is an abstracted measure of power. With that wealth, they have ridiculous amounts of power compared to the average person.
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Spot on, let's not also forget the gigantic loophole that even if they just own assets they can use those assets to leverage loans (tax free in many cases) and use that money to do all those things.
You don't need liquid cash to do the rich person stuff.
Re: The Up Side (Score:2)
They actually do have billions in cash, between them anyway. There are many many articles about how they currently have unprecedented cash reserves. They can't find anything they want to invest in, their money is devaluing more slowly than they think it would if they invested the rest of it. They are willing to let us starve because we can't find a job as a result of their lack of investment into businesses which would employ people.
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Re: The Up Side (Score:2)
"What's the return on investment of giving money to a drug addict, honestly?"
2.5x that of giving it to a wealthy cash hoarder, or more. When the wealthy get money and spend it, it tends to be spent about two more times before it ends up in a rich person's tax shelter. When you give it to the poor, it is spent about five times before that happens.
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We really want them to pay their fair share in taxes, not the 15% or less they currently due with things like long term capital gains rates being so low.
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Whatever happens, no, the billionaires won't be suffering along with us. They have their nest eggs and backup plans. They know they're helping destroy the world, in fact some of them appear to be counting on it, and they're counting on the proles being as stupid as they have ever been by making sure governments are either hamstrung or wholly undermined.
Money is power. Billionaires have money, and thus they have power. An egalitarian democratic society should not even tolerate the existence of such accretion
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Re:The Up Side (Score:4, Insightful)
" And every year that these companies produce money..."
Nobody "produces money" or "makes money"; those are just metaphorical phrases. What rich people do is to part other people from their money, by a variety of means of which the most effective is deception.
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Except that these billionaires whose money is all tied up in stocks and companies still live in mansions, still have people to drive them everywhere, still have access to all the medical care they need without insurance companies telling them no, still can buy any product they want at any time, etc. Yes just like the rest of us!
Welp (Score:2)
That's one way of reducing the world's population. Let's see how well this works out.
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Excellent idea. For the good of the world, we should start in the US "flyover states".
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Think of all the room for Third World immigrants to settle...the ones used to walking 10 miles to get a jug of water. Everybody wins!
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Unfortunately for the rest of us, these "flyover states" are where the agriculture is done. Take them out, and we take all of us out.
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Since there is no alternative, despite ample and long-term warnings, we will find out.
The real solution (Score:2)
Farmers: What's that? I can't hear you over the sound of all my money? Oh well, I'll just get a journalist to bitch about it on The Guardian instead.
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Avocados and almonds aren't really the problem. They're not really that incredibly thirsty and they simply aren't produced in large enough volume. Crops like alfalfa are the problem. Those are grown largely as feedstock for cattle. Ultimately beef production is the problem.
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Dignified - not defined (Score:2)
On review of the OG document I failed to find any concrete definition of what a "dignified life" is, and instead found a lot of hand-waving and talk about general social justice and equitable distribution of resources. I do not disagree with the substance of the paper in its implications, or besmirch its ambitions, but not being able to substantiate, define, or qualify that increased water requirement leaves me feeling like the paper is going to wind up another glossy policy document that gets dismissed whe
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showers are more water efficient than baths.
Depends on the person. Some people take some pretty long showers. Actually, for both showers and baths there are options to make them considerably more water efficient. Obviously for showers there are the supposedly more efficient high pressure shower heads, but most of those don't seem to live up to the promise for most people. However, re-use of both shower and bath water is possible. There are recycling showers that have drains that feed right into a filtration/water purification system then go back thro
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Not only that but;
While 50 to 100 litres a day are required for each person’s health and hygiene, in fact people require about 4,000 litres a day in order to have adequate nutrition and a dignified life.
What?
Where I live the water is pulled from the river, filtered, used, filtered and returned to the river. How does that count in water use? How do you reach 4,000 litres a day every single day on average?
I'm not saying that we don't have a problem. What I'm saying is that you can't assume everyone's water use is the same. Some go out of the way regardless of the consequences. Grass in the dessert makes no sense. God will not provide unlimited population growth. Bailing out people who igno
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The vast majority of that water use is for agriculture. Plants are evaporators.
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So did you read the article? We need that evaporation, as per the article.
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While 50 to 100 litres a day are required for each person’s health and hygiene, in fact people require about 4,000 litres a day in order to have adequate nutrition and a dignified life.
What? Where I live the water is pulled from the river, filtered, used, filtered and returned to the river. How does that count in water use? How do you reach 4,000 litres a day every single day on average?
You only need that if you eat food.
If you don't eat food, no need for so much water.
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https://www.theplantway.com/wa... [theplantway.com]
Nagging will NOT work (Score:1)
Nagging has insufficient power to change the status quo. Stop assuming nagging alone will solve this and start work on Plan B. I'm just the messenger who realized nagging only goes so far on me also.
Nagging has a point of diminishing returns and bajillion nags will not force change above an asymptote.
This will certainly cause inflation (Score:1)
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Not necessarily. Land used for agriculture is declining anyway. https://www.fao.org/sustainabi... [fao.org]
Not at all the crass stupidity of elites... (Score:2)
"The commission found that governments and experts have vastly underestimated the amount of water needed for people to have decent lives".
And that is obviously due to "anthropogenic global warming".
Re:Not at all the crass stupidity of elites... (Score:4, Insightful)
"The commission found that governments and experts have vastly underestimated the amount of water needed for people to have decent lives".
And that is obviously due to "anthropogenic global warming".
Partly. Anthropogenic global warming is shifting rainfall patterns, so some places that used to grow food are drying out, while other places are getting too much rainfall.
However, a significant part of the problem is that population growth has meant that people are depleting aquifers faster than they get refilled, so it's not all due to climate change.
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Partial mitigation possible (Score:4, Interesting)
We have to work on the 20% waste of global food production. That's the low hanging fruit, as it were. Discarding misshapen but perfectly edible fruits and vegetables should be relegated to the dustbin of history. Preservable grains and pulses should be staples for everybody. Supply chains with massive waste should be deprecated.
It's not the whole answer but you have to start somewhere, right?
Ummm (Score:4, Insightful)
The water apparently just disappears into another universe, or perhaps there is a loophole in matter neither being created or destroyed.
The evaporated water cannot stay in the atmosphere - the water cycle is a short time, and besides, if it did, we're be into a real problem because H2O vapor is the strongest greenhouse gas. Yes - some places will encounter drought. But others will see increased rainfall. That the earth is going to dry up, and humanity turned into beef jerky is one of the biggest and least scientifically sound myths about AGW.
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What happens to water when it rains? Have a think about that. Think about how we deal with rain. Think about how the changing climate affects what happens to rain that has hit the ground. Think of how rain has changed. We are getting more extreme weather. Extreme weather means more downpours - exactly as you suggest - but what do we do with that?
a) A significant amount of rain occurs over the ocean - contaminating a possible drinking water supply with salt
b) A significant amount of rain occurs over cities -
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It is a real pity that higher temperatures do not cause more water evaporation which in turn causes more precipitation.
The water apparently just disappears into another universe, or perhaps there is a loophole in matter neither being created or destroyed.
You seem to be confused and think that this is all about global warming. The summary does not even mention global warming, although it is complicating factor. This is about a general water shortage. It's mostly caused by overuse, not global warming. Clearly million year old aquifers are not affected that much just by global warming, but plenty of million year old aquifers are being drained to the point where the only water left is too saline to use. Plenty of massive rivers are no longer reaching the ocean.
Just some natural regulation mechanisms... (Score:2)
... hard at work to correct the grossly oversized human population. Also not a surprise in any way for or shape, except to the clueless.
Re: Just some natural regulation mechanisms... (Score:2)
Sadly these mechanisms aren't politically correct... But this doesn't make them less real at all.
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Indeed. Physical reality is absolutely merciless and does not care one bit about any political stances. Which is really not hard to understand, even though most people fail at that.
There's plenty of water (Score:2)
Like oil, there's plenty of water for everyone. The real issue is there isn't enough cheap and easy to access usable water/oil. At some point, desal plants with fields of solar cells will line coasts making plenty of water for everyone. For now, most people's best option is to not be poor. Luckily for most slashdot users, they are well above being poor. if you can afford a computer and to browse sites like this, you have more money than 90% of the world.
Easy solution (Score:2)
Double down on cooling AI compute with water to solve the problem
don't worry about food production (Score:1)
Priorities (Score:3)
The article makes some sweeping generalities about the world as a whole as though it's one society's responsibility to micromanage another's way of doing things.
You have conflicting priorities to deal with. One group says that you need to stop storing fresh water because of environmental or historical concerns. Another says that you can't build desalinization plants for the similar reasons. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Clearly, environmental concerns weren't a deal-breaker when it came to building these massive solar field in the southern California desert. Why should water be any different?
Calling BS (Score:3)
4,000 liters of water per day, per person, for a dignified life?
That's nearly a thousand gallons a day, per person. Which seems terribly off - given that even if we count the water used to grow the food a person consumes in one day, and the cooling water for the power generation plant, and the amount of water used bathing, hydrating, laundering, etc... it's still hard to get to more than 100 gallons per person per day.
Perhaps by dignified life they mean a person should be able to swim in their own private olympic-size swimming pool aboard their own private yacht. Because I'd have a hard time using more than 50 gallons/day if I tried.
Re: Calling BS (Score:2)
That figure apparently includes the water needed to grow the food that you eat.
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Not coming out of your tap no, but to produce and grow and ship all the stuff you consume then I wouldn't be surprised. Just your morning cup of coffee, to pick a random example, consumed about 36 gallons of water to grow and harvest and process. So a lot of us are getting close to 50 before we even get in the shower.
Drop the meat (Score:1)
The US feeds about 3/4 of its food to animals. About 40 calories of feed for 1 calorie of meat. See where this logic goes?
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We're omnivores. We eat meat as part of the diet our bodies are evolved for. However, we typically eat far too much of it.
Until we can properly replace animals with lab meat, what we could do is drastically reduce our meat intake. Especially beef, which is probably at the top of the environmental impact list.
Topsoil (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
on-topic section just before 11 minutes:
"Degraded soil infiltrates half an inch of rainfall per hour... remediated soil holds up to 32 inches per hour..."
but won;t any one think of the (Score:2)
Only one way to solve these problems (Score:2)
Make it a social priority, streamline the energy investment and permitting processes, waive aesthetic concerns, and give the NIMBYS the finger. While youâ(TM)re at it, ban lawns and turf grass in arid regions.
Soylent Green (Score:2)
Soylent Green should address, even solve, most of the issues identified.
I wonder if billionaires will taste better than regular folk.
No surprise, why (Score:2)
My state has built one dam in 45 years, it's no surprise that reservoirs are near empty, some years. They were going to build another but NIMBY-ists stopped that. The demand for green electricity resulted in a plan for 5 dams. Now, 3 years later, the government has released zero feasibility reports: A process that should take 2 years.
It's no surprise, why the world is running out of water. African nations have never been big on building infrastructure: It's one of the reasons, they don't grow, altho
Re:Rising Sea (Score:5, Insightful)
Seawater has salt and other dissolved minerals in it which make it particularly toxic. To remove these dissolved substances requires enormous amounts of energy, and as a byproduct has significant quantities of said minerals, which you then have to dispose of.
As to using pipes, well, pipes designed for transporting hydrocarbons aren't likely without massive retrofitting (read: replacing) to carry other fluids.
If you're not losing sleep over this, that's because you're an idiot, or you plan on being dead soon.
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Salt disposal isn't exactly rocket science. Desalination creates a brine stream, which either goes straight back into the ocean (most common) (it has to be far enough offshore and sufficiently spread out so as to overconcentrate any location), or into evaporation ponds (less common) for mineral recovery.
Also, the current trends are increasingly favourable to desalination in the future. The situation that we face is that solar and wind are getting incredibly cheap (and it just keeps going), but are intermit
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So, to meet your conditions for not wiping out coastal ecosystems, just how much more money on top of the vast amounts of energy required are you prepared to put into it? Once again, as with carbon sequestering, we're left with the paradox; if you have enough energy to mitigate the crisis, then you have enough energy to simply stop driving it further.
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I'll repeat: desalination is primarily electricity cost, not capital cost. Brine discharge is a capital cost. Proper discharge of brine - aka, NOT "wiping out coastal ecosystems", and not even having any meaningful impact (a typical desalination discharge from a large plant (tens of millions of litres per day) will have a ~5% higher salinity around 100m from the discharge point, and the discharge points are commonly hundreds of meters offshore) - is tiny compared to the cost of the electricity.
And I'll re
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And I'll repeat: renewables are intermittent. It's not the total "energy to mitigate the crisis" that's of relevance; you must address the intermittency. Believe it or not, most people aren't happy with their power shutting off every time the sun stops shining or the wind stops blowing.
What is amazing to me is that some people in here still believe that when it gets dark, there is no way that solar cells work.
Our local solar arrays are enjoying batteries that keep their power going 24/7. And to reference wind - did you know there are quite a few places where the wind doesn't stop blowing? Yes there are.
Desalination is expensive [Re:Rising Sea] (Score:2)
Salt disposal isn't exactly rocket science.
No, but desalination is expensive. Reasonable for drinking water, but drinking water is not the main use here. When you're talking 4,000 liters per day (most of which goes for irrigation of crops), most of the world can't afford it.
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I believe that most of the world is likely going to die. It's truly fucked but the way we handle crisis like these as a species it seems inevitable.
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Completely desalinated water for agriculture purpose is fucking laughably absurd.
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I mean, it's part of the solution that prevents us from fucking dying- for sure.
But at some fraction of a kWh/m^3, you aren't replacing the water supply for agriculture with it... unless you're willing to buy $150 heads of cabbage.
At the worst case, agriculture pays ~$0.007/l (usually closer to ~$0.003/l)
Desalinated water goes for ~$0.17/l on the low end (which is unrealistic, given not everyone can afford those kids of subsidies)
That's an increase of ab
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But I suspect it's more economically reasonable to stop exporting non-tropical produce from California, which has water scarcity issues, to places east of the Mississippi, that have a large water surplus, and could easily grow them locally instead (at the cost of maybe not exporting quite as many bazillion tons of grain). This would revert some of the twentiet
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Their aquifer levels have been declining for decades.
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Seawater has salt and other dissolved minerals in it which make it particularly toxic. To remove these dissolved substances requires enormous amounts of energy, and as a by product has significant quantities of said minerals, which you then have to dispose of.
Not really, by using a Technology called Reverse Osmosis which doesn't require great amounts of electricity you can make large amounts of fresh water. The problem is the salt waste leftover ,called concentrated brine , which can kill fish and other aquatic life but this problem is easily solved by mixing the brine with seawater to dilute it to safer levels.
You can also Reverse Osmosis on waste water, which is what happens in Singapore and the people living there don't seem to have suffered any ill effec
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Maybe use all that goddamn energy used to mine crypto and use it to desalinate. Same with the goddamn LLM AI server farms. We have no shortage of water. The distillation plants on an aircraft carrier produces 500,000 gallons per day while consuming less than 2% of reactor power. We could also collect iceberg ice before it melts from climate change and use that. That would reduce sealevel rise by distribution farther inland.
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So let me get this straight⦠We will have a global water shortage but also the sea is rising.
Correct. The water shortage discussed is fresh water. The sea isn't.
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So let me get this straight⦠We will have a global water shortage but also the sea is rising.
Correct. The water shortage discussed is fresh water. The sea isn't.
Why doesn't rainfall increase with the increased evaporation of water because of higher temperatures?
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The water shortage discussed is fresh water. The sea isn't.
Why doesn't rainfall increase with the increased evaporation of water because of higher temperatures?
The short answer is that climate change will alter the patterns of rainfall. Some places it will increase, and some places it will decrease.
For a longer discussion, try https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6... [www.ipcc.ch] , and scroll to chapter 4, "Water".
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But so does, as you noted- evaporation.
The end result is more water in the air, and less in the ground.
For agriculture, it turns out, we get their water from the ground.
That doesn't mean extensive rainwater collection systems aren't a good part of the solution.
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Are you this _extremely_ stupid or just a no-honor troll?
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Desalination is a very cheap process- so nothing to worry about.
I hope you got your vote in for President Macho Camacho.
Don't hold your breath (Score:2)
The day Mar-a-Lago ends up under water I'm going to hire a halleluiah chorus to surround it by boats and belt out the tune until everyone is horse.
Elevation of Mar-a-Lago is 15 feet above sea level [whatismyelevation.com] (4.6 meters). Although this sounds pretty low, the IPCC estimate [www.ipcc.ch] of global mean sea level (GMSL) rise is GMSL will rise between 0.43 m and 0.84 m by 2100. Even at the higher rate of sea level rise, you can expect Mar-a-lago to be below mean sea level in 2435. So you have a while to wait.
(of course, if the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet is reached and we get catastrophic melting, this could be earlier.)
Re:Don't hold your breath (Score:4, Informative)
Elevation of Mar-a-Lago is 15 feet above sea level [whatismyelevation.com] (4.6 meters). Although this sounds pretty low, the IPCC estimate [www.ipcc.ch] of global mean sea level (GMSL) rise is GMSL will rise between 0.43 m and 0.84 m by 2100. Even at the higher rate of sea level rise, you can expect Mar-a-lago to be below mean sea level in 2435. So you have a while to wait.
That's not quite how it works though. While the bedrock in Florida is limestone, a lot of it is covered by a very high sandcap. A small amount of sea level rise can cause a lot of erosion on that sandcap. So it's not inconceivable that half a meter of sea level rise can lead to conditions that would erode the land that Mar-a-lago sits on. Not to mention leading to storm swells that periodically flood it, etc. It can be pretty hard to predict exactly how coastlines will change in response to sea-level rise. It's certainly not as simple as just looking at elevation and subtracting the amount of sea level rise.
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Worse for the fatheaded troll that lives there, Mar-a-Lago is on a barrier island, at least looking at the map. It is surrounded by water. One good direct hit from a hurricane, regardless of any attempted Sharpie redirection, is likely to swamp that island and return it into a sand bar.
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That's assuming slow steady water rise. But there are storms, hurricanes, tides, etc. There are regularly waves higher than 15 feet. Living near the beach in Florida is an assumed risk, and houses aren't safe just because someone rich owns them.
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Trump doesn't listen to anyone with a brain, which is why he surrounds himself with people who will just do whatever he tells them to do. Trump claims he has plans, but then, he only has "the concept of a plan". He was in office for four years, yet, he never came up with a single plan, except to get as much money into his bank account as possible and to stay out of prison.
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I think we've seen pretty clearly how Trump "plans". We can all recall how Trump claimed that he knew better than any of the generals and he had these great plans. His "plan" ended up being to demand those same generals come up with a plan. The thing is, I'm not 100% sure that Trump knew that he was lying. I think he might be so riddled with affluenza that he believes that's how thinking works: you demand that subordinates come up with ideas, and then those ideas are yours (unless they go wrong, in which ca
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I think his lies and his stupidity are part of the "weave" his likes to call his "speeches". They are all part of the same cloth.
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Remember, there's all this water flowing to Canada and Trump says there's a big spigot that we can turn to make it flow back south except that the liberals won't let us turn it.
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https://idahocapitalsun.com/20... [idahocapitalsun.com]
Choice quote: " In well known economics, water, travels uphill toward money."
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Apparently it's a sin that the water dumps into the Ocean here, which is an interesting take on things.
I wonder just how many millions of square miles of land here would be rendered non-arable.
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or
s/millions/thousands/;
Both work.