Maybe I've not communicated my position well, I am genuinely not trying to be insulting or combative.
No worries from me. My laptop is acting up (not sure if I picked up a virus or if my dog's drool on it finally messed it up. So it has been kind of a pain in the butt to post the last couple days.
My cursor is jumping all over the place and shrinking/expanding the screen I am on. Very annoying.
I think more people need to be thinking about solutions, I think that's awesome that you are, and it's been a fun conversation. What I am attempting to put across is that watering all of the vulnerable forests of the west is not physically possible, it is too large an area, completely independent of the viability or non-viability of desalinization. If you are talking about something else then I guess I'm confused.
I agree, it is something that we need to get a lot more proactive about. I started off talking about bringing in water from the ocean as a way to not use the precious fresh water sources in these dry regions, but then took it a step further to wanting to consider the ability to bring water in to most of our nation.
As for 'watering the forests', it was not something that I put much thought in and was just answering a rhetorical nay saying question.
But that being said, I don't know why we can have water access every couple dozen feet over every suburban zone and not design something for people to tap into in our vulnerable forests. Hire a few thousand people to walk and identify potential dry areas and tap that sea water to use in these areas using hoses seems very feasible.
It might be expensive to set up and maintain, but so are these mega fires, and not nearly as dangerous. And it might take a decade of hard work, but the only other option is to just let it burn, and I think that is far worse of an option.
I think we as a species need to start acting like stewards of the land/nature and do more to help it thrive after centuries of abuse.
I would add that did see you mention plastic at one point too. I would just add to that, there is a difference between a plastic toy from a fast food joint that is going to last forever and piping to get water to vulnerable areas that desperately need it.
I totally agree with you that to rake all of the forests would be detrimental to the biodiversity of the forest and bad for the soil food web.
But, that's not why people felt that his comment was tone-deaf, most people don't understand the role of composting matter and humus in the forest. The reason people felt that it was a silly comment is because the forests of the west are way too large for raking to be employed on a large enough scale to be an effective solution to fire danger in the west. And likewise, the forests of the west are too large to water them with drip irrigation. I felt like you were not able to hear what I was saying in that regard, it's not about technology or desalinization, it's about scale.
You really seem to be fixated on my bullshit 'drip irrigation' statement.
I am tip toeing around what I think, because it is extremely harsh in some ways, and I really am not wanting to put that out. I know how scary fire is and how utterly terrified I would be if I lived there, and can't imagine what you all are going through. So with that warning label, please don't take offense to what I am about to say.
I think that living in these fire zones is the same as people who live in flood planes, hurricane zones, volcanoes, etc. and it not something that we should necessarily allow.
Again as for area though, if we can water monoculture lawns across suburbia, we could water forests that are otherwise going to burn we just need the will. And it really seems that right now we do not.
You may as well propose improving the beach by washing each individual grain of sand, sure it could be calculated and you could create a computer mockup that could produce a theoretical result, but...yeah...it's not gonna happen in the real world.
No, because what you are saying here is stupid. What would be the point of washing sand? While providing water to an area when we have the ability to provide as much water as we could ever use, a substance that all known life on our planet needs to survive, is something that we would need to do eventually.
We are still a young species and have relied on living next to fresh water until very very recently. We now need to figure out how to do things smarter.
I found this, I don't trust MBS at all, but it had some interesting information about it.
I think that the main complaint about desalination is the dumping back the brine in the ocean, while I am saying we dump it inland, and the 'sultan sea' thing that was mentioned earlier in this thread would seem like a perfect place to set this up.
And I was pleasantly surprised that desalination already has companies investing billions in doing it, so I am pretty confident that it is not as stupid of an idea (getting water to every home in water scarce areas in our nation using sea water) as people have acted like it is in this thread.
You are thinking of solutions, that's more than most people can be bothered with. I think for the most part we're on the same page, cheers.
If I have misunderstood what you were trying to get across, then I apologize.
Again no worries.
Don’t feel bad, it seems a few here misunderstood or are not seemingly getting it including me lol.
We both live in a water abundant area. It is easy for us to not get.
Edit:
Thought that this was interesting. And again thinking that it makes sense to set something like this up by that Salton sea and using it to dump the brine into instead of sending it back out into the ocean.
Also I would like some way for the ocean intake to be accessible from the surface so boats can dump plastic from the ocean pollution into that gets collected inland.
These could be propaganda videos, idk. But the concept is what I am talking about.
(teasing). We need to be more efficient with the water we have and not build in places that don't have enough.
