If Megan wants to start posting here, I'm sure she could drown, pun obviously intended, your Texas water conversation with her California water conversation. That would have the two biggest states with water issues covered.
Movie setup: We need to go to the Moon and blow it up, because it's evil and sucking up all the Earth's water!
There's actually a SF novel, Spin State, by Chris Moriarty, where a lack of water on Earth is being caused the export of water out to the cities being built in the L-5 points. So the wealthy space-dwellers are fiendishly encouraging a population crash on Earth in order to free up more water for them.
Seems unlikely now, given what we know about ice on asteroids and the moon and so on. We don't need any help from people in space, we can destroy our planet all by ourselves!
There's actually a SF novel, Spin State, by Chris Moriarty, where a lack of water on Earth is being caused the export of water out to the cities being built in the L-5 points. So the wealthy space-dwellers are fiendishly encouraging a population crash on Earth in order to free up more water for them.
Seems unlikely now, given what we know about ice on asteroids and the moon and so on. We don't need any help from people in space, we can destroy our planet all by ourselves!
And there was that Asimov short story where Spacers are using terrestrial water for reaction mass and hated for it, and then they go out to Saturn's rings to bring back enough water "forever and ever". Apparently a "Take that, environmentalists!" moral.
I like the Star Trek where they go back in time to save the whales.
You can't whale in the same river twice.
The Amazon and the Yangtze have dolphins. Those are whales, basically.
It's been weirdly rainy in LA this summer. This is probably another harbinger of our imminent doom, but I kind of like it, because it feels like I'm in Asia. Also, it hasn't been as hot this summer as in years past - it broke 100 in my part of town only a couple of times - so I've been feeling less panicked this summer than usual. I'm sure I've said this here before, but I often have the thought that I should move somewhere intolerably cold, like Fairbanks, or Winnipeg. Then, instead of being so anxious every summer, I would welcome, and even celebrate, the rapid warming of our dying planet.
Eh. I'm pretty burned out on CA water issues. I'd love to get out and start a second fairly different career.
I don't especially need to discuss water issues but to avoid changing the topic, I will say that California getting twice to four times the usual precip (depending on the watershed) this last year was great. The state was so green and gentle so late into the year.
In case anyone thinks it's current, the Rhein was dry last year; it's back to normal now. I don't think it ever got so dry that the island where my FIL grew up, which he now lives above on a hillside, got a land bridge, but some of the other nearby islands did. He's upstream of Cologne by 20 miles (I think; the only time we went there, we took the train, so I'm not really sure).
It's been quite a dry summer here, but we've gotten just enough rain to stay any drought, either in terms of lived experience (eg brown lawns) or public notice. I mean, there's a drought watch, but that just means that we could maybe see a threat of a drought. Biking through the countryside, I did note that some farms had much taller cornstalks than others, presumably an effect of subtle variation in water table depth or acquifer or whatever. As a rule, farmers here don't irrigate.
It was nice. My sump pump needed a rest.
Interesting that the land around the Paraña is equally green in both shots. Although I guess that's the part that dries out last.
Its been very wet and mostly cool here in central New England
Anchorage has also had a pretty cool, wet summer.
Yeah, it's been oddly pleasant in central CA too. We're usually over 40C/100F for most of August, but this year we had highs in the 90s, and cool enough nights to open the windows. Honestly, that's the most noticeable difference - nights that substantially cool things off, instead of dropping only into the low 90s before roaring back up the next day.
My wife scheduled her surgery for late July based on normal patterns - the 2 months off bike would be at our normal peak heat. But this year has been biking beautiful even in August and so far in September. It's been odd in our Texas friend calls to be the ones talking about our mild summer this year.
Everyone I talk to is obsessed with the idea that El Niño is supposed to bring us a wetter, cooler winter. We're all very excited.
I just read the Wikipedia article on what happened to the Ever Given after it was dislodged - had not seen any of it. Egypt's Suez Canal Authority demanded a huge compensation payment and seized it during negotiations. A lot of the crew were stuck in limbo while that proceeded. Eventually there was an undisclosed settlement and the ship was released after almost 3 months in seizure.
On the Jalopnik link, it seems the ones happening this year are less disruptive. In the January and March examples, "both ships were underway after only a few hours." In the Xin Hai Tong blockage it was reporting on in May, it only took 76 minutes.
The Yangtze dolphin is almost certainly extinct.
14: Yes. It is false color, and and the great bulk of the flow (or lack thereof) is from rainfall much further north, so. Shrug.
I really love those* satellite overlay photos showing change over time.
*The links in the OP, the ones I've seen in CA papers showing drought and recovery from drought, all of them.
21: yes. This dude https://www.zsl.org/about-zsl/our-people/prof-samuel-turvey was probably one of the world experts on it, and he thought it was extinct and mounted an expedition to look for survivors and found some, and then a few years later he mounted another expedition to check and didn't find any. (I know him vaguely. Very depressing moment for him.)
3/4. In contrast there's a long short by Asimov, "The Martian Way", where terrestrial populists are trying to stop the export of Earth water to the Mars colony, so the colonists respond by fetching vast quantities of ice from the outer system, thus becoming de facto independent. And yes, that's an obvious thing to do, but it wasn't so clear in 1952.
And here I was, just trying to set up a Star Trek joke.
My four year old's solution to global warming is to shift the earth's orbit to be farther away from the sun. His solution was to trade places with Mars as the fourth planet from the sun, though that might be overshooting the goal some.
Anyways, glad to know the younger generations are on top of problem solving.
Totes doable. Wrap the moon in tinfoil, photon pressure pushes it away from the sun, lunar gravity tugs Earth outward. I'll give you a discount on the tinfoil launches.
30: As part of leaving Twitter my daughter has been involved in various rage-fueled projects* that are sort of pointless but semi-satisfying for her.
One involved burner accounts about one of which she observed this:
I also can't even begin to tell you how deranged the "For You" tab looks when you only follow Elon, Linda Yaccarino, and X. It's just mega cringe Elon propaganda, all the time.
I cannot overstate how many there are of these.
*The first was just flagging tons of anti-Semitic/Nazi posts and users (which she says are incredibly easy to find) and seeing if Twitter does anything. Mostly not, but some of the most egregious do get either temporary or permanently suspended (she did note for a few very bad accounts with lots of followers she got not response so she suspects they are somehow white-listed).
31 that's an interesting and revealing experiment
Since we seem to be in a regime of positive feedback on global temperature we're better off starting geoengineering as soon as possible, right?
No. We have to wait for those who profited most from the warming to die of natural causes or they'll get bad feels and go fascist.
And what of those who found it emotionally satisfying to believe their lies? Won't everyone think of nothing but their feelings?
34: Positive feedback is a good thing, right? I'm pretty sure I remember that from HR training.
But warmth is also a good thing I'm told, so that's just too much of a good thing.
OT: I see the PVO are every bit as professional as they were in 1983. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66798508