Oh it’s over over 
Utah's Great Salt Lake is dry :sadcam:
- Thread starter OfTheCross
- Start date
Too many people believe in the "be fruitful and multiply" while they drain the planet of its vital resources
Sterilization needs to come into play
I've seen it pitched that desalination would be a solution. Once we get desalination, we're gonna fukk over the ocean pretty hard.Agent Smith was right, we are a virus.
Nothing in this article would be helped by desalination at all though. The water cycle they described is basically a closed system and you can't pipe water all the way from the ocean to Utah.
There are other major problems with desalination too, mainly the fact that it uses a ton of energy. And it doesn't solve all the rest of the issues associated with climate change. We're going to have to start reducing consumption - we aren't going to be able to tech out way out.
These sorts of ecosystem collapses are what I keep telling people about when they think climate change is gonna be some predictable or controllable thing. Let's say the lake's ecosystem collapses, local economy collapses, poison wind starts blowing....but do you know the impacts when those 10 million migratory birds don't stop there anymore? Neither do I. What if the waterfowl population is reduced by millions of birds, birds that impact ecosystems across North America, what other downstream effects does THAT have? And that's just one little aspect out of many.
Capitalism is a fukking failure and can't deal with tough decisions at all. They're going to keep chasing profit until they kill us all.
Pure idiocy. One of the places with the least water and yet they charge the cheapest water rates. People doing crazy shyt like watering lawns, golf courses, building data centers, water-intensive crops like alfalfa, in the very place that can least support it.
But raising rates isn't the solution either. Who suffers most when rates are raised? The poor. But past a certain income level you don't even care yet. So certain water-intensive industries will have to back off, and poor people will find it even harder to get by, while the middle-class and wealthy will barely even change their water consumption. And problems will continue.
Seriously, how could you ever get this shyt under control without simply declaring water an essential community resource and rationing its use? But that's "socialism", and we can't be having that now can we.
MischievousMonkey
Gor bu dëgër
Let's see if the market fixes this one.
It's looking bad out here for our species
As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, Utah Faces an ‘Environmental Nuclear Bomb’ (Published 2022)
Climate change and rapid population growth are shrinking the lake, creating a bowl of toxic dust that could poison the air around Salt Lake City.www.nytimes.com
SALT LAKE CITY — If the Great Salt Lake, which has already shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up, here’s what’s in store:
The lake’s flies and brine shrimp would die off — scientists warn it could start as soon as this summer — threatening the 10 million migratory birds that stop at the lake annually to feed on the tiny creatures. Ski conditions at the resorts above Salt Lake City, a vital source of revenue, would deteriorate. The lucrative extraction of magnesium and other minerals from the lake could stop.
Most alarming, the air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous. The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah’s population.
“We have this potential environmental nuclear bomb that’s going to go off if we don’t take some pretty dramatic action,” said Joel Ferry, a Republican state lawmaker and rancher who lives on the north side of the lake.
As climate change continues to cause record-breaking drought, there are no easy solutions. Saving the Great Salt Lake would require letting more snowmelt from the mountains flow to the lake, which means less water for residents and farmers. That would threaten the region’s breakneck population growth and high-value agriculture — something state leaders seem reluctant to do.
Utah’s dilemma raises a core question as the country heats up: How quickly are Americans willing to adapt to the effects of climate change, even as those effects become urgent, obvious, and potentially catastrophic?
The stakes are alarmingly high, according to Timothy D. Hawkes, a Republican lawmaker who wants more aggressive action. Otherwise, he said, the Great Salt Lake risks the same fate as California’s Owens Lake, which went dry decades ago, producing the worst levels of dust pollution in the United States and helping to turn the nearby community into a veritable ghost town.
“It’s not just fear-mongering,” he said of the lake vanishing. “It can actually happen.”
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A satellite view of the Great Salt Lake captured in September 1987.Credit...EROS Center, U.S.G.S.
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The Great Salt Lake in May 2021.Credit...EROS Center, U.S.G.S.
A modern oasis, under threat
Say you climbed into a car at the edge of the Pacific and started driving east, tracing a line across the middle of the United States. After crossing the Klamath and Cascade mountains in Northern California, green and lush, you would reach the Great Basin Desert of Nevada and western Utah. In one of the driest parts of America, the landscape is a brown so pale, it’s almost gray.
But keep going east, and just shy of Wyoming you would find a modern oasis: a narrow strip of green, stretching some 100 miles from north to south, home to an uninterrupted metropolis beneath snow-capped mountains, sheltered under maple and pear trees. At the edge of that oasis, between the city and the desert, is the Great Salt Lake.
Utahns call that metropolis the Wasatch Front, after the 12,000-foot Wasatch Range above it. Extending roughly from Provo in the south to Brigham City in the north, with Salt Lake City at its center, it’s one of the fastest-growing urban areas in America — home to 2.5 million people, drawn by the natural beauty and relatively modest cost of living.
That megacity is possible because of a minor hydrological miracle. Snow that falls in the mountains just east of Salt Lake City feeds three rivers — the Jordan, Weber, and Bear — which provide water for the cities and towns of the Wasatch Front, as well as the rich cropland nearby, before flowing into the Great Salt Lake.
Until recently, that hydrological system existed in a delicate balance. In summer, evaporation would cause the lake to drop about two feet; in spring, as the snowpack melted, the rivers would replenish it.
Running out of water, but growing fast
In theory, the fix is simple: Let more water from melting snowpack reach the lake, by sending less toward homes, businesses and farms.
But metropolitan Salt Lake City has barely enough water to support its current population. And it is expected to grow almost 50 percent by 2060.
Laura Briefer, director of Salt Lake City’s public utilities department, said the city can increase its water supply in three ways: Divert more water from rivers and streams, recycle more wastewater, or draw more groundwater from wells. Each of those strategies reduces the amount of water that reaches the lake. But without those steps, demand for water in Salt Lake City would exceed supply around 2040, Ms. Briefer said.
The city is trying to conserve water. Last December, it stopped issuing permits for businesses that require significant water, such as data centers or bottling plants.
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But city leaders have shied away from another potentially powerful tool: higher prices.
Of major U.S. cities, Salt Lake has among the lowest per-gallon water rates, according to a 2017 federal report. It also consumes more water for residential use than other desert cities — 96 gallons per person per day last year, compared with 78 in Tucson and 77 in Los Angeles.
Charge more for water and people use less, said Zachary Frankel, executive director of the Utah Rivers Council. “Pricing drives consumption,” he said.
Through a spokesman, Mayor Erin Mendenhall, elected in 2019 on a pledge to address climate change and air quality, declined an interview. In a statement, she said the city will consider pricing as a way “to send a stronger conservation signal.”
@Micky Mikey
@Scustin Bieburr
Scustin Bieburr
Baby baybee baybee UUUGH
Yellowstone probably going to erupt soon too. It is what it is. We get what we deserve for mistreating the only home we have
Iron lungs for the win
Ethnic Vagina Finder
The Great Paper Chaser
O so now people in Utah wanna believe in climate change
"But our melanin can protect us from climate change. We dont need the ecosystem or plants to livw." typical TLR dumbass
And those people will be the first ones in raiding parties when the shyt hits the fan, and resources are super scarce.
Reality
Make your own luck.
I think people will look back at 2022 as the year when it all started to recognizably fall apart climate change-wise. It feels like things are accelerating very quickly. We truly underestimate how delicately balanced the system is, and how one thing going awry can have a sudden domino effect.
I remember this article from years ago talking about the outerbanks. Folks just kinda shrugged and said they'd b3 able to dredge the ocean and add more sand. 
www.nationalgeographic.com
Reality was like
www.starnewsonline.com
Rising Seas: Will the Outer Banks Survive?
Storms, development, and rising seas may doom the iconic vacation spot.
www.nationalgeographic.com
Reality was like
On the Outer Banks, structures rise and fall as climate change looms
A new nearly $150 million, 2-mile-long bridge could represent the future of transportation on the Outer Banks as climate change looms.
www.starnewsonline.com