If in fact glaciers are melting at faster and faster rates, i.e. faster than even the gloomiest forecasting scientists predicted, then maybe it is in fact likely that our oceans will at some point in the next couple of dozen to hundred or so years flood the low lying areas. We'll all be, at our coastal edges, Holland or New Orleans.
If this happens, however, and ocean rise will be due to glacial water that once was ice, that water will be fresh water, not salt water, pushing up that rise.
Based on other predictions, this may be happening as fresh water becomes in less and less supply, due to rapidly growing urbanization and suburbanization, which is swallowing up ecosystems and watersheds, while putting increasing human demand on fresh water supplies.
Which may mean that technologies which desalinate fresh water may also give birth to technologies which can pull the fresh water from glacial melt out of the oceans.
After all, fresh water in oceans is going to affect the balance of life there. The salt water ocean life isn't going to need the fresh water, but people will. And people won't need the extra water inundating our coastal areas. So maybe this is an opportunity in disguise. Imagine the industries that could grow up around pulling that fresh water out of the rising oceans, restore the salt-fresh water balance in the oceans,
However, if this scenario is at all feasible, what will be the power behind the mechanisms that can pull excess fresh water from oceans to restore salt-fresh water balance and make glacial melt from oceans available for human use?
Will it be fossil fuels? As this scenario unfolds, fossil fuels will become less and less viable due to increasing global warming and concerns about global warming, and due to less and less availability of fossil fuels due to Peak Oil.
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About Me
- David Glober
- Training: Certified Leadership and Talent Management Coach; Certified Career Coach; Life Blueprint Facilitator; Permaculture Designer; Gardening and Composting Educator. ~ Affilitations (all in San Francisco, CA): Potrero Boosters; Bluepeter Building Restoration Working Group; Urban Energy Working Group; Permaculture Guild; Garden for the Environment. ~ Interests: Land Use, Water Resources, and Soil Development, in Urban, Suburban, Rural, Broadacre, Forest and Open Areas; Orientation of People to Sense of Place, Culture, the Natural World, and Each Other; Individual Development in the Context of Community Building, Group Dynamics, and Cultural Anthropology; Garden to Kitchen Connection in Cooking and Eating; Art and Architecture; Film and Music; Alternative Fuels, Clean Energy, Environmental Technology; Botany and Biodiversity; Ecopsychology.