I heard drinkable water will be scarce in the future. How is this possible?

Question

We have the Polar Caps. Earth is 75 percent covered with water. Although most of that is salt water, technology exists to convert salt water to drinkable fresh water. Is the process that difficult or expensive???

Answer 1

Because we are daily poisoning the water. One factory is allowed to dump hundreds of gallons into the water daily.
We can not filter everything-we can try.

Salt water is also affected--why do you think fish are bring affected (a whole different post-look on web)

We have more droughts now -much due to the cutting of our trees(another whole post could be done) this is simple science on how trees affect our water.

Already during extreme droughts in areas we can not meet the demand without hurting others.

You could full a book with whys. In answer to your question-it is possible.

Answer 2

Oh definitely, salt water is highly corrosive and therefore is murder on the pipes plus the treatment plants are ungodly expensive to use for large masses of people. That's why there pretty much only used in the dessert. As for the polar ice caps, they're melting at a increasingly fast pace right into the oceans, making them just as salty and undrinkable as the rest of the water. On top of that, technology has cured a lot of population controlling diseases and made almost every area in the globe habitable. Basically more people equals less water for everyone because there is only a set quantity of water on Earth (water isn't produced from scratch it just circulates for millions of years). And finally, humans are dumping pollutants into the oceans at record breaking speeds. So added all together its extremely plausible to believe that water will become increasingly scarce over the years.

Answer 3

Water is an unrenewable resourse. The amount
of water at the time of creation is all there is.
If our water supplies become poluted with things like mercury and other heavy metals
it becomes harder and harder to purify it, More
water is carried in the air over the USA every day than there is in all the rivers and streams and lakes in the country, Water also is in
underground lakes and rivers but our poluter water can sink into the earth and get into these
sources, When a person uses a gallon od gas
to clean his tools or paint brushes then dumps
it on the fround he can pollute thousands of underground water that one day may be needed
to keep us alive.Some mid east countries already desalinate sea water to drink and irrigate.

Answer 4

I also don't think anyone else has mentioned, drinking distilled water can actually be harmful. Regular fresh water still has some minerals in it, but distilled water is 100% pure H2O. That may sound like a good thing, but in reality, it means that when you drink it and it passes through your body, it takes more minerals with it than regular drinking water, because the balance between the amount of minerals in the water and the amount of minerals inside your cells is different. The only thing distilled water should be used for is running things like irons or steam cleaners, or other uses where you don't want minerals to build up.

Answer 5

Currently, it is greatly expensive to process salt water into drinking water. For example, remeber how much VCR's were in the earl 80's? I do. We got one from my mother-in-law. It was JVC and cost around 400.00 US. Now, you can we get them for 50.00 US and up. The funny thing is that while property and oil prices has skyrocketed, the price of machines is much lower. That is certainly a topic for the future but I am in the here and now. Now, as to Earth using its natural water sources. It is downright dangerous to get our water supply from the ice caps. If we attempt to make use of this melted water, the ony thing good is that the water could be filtered into water for farms and livestock. At the same time, I offer a caveat: I do not think we could make use of enough water in conjuction with global melting. It has been estimated that our global shorelines would be melted and add a hard-to-think-of two feet to the shores around the globe. I believe we would see lost of lives and homes before we even got to to make drinkable water and water ditribution companies large enough to keep such a event from happening. I think we ned tao take every measure of mankind to halter the melting (any way we can without harm to the land) and make a plan for now plus contigency plans n the future.

Answer 6

Get a bite of plastic over a bucket - shelter it with elastic string or despite. Weight it interior the middle - with a stone or despite. So the plastic is now like a the different way up pyramid on your bucket. below the pyramid positioned a heavy field - like a cup. Now positioned seawater on your bucket; no longer masking your heavy cup. The sunlight shines contained in direction of the sparkling plastic - the sea water evaporates - the evaporated water condenses on your plastic and runs all the way down to the factor on the backside of the the different way up pyramid and drips in on your heavy cup. you presently have desalinated water on your cup and this is drinkable. Is that a superb answer or what!!!

Answer 7

90% of all fresh water on the planet is polluted right now. It will only get much much worse. And it is expensive to convert salt water to drinkable fesh water.

Answer 8

As far as water is concerned, we humans are HORRIBLE with saving-using-respecting our water (a crucial resource!) that comes from rain. This must change! Only 1% of the water on this planet is currently usable-drinkable and that will only become worse-less as global warming, pollution and population growth increases. Many countries that are having population explosions right now are planning to build dams to get water for its people, but the people down the river from a proposed dam promise to bomb the dam and kill those building the dams because they fear loss of water from the dam being upriver from them. The anticipation of many civil wars and terrorism over water availability is of real concern in many areas around the world. Coverting salt water to fresh is still quite expensive. We have to STOP our pollution of our fresh and salt water too! Many or our underground aquifers (including the Ogallala aquifer of the central plains) are drying up too, mostly due to the water going to agricultural water to grow grain fed to cattle for beef. If we were to become vegetarian or even stop our meat eating by a fraction, we would use much less water. The amount of water used to produce one pound of beef-meat is HORRIBLE and should be included in the cost of beef per pound! The amount of water needed per pound of plant products, like fruits, vegetables, is a FRACTION of the water needed by cattle! I think one pound of beef uses 5000 gal of water an one pound of grain or potatos is about 12 gal. Think about it!

Anywhere in the world that there is good rain, people should be saving and collecting their water. We should be saving and using, recycling the water from showers, dishes too.We do that where we live. It takes time to do it, take buckets out to water our trees, but we hope we can help our trees withstand periods of drought that are being felt all over the world even while some areas are experiencing floods. Houses should have better gutter systems too and the runoff water should be collected and stored. There are many changes that we as a species must make to live SUSTAINABLY. We have been doing a very very poor job so far. Is it too late?

Answer 9

Desalting sea water is simple but expensive. And it used a lot of power, which means we would create pollution to generate that power. By the way, drinking water is a tiny amount, bottled water could supply that easily. It is water for crop irrigation, washing, flushing toilets and industrial use that we will run short of as the population grows.

Answer 10

Scare tactics, expensive only maderately but can we build a plant in your neighborhood? Malibu said NO WAY. NIMBY All the water that was ever here is still here in one form or the other. So maybe a little better answer would be more sensible policy on birht control.