Recent comments in /f/dataisbeautiful

something-quirky- t1_j264xk1 wrote

I think you’re forgetting is that the atmospheric harvesting wouldn’t be evenly distributed across the globe. As your map points out, there would be spots that would be better then other. So you’d expect that the harvesting plants would be not be evenly distributed. So while you may only be extracting some fraction of a percent from the entire globe, you’d be extracting a much larger percentage in the context of the local area. It’s like saying “its okay if i drain this lake because it only takes up .00001% of global fresh water” meanwhile you’ve used up 10% of the LOCAL freshwater. You’re also mischaracterizing the problem. Sure, humans only need 8 cups of water to drink… but you also need to use the toilet, and take a shower, and wash your clothes, and wash your dishes, and cook etc. And you can’t just pump in dirty water for everything that isn’t for drinking. It’s just passing the buck is what it is, and I’d be willing to bet that the resulting weather patterns from this practice would be just as devastating as draining the rivers and streams.

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5ClearUrinations t1_j25x4cv wrote

That isn’t how my interpretation of the index would work. 100 would the highest interest in that country’s history and 0 would be when interest is at its lowest in the country’s history.

Arbitrary example: the U.S.’s lowest interest was when it was searched 2,000 times in a week. The index of 0 would correspond to that value. The U.S.’s highest interest is when it was searched 150,000 times in a week. This would be its 100 index. All other indexes would just correspond to somewhere between 2,000 and 150,000 weekly searches.

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WaterScienceProf OP t1_j25vg4q wrote

The atmosphere holds about 12,000 km^2 of water, and the average human needs 8 cups of water per day (the main application of AWH). Thus, it we provided all human drinking water with AWH, it would be about 0.0001%/day.

On a sustainability note, right now the use of river water for drinking can be ecologically damaging, as many water resources are fully exhausted. e.g. the Colorado River and Rio Grande in parts entirely dry up. AWH is a more sustainable source, as the sun provides plenty of continuous evaporation to add more water vapor.

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WaterScienceProf OP t1_j25u4s8 wrote

The model calculates the Gibbs free energy from removing water vapor, which takes property lookups at each condition. The data intensity comes into play because it's a full year averaged using hourly data, all across the globe.

To the other question: as the humidity goes to zero, the energy needs become extremely high. It also becomes very challenging for practical systems.

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