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by danmaz74 5041 days ago
"We get new sunlight every day, but the fresh water that we have is all we have." Actually, we get new fresh water every other day - it's called rain.
2 comments

If we actually got new water every day it'd be arriving on meteorites.

Of the water present on the planet, 97% is salt water which is unusable for drinking or agriculture. Of the 3% freshwater, 68.7% is locked in glaciers. So, 1% of the water on the planet is liquid and most of that is underground. We don't really have a lot and things like fertilizers damage what we have.

It turns out that the amount of fresh water is relatively constant. If we want more in places that have less then we have to manufacture it from seawater, steal it from our neighbors by cloud-seeding, or rely on the weather cycle convert seawater into fresh water and then distribute it.

If you live in Dubai, you aren't waiting for it to rain. You're building desalination plants and processing seawater.

In South Australia we are building a wind and solar powered desalination plant too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Stanvac_Desalination_Plant
I can tell you've never been to Australia.

EDIT: http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap10/continents.... (Sorry for the horrible background, the data is there)

The data is very interesting, but as I read it it confirms that even in Australia there is a lot of fresh water coming down each year, and the problem is how to convert it into usable fresh water. Just like with solar irradiation: There is a lot of it coming, but it's very difficult to turn it into usable energy.

PS I've never been to Australia, but I'd like to come someday :)