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by nate_meurer
1 day ago
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> Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain. This is about as useful as saying "the water stays on Earth". The ecological damage entirely depends on the nature of the water source. The most poignant situation is non-rechargeable aquifers. When water is extracted, the mineral structures collapse and the storage capacity is forever destroyed. And as the other reply stated, evaporation (as from evaporative cooling) exports water out of a catchment basin so that it can't be used downstream, just as if you pumped it away. |
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That is actually an important distinction. There are many things for which this is not the case. If you fail to recover the helium extracted with natural gas deposits then it doesn't stay on Earth. If birds eat your crops, you can't undo it. If you burn coal then it turns into CO2 and heat and it's thermodynamically impossible to reverse the process without inputting more useful energy than can be recovered from burning it to begin with (which is why carbon capture is a sham and we instead need to stop burning fossil fuels).
Whereas you can evaporate and recondense the same water an unlimited number of times and whether it's a problem depends not so much on what you're doing as where you got the water to begin with.