of course you can salt up a field....even using hard water from the Colorado river. sea water is a long distance from farmer fields- so even if efficiently desalinated will require massive piping. I have developed new membranes that don't require as much pressure as CA membranes in days past, but the facilities should be used for drinking, NOT for irrigation.
I still contend we have a population problem. We can postpone reconciliation for awhile by moving assets, but the core problem exists. Solving the problem is.....simple but ugly. mass die off from plague, war....just as animal species have come into balance. If we can be smart, the ugly can be reduced. My optimism is tainted by watching water wars in the west.
I will do my part- electric car, conserve my resources----but not deny using "my fair share"
We're in agreement about there being too many people now. We can keep the mouths we have fed for a while, but there will be a limit.
Most people don't realize it, but the Arab Spring started over the price of grain. The world had a grain shortage for a few years when first SE Australia had a drought, then just as that started to right itself the US Midwest had two terrible crop years in a row due to spring flooding, and then that was followed by massive fires in Russia that destroyed a big swath of the wheat crop. These things caused a small increase in grain prices in the developed world that consumers largely didn't notice because our food is a small part of our monthly budget (for most of us).
The poor countries of the Arab world are heavily dependent on imports to feed their people and large percentages of the populations in those countries just barely scrape by on the bare minimum of calories at the best of times. When grain prices went up, these people were hit the hardest and their hunger drove them into the streets where they protested the high grain prices and it quickly morphed into a larger political protest.
This brought down governments, peacefully in some countries, but violently in others. The Syrian civil war is still going on and it all started because Australia, the United States, and Russia had some bad years.
Hans Rosling shows that the world's population will stabilize around 10 billion people as the generations fill out. It's an optimistic picture and a good thing that the trend line shows we're not going to keep growing like weeds, but the problem is the system is teetering on disaster at 7 billion people now. As I've pointed out above, China and India are running out of ground water to grow their own food.
Extraordinary measures could be taken to desal enough water to replace the ground water they are using now, but there is no other source of water for them. They are already using all the surface water available and it doesn't cover all their needs. I don't see any sign that either country is doing anything about their coming crisis. China is usually pretty good at projecting ahead, but they are trying to manage a very large and chaotic culture. India is terrible are planning for their future.
Even if they decide to build the desal plants, the pipelines, and the power infrastructure to run them, it will take years to build them while their agriculture production falls off a cliff. They need to go onto the world market to buy food and because they have more money than other importers, they suck up most of the supply. What will happen in poor countries when the food situation gets much worse than the situation that triggered the Arab Spring?
Even if people in net exporting countries all decide to ration their own food so more can be exported, there isn't enough. Americans eat a pretty high caloric diet, but there are only 310 million of us. Cutting out 20% of our caloric intake to help feed 2 billion in China and India who are hungry would help, but it wouldn't free up enough to export enough to cover the need.
And that's only if there is unusual altruism. Human nature is to hoard when there are shortages and someone has the means to hoard. Here in the NW there is a joke that when the weather forecasts snow all the milk and bread disappear from the store shelves. But it is true, I've seen it. The prediction is for the average person maybe being housebound for a day, possibly two and people are stocking up on staples for a month. I've personally seen the empty shelves when it happens.
I was using the desal plants for agriculture idea as an example of something humans could do to water crops when other sources of water run out, but in most cases it wouldn't be practical, even if the electricity was nearly free. We would have to build massive infrastructure to support such a venture and that wouldn't be cheap.
