[Strategerist]

1) This is an incompetent newspaper with a two-paragraph article about a scientific paper in press.

2) The paper is apparently entitled: “Sea-level fingerprint of continental water and ice mass change from GRACE”

3) There’s no abstract of the paper I can find.

4) The paper itself PROBABLY says nothing about the Maldives, doesn’t recommend we stop using groundwater irrigation, etc.

5) Sea level is in fact rising - VERY gradually, and it’s been doing so since the end of the last ice age. It’s mostly the water just thermally expanding, rather than ice melt.

6) “Water Mining” isn’t a term that’s just been invented; it’s been used for years, and I’ve heard it used many times before. The term “fossil water” is also routinely used; aquifers have water that’s accumulated over millions of years.

7) Major deep aquifers are obviously and provably being drained of water much, much faster than they’re being replenished; otherwise farmers wouldn’t need to keep drilling their wells deeper.

8) Just becuse one is skeptical of anthropogenic global warming (as I am) doesn’t mean that one ALSO has to believe it’s IMPOSSIBLE for humans to affect ANYTHING about the earth.

9)The amount of deepwater aquifer water used for irrigation is ENORMOUS; in the paper, the key issue will be the estimate of how much water that is; than a simple calculation should demonstrate the (fairly tiny) sea level rise that this usage causes.

10) We’re going to deplete these deepwater aquifers sometime in the next century at the current rate. This is a problem. It doesn’t mean we should stop all deepwater irrigation immediately and let billions starve. It means we need to continue efforts to use irrigation water more efficiently, and engineer/breed crops that use less water.

[epithermal]

Excellent points, thanks for taking the time to write them. I also tried to find the article referred to by the author, but had no luck. The one you refer to has to do with the GRACE satellites, so I am not sure if it is related to ground water. Grace website: http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/

I am not a member of AGU, so I can’t access the article, but it will probably show up online in other news soon. I am going to keep looking because I would like to see the basis for the argument.

I see that people are having fun with the term ‘water mining’, but it is an old accepted term used by groundwater hydrologists and is a fact. We have an area here in Washington state where declining water levels have become extreme and there is a lot of talk about artificial recharge by the government.

[bill1952]

Well, some might also postulate that an endless preoccupation of such minute changes over long amounts of time even while those changes will also undoubtedly be changed on a more or less regular basis, along with the concomitant changes and reversals of extrapolated results, is a valid diagnosis of OCD, and that is a mental disorder.

just saying...

[lewislynn]

Global warming, water uses, aquifers, rising seas aside. The article suggests that irrigation water evaporates, then comes down as rain on the oceans causing rising sea levels...as if ocean water DOES NOT evaporate and come down on land.

The way I see it you also believe that to be true.

I guess all the runoff from rivers to the ocean is insignificant compared to irrigation water. Using your/their rising sea logic. At the rate of yearly river water runoff for centuries Phoenix should be beach front property.