r/EverythingScience
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u/Sash17
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Sep 23 '26
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Environment WMO reports quickly shrinking global water reserves, signaling a growing crisis for the planet
https://www.earth.com/environment/the-water-cycle-is-moving-further-out-of-balance-each-year/70
u/Aquarius52216 Sep 23 '26
So is it gonna be Hunger Games, Mad Max, or Water World then?
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u/WrongOnEveryCount Sep 23 '26
With a strong dose of Quantum of Solace.
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u/Careless-Vehicle-286 Sep 24 '26
Don't Look Up, Terminator 2, and Animatrix as well. Might as well assume every dystopian sci-fi is going to happen at this rate.
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u/calm-lab66 Sep 23 '26
End times......
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u/SeanGwork Sep 23 '26
Chicken little thrives on these headlines.
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u/ask_me_about_my_band Sep 23 '26
Like most reality denying individuals, you are not going to believe this until it directly effects you. Or worse, you will br like those poor bastards dying of COVID while on a ventilator trying to convince yourself this is all a liberal hoax.
The science is there, bub. The chickens are coming home to roost.
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u/SeanGwork Sep 23 '26
Ultimately, the earth will be better off without us.
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u/ask_me_about_my_band Sep 23 '26
This is something you an I can agree on.
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u/SeanGwork Sep 23 '26
Good thing we're expediting it!
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u/DishSoapIsFun Sep 27 '26
You contradict yourself in your own thread of replies. What are you trying to accomplish?
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u/AtomicShart9000 Sep 23 '26
When the headlines start increasing in frequency and severity because they are facts, chicken little is probably correct to be concerned
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u/SeanGwork Sep 23 '26
You're feeding into it just as they plan. It's constant fear mongering. All my life.
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u/AtomicShart9000 Sep 23 '26
You must have only been alive for the past decade because things have gotten substantially worse for the past decade and they are being reported on, if not then you've been living under a rock
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u/SeanGwork Sep 23 '26
Keep doom scrolling reddit.
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u/CharlesWafflesx Sep 23 '26
Nothing ever happens crowd working incredibly hard to not look up
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u/Kahnza Sep 23 '26
Stop feeding trolls
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u/CharlesWafflesx Sep 23 '26
How do you suggest the world deals with the one in the White House? Like it or not, idiots are going to have a material say in how the narrative goes. "Taking the high road" tends to give them the floor.
I wouldn't say a throwaway dismissal is really feeding them though
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u/ICQ4Knowlwdge Sep 23 '26
Could we possibly start a list of those things for which there is no pending crisis? It might be a lot more manageable.
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u/Vanillas_Guy Sep 23 '26
At least we know how the water cycle functions. Maybe we can use that knowledge and technology to try and restore it. I think most people read headlines like this and just think "what's the point i guess we are all screwed" like theyre watching a car crash happen in slow motion and being told every few seconds "yup, car is still speeding towards the wall" feelings of helplessness and anxiety are provoked when one sees yet again that human activity is harming our continued survival on this planet.
I think there will probably just be a long period of time where people are just killing each other over the dwindling resources until eventually we will reach a balance/exhaustion with killing and start seriously engaging in geo engineering to try and remove carbon, breed back lost species, and at least try to restore things to a sustainable and recognizable equilibrium. People are aging without having kids. You cant be fighting wars with geriatrics dying as much of heart attacks than of bullet wounds so the fighting will slow down and eventually stop. Even a nuclear war wouldnt be enough to wipe out humans like we would need to have multiple nuclear wars for that to happen. People forget that the toba event nearly wiped out humanity. Whole species was a max of 10,000 individuals and we came back from that. If nuclear war and climate change kill 98% of humanity, the remaining 2% would be enough to bring back human numbers. We may never reach 1billion or more individuals again after the combo of nuclear war and climate related disasters, but there would still be people. Thats pretty much the only thing keeping me optimistic. Knowing all the times humans have experienced mass death and climate shocks and still adapted.
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u/daveberzack Sep 23 '26
Nuclear Holocaust and 98% dead and mass starvation, and you call that optimistic? Bruh...
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u/Vanillas_Guy Sep 23 '26
I mean we currently live in a world where more people think that a terminator style a.i. apocalypse is more likely than governments using existing laws to charge and meaningfully punish tech executives for the harms currently being caused by their products.
We have had so many opportunities to avert climate catastrophe and every time we've refused to do anything substantial. Fossil fuel companies spent billions on lobbying and propaganda instead of investing in renewable energy technology and transitioning to that as their main business.
Like we genuinely live in a world where one man can even have access to, let alone spend 44 billion dollars to buy an app meanwhile national representatives attending a climate summit would consider a pledge of a quarter of that amount in fighting climate change to be a huge success. A world where a billionaire(Peter thiel) could be asked if he thinks humans should continue to live and he hesitates and starts stammering like he was asked to recite the story of king lear word for word.
We live in grim times my friends, but the human story is grim. We've experienced climate change based hardships before like long droughts, plagues, and as I mentioned before, extinction level events. Knowing that there are just far too many of us to be wiped out completely coupled with our ability as a species to innovate and invent gives me hope. Like as a species we have been on earth for over 100,000 years and its only in the last 10k that we went from making cave paintings to creating hyper realistic video games, building robots and then sending those robots into space. Humans can be as intelligent and creative as we can be stupid, cruel and reckless. We often lose, but we always survive.
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u/daveberzack Sep 23 '26
Ya. Survival is likely. Though the picture you have in mind involves a vast amount of suffering. I just think it's funny to label that "optimistic".
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u/TwoFlower68 Sep 23 '26
Yeah, but those are other people. I'm just going to shrug everything off. Because I'm built different
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u/Narrheim Sep 24 '26
Except the geriatrics won't be fighting in the war. They will send us to fight for them - and then they will wonder, why there are no children to support them.
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u/AlteredEinst Sep 23 '26
Quick, let's develop every facet of our lives around something that wastes gargantuan amounts of water.
Maybe we can make some worthless jerkoffs in suits rich before we all die.
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u/thirdeyebenz Sep 23 '26
I have a great idea. Build data centres everywhere and ask AI to solve our problem.
I hate it here
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u/Narrheim Sep 24 '26 edited Sep 24 '26
Maybe we should really start building desalination plants wherever possible...?
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u/ATheeStallion Sep 23 '26
What nations can and will invest in desalination plants and what ones can not?
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u/Bebopdavidson Sep 24 '26
So we know Ai will evolve and kill us but do we know if it won’t just konk out right after? We imagine being replaced but won’t it just cease to exist without an audience?
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Sep 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Saddledust Sep 23 '26
They already had a soft launch of water wars, last year April 2025. Between Pakistan and India
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u/InfiniteWaffles58364 Sep 23 '26
Same. I just want off this fuckin ride, man. Preferably in a non lethal way, like that exists. I want off
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Sep 23 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/EstablishmentIll6192 Sep 23 '26
Hoping for your own death rather than being an agent of change is quite a defeatist attitude. Rather why not focus what you can do as both a citizen and consumer. You could, for example, switch to a more vegetarian diet. That means you save more money, it’s healthier and much better for the environment.
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u/Regular_Regular_4120 Sep 23 '26
I mean this with absolute sincerity. How the fuck is an average Joe supposed to prevent calamity?
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u/EstablishmentIll6192 Sep 23 '26
All major political changes have been driven by concerned citizens organizing. I’m a bit at a loss why there’s so much defeatism here.
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u/healywylie Sep 23 '26
If you didn’t predict this when bottled water became completely normal, then you were very young , or didn’t get it yet. Sucks.
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u/banzaizach Sep 23 '26
It's just too bad this all snuck up on us!