Raw LLM Responses

> Probably a stupid question. There's no such thing as a... > Would desalination drop the water levels enough to even it out eventually? Never mind. But joking aside, there are two reasons why it won't have much of an impact: 1. After desalinated water is used it enters the water cycle again, mostly at points that don't provide long-term storage and very quickly move the water back to the oceans, like run-off. In order to lower sea levels, you'd need to remove the water in a way that keeps it away from the oceans for a far longer time—like what happens with glaciers. 2. To lower sea levels by just 1 mm, you would need to remove around 350 gigatonnes of water from the oceans. That's 350,000,000,000,000 liters, or about 50,000 liters per living person on the planet. So let's say you wanted to counter 50 cm of sea-level rise by having each person on earth store a sufficient amount of water (desalinated or otherwise). 50 cm is 500 mm, so every single person on earth would have to squirrel away some 25,000,000 liters of water—the equivalent of 10 Olympic-size swimming pools. Or, let's say you wanted to dig a 50 meter deep basin to store all the water away from the oceans. A reasonable idea, right? 350 gigatonnes of water takes up 350 km^(3), so to store enough water to counter 1 mm of sea level rise in a basin with a depth of 50 meters, we'd need it to span an area of 7,000 km^(2). And to counter 50 cm of sea level rise, we'd need it to span 3,500,000 km^(2)—an area about 20% bigger than India. In short: desalinating and using water doesn't remove it from the oceans for a long enough time to have a meaningful impact on sea levels, and to lower sea levels by any significant amount, you need to remove a ridiculously large amount of water. Additionally, it's worth noting that the lowest energy cost of desalination currently is about 3 kWh/m^(3), so at an energy price of $65/mWh, you'd be looking at a cost of at least $35 trillion just