Find Somebody who'll Listen

Q. How do you reduce a carbon footprint?

A. By adding water.

Look, it's no big secret that the western 2/3 of the US is getting bone-dry or already bone-dry. It's also no secret that there's too much water in various places and not enough in others. Look at any water map of the United States and you'll see that the biggest threat to a second American Civil War is the western 2/3 of the US panicking and coming after the eastern 1/3 of the US, simply for its water resources.

Ever see Mad Max? Water. Ever see Waterworld? Water. The reason water shortage is a trope in science fiction is because water shortage is a reality in the world we live in. Max gets accosted by a guy selling water and points a geiger counter at it. The guy laughs and says something along the lines of "everybody's gotta die sometime, might as well not be thirsty when you do."

The reality in the modern world is that Egypt is basically only viable to live in on the banks of the Nile. The reality of the modern world is that there are American Indians who can barely survive on the land they're on because the water is contaminated with radiation.

So I came up with an idea. I can't get anybody to listen. Maybe you can.

Willis Carrier is credited with coming up with the term "air conditioning". He wasn't trying to cool it or dry it specifically, he was trying to normalize it for consistency for the printing company he worked for. What he did was force air through a hose at high pressure, which cooled it. Cool air doesn't hold as much water as warm air, so the water condensed out. Voila. We don't praise Carrier as much as we should. He made lots of the world habitable.

I know. What's that got to do with anything?

Well, here ya go. If we could a) build an air conditioner about the size of a football field out of lightweight materials that b) could be hung on a dirigible that c) had fabric that doubled as a solar panel and d) could change elevation to take advantage of the relative humidity in the air at whatever altitude, that e) could be set to float over a reservoir, and f) was subsequently started up...

You see where this is going. Water gets condensed out of the air to fall where we want it, not where it wants to go.

Now there's only a certain amount of water in the atmosphere at any given point. What if we crank these things up where there isn't any water? Nature abhors a vacuum, so water's going to try to even itself out. Guess where it's going to come from? High concentrations of water. Thunderstorms. Hurricanes. Et cetera.

What if you could put some of these in the path of a hurricane and drain enough water out of it to drop it from a Category 4 to a Category 3?

What if you could put some of these in the air over the area where the Navaho Indians can't drink the groundwater because it's radioactive?

What if you could put these in the Sahara desert?

What if you could put these in Somalia? You know, give those people something to do besides try to pirate ships for a living because they have nothing else?

What if you could ....

You get the idea. What if you could solve the world's water problems?

Think that won't help fix global climate issues? Think that won't help fix carbon emissions?

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I hope somebody can make use of this. I've been trying for a few years now and nobody seems to care.