Can someone remind me again why people are acting like water can only ever be used for evaporative cooling once? Does it not condense, fall elsewhere and get reabsorbed into the environment again (suitable for reuse) once it "escapes" the tower?
Or am I just fucking retarded and water just literally stops existing once it's been used once and that's why this hyper-terror campaign is now being waged against anything that uses water for cooling under any circumstances?
Honestly, most of it is just fear mongering, pushed by various interests, and lapped up uncritically by retards. But there is a grain of truth to the argument.
While you are completely correct that water on Earth is a closed cycle, and that any water evaporated off eventually condenses and and falls back to Earth to reenter the environment and eventually become available for use again. However, that does not mean that all water in Earth's hydrologic cycle is evenly distributed in space, or time. Most of the water on the planet is in the oceans, where it is useless for drinking water, crop irrigation, or industrial processes. Most of the water people use comes from glaciers and snowfields, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and aquifers. People use the fresh surface and ground water, the waste water returns to the environment, goes through the hydrologic cycle, and eventually returns to the fresh water sources people use. The key word there is "eventually". It is entirely possible to drain these sources of fresh water faster than they naturally recharge.
And therein lines the crux of the problem: water sources in some parts of the country are getting drained faster than they replenish. A perfect example of this was last year's wildfires in LA. Sure, they had water to fight fires with locally, but they didn't have enough. You might argue that was due to incompetent leadership and neglect of the region's water infrastructure, and you'd be right. Remember how Trump kept sperging at Newsom on Twitter to release surplus water reserves in Northern California to be available in Southern California? Remember how it turned out that a local reservoir had been empty for repairs for almost a year?
The water issues in LA are a microcosm of water issues in the wider US. Sure, a lot of the eastern part of the country has plenty of water. The western portions of the country, less so. The Colorado River Compact was built upon a misunderstanding of the southwest's natural wet/dry cycle, and so has been getting drained faster than Nature can keep up with. Supposedly upstream states are getting screwed by California taking more than their allotted share of the river's flow, forcing the upstream states to do without so the US can keep treaty obligations over minimum flows into Mexico. Multiple reservoirs along the Colorado River are critically low going into this summer, with some in danger of falling below their minimum power pool or even their dead pool thresholds.
If this sounds like the same mismanagement and neglect issue with the nation's aging electric grid, you'd be completely right. Like with the electrical grid, the correct solution is to build out more capacity, not just to keep up with increasing demand, but also be able to meet that demand while having a portion of the older capacity offline for renovation and repairs. But capacity takes time to build up, and gets blocked and delayed by "environmentalist", and so people feel the increased demand for water in power in their pocket books in the more immediate term.
So supposedly a datacenter moves into a region, and the result is increased power and water bills for everyone else. When the inevitable water shortage comes along from regional water mismanagement, people get annoyed when they get told they can't water their lawns, flush their toilets, and have to watch their summer tomato garden wilt and die. Meanwhile they get to watch the new datacenter, the one that was totally going to bring new jobs to the area and then didn't, constantly casting off billowing clouds of steam, clearly not subject to the same water restrictions.
Makes for a great sob story that malicious propagandists can use to keep people hyped up and scared about "climate change".
As I presently live in one of the drier portions of the US, while I do get annoyed at the fearmongering, I am, perhaps somewhat irrationally, sensitive to what seems like wasteful water use. If you live in a wetter part of the country, it might seem like much ado about nothing.
