Arguing about possible cascade effects of brine disposal from large scale desalinization that are are not proven or not even studied is the definition of FUD and BS.

Look kid, I have been an environmentalist well before you were born and well before the whole movement become hijacked by law firms, media clickbait’s and politicians, protested pesticides and antibiotics well before it seems normal to do so but you or nobody should simply clump everything up in the same basket just because it has a possibility of harm even if it is an unmeasurable one.

Ecology is about resources and understanding If the human interaction with the environment but, most of all, is a quantitative discipline, like engineering.

We do not need any more demagogues or politicians but sound minded people and defendable data for any claim we make.

In the Gulf of Mexico there is an exposed salt deposit underwater that is worth several millions years of brine accumulation from providing 100 liters of water to 10 billions humans every day.

And it made by the exact same brine because was the effect of millions years of deposits of sea salts.

Any time an earthquake hits that region, an equivalent amount of many years of best desalination plants in the world gets released and change the ecosystem.

We need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot fighting every single insignificant battle and totally losing the war.

We were manipulated enough to kill the nuclear energy in the ‘70, did we not learn anything ?

This is a super niche effect that has been argued over and over many times before.

Yes, there are specific cases where the salinity increase was dangerous for the local, very local wildlife but all, repeat all the study refer to very specific ecosystems usually in freshwater or at the confluence of freshwater with marine water, as you correctly point out.

I argue that none of the proposed desalination plants fall on these categories and starting FUD campaigns based on very picked and chosen data is really dangerous and detrimental to the credibility of future valid arguments.

If you are an hammer does not justify treating everything like a nail. This post was about desalination on large scale. Do you want to post a warning on not dispersing back brine in high concentrations, fine, but proper disposal of brines is not only feasible but totally inconsequential

Total BS, sorry for a couple of of very BIG reasons We just “borrow” water with law salinity and we will re introduce it in the cycle. There is very little water that is ever lost.

The total amount of human consumption of fresh water is just insignificant, not even measurable, with respect the total amount of water on this planet.

Bottom line: water does not exist in a “state” but in a dynamic cycle. Altering this dynamic cycle to a measurable amount requires a scale that is far bigger (many orders of magnitude) and does not take into account negative feedbacks to the process of increased salinity, like the increase of low salinity water coming from the waste product of this process