If the Casey's interest is in terraforming the American West to support substantial population growth, I would start with the Columbia River Basin and identify the bottlenecks to growth there.
The Columbia River drainage basin is larger than the Great Basin (670k km2 [1] vs 541 km2 [3]), it's the 4th largest river in the US by flow [1], and there are already existing megaprojects like the Columbia Basin Project [2] that have unmet potential.
If the growth Casey envisions isn't happening and/or won't happen with the easy access to substantial volumes fresh water of the Columbia River then it's very unlikely to occur in the scenario they envision with desal + pumping water into the Great Basin.
I took issue with the example of aircraft airfoil design, probably too pedantically, due to the challenges technical individuals have had related to rationalizing the behavior, despite a mathematical explanation.
But I completely agree with your point that rationalization alone isn't sufficient. We struggle to describe the universe solely in words and rely on other tools to further describe phenomena.
I wouldn't use it as an example to prove that that we have a history of rationalizing explanations where none exist. Certainly, as you mentioned, the explanation takes the form of a set of differential equations. I would instead argue that there is a history of incorrect rationalizations from individuals who were akin to "real world aircraft engineers" in their time and that these rationalizations are still present in discourse around wing lift / design.
I couldn't agree more! However, I think the content of the article is informative. If you strongly disagree I'm happy to remove the link to the article
Using airfoil design rationalization as an example may not be the best choice in this context since there is a fairly long history of incorrect rationalizations for wing lift.
The Columbia River drainage basin is larger than the Great Basin (670k km2 [1] vs 541 km2 [3]), it's the 4th largest river in the US by flow [1], and there are already existing megaprojects like the Columbia Basin Project [2] that have unmet potential.
If the growth Casey envisions isn't happening and/or won't happen with the easy access to substantial volumes fresh water of the Columbia River then it's very unlikely to occur in the scenario they envision with desal + pumping water into the Great Basin.
- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River - [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project - [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin