Are the results of the groundwater model robust?
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De Graaf et al. (2019) suggest that groundwater pumping will bring 42–79% of worldwide watersheds close to environmental exhaustion by 2050. We are skeptical of these figures due to several non-unique assumptions behind the calculation of irrigation water demands and the perfunctory exploration of the model's uncertainty space. Their sensitivity analysis reveals a widespread lack of elementary concepts of design of experiments among modellers, and can not be taken as a proof that their conclusions are robust.
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