Why are we using "arabnews.com" as a source? It's owned by the Saudi government isn't it? This topic is hitting the front-page of more reputable news sources.
The GP felt it is okay to disparage Arab News solely because they are funded by the Saudis, which evidently they don't like. By the same standards, the BBC is literally funded by another state, the UK. Both are state funded media, thus propaganda almost by definition. Remember, propaganda does not have to be false or unreliable. (Although, ironically, BBC right now is in trouble for deceptive portrayal of Trump.)
Hacker News guidelines[1] recommend posting the original source, not BBC over Arab News.
The newspaper has been described as "a mouthpiece for the Saudi regime" by Qatari-owned The New Arab,[24] and regarded as "reflecting official Saudi Arabian government position" by the Associated Press and Haaretz.[5]
This is much different than the BBC which attempts to maintain independence.
Sure, one can debate this ad nauseam. I would even concede that on average, BBC is perhaps more reliable than Arab News. However, if your standard is ArabNews not OK because Saudi government funds it, but BBC OK, you might just as well say it in plain English that you simply don't like the opinion of the Saudi government but on board with the UK's (which is a stance that by the way I mostly share, but refuse to preach on a neutral forum like Hacker News as policy.) I would not be surprised that for some stories, Arab News would be a better source than BBC.
You don’t see a difference between a major news outlet from a democratic country which has freedom of speech and an outlet from a religious monarchy which has no notion of free speech or even human rights?
There was a recent scandal with respect to a misleading quote from a news story about President Trump and the General Director and Head of News resigned.
Yes, it would have been better if they had not spliced the clips so closely together, but that does show a commitment to taking its role seriously.
Earlier today I watched a video[0] that helped contextualize the water situation in Iran. The key takeaway for me was that Iran has been rapidly depleting their water reserves and they don't have any ways to quickly refill them, nor do they have treaties with neighboring countries to guarantee water. That video doesn't mention cloud seeding at all.
How should we think about cloud seeding? Does this technology actually move the needle at all on Iran's water needs or is this just some dubious marketing campaign?
I assume marketing. I’m wondering what will happen when they force the afghan refugees back over the border into Afghanistan since they don’t have the water to give them.
Climate change and bad decisions from the last 50 years are starting to bite now. It’ll just get worse. Expect migrations and countries collapsing as millions of people are pushed to migrate for survival.
The drinking water is just part of the issue (as you said). Water is used in countless industrial processes, farming, EVERYTHING. if the water goes, so does everything else.
And it’s not just water going away—it’s impingement by salt as well.
> Drinking water is such a tiny proportion of total water use
A lot of water infrastructure needs minimum levels to function. Drinking water may be a small fraction of use. But if the big users deplete a reservoir below its minimum operational level, the fact that the dead water is enough to keep Tehran alive is more trivia than solace.
> Climate change and bad decisions from the last 50 years are starting to bite now. It’ll just get worse. Expect migrations and countries collapsing as millions of people are pushed to migrate for survival.
For those unfamiliar, climate change and drought are believed to be one of the major causes of the bronze age civilization collapse
People speculate climate change and drought are one of the causes for every major collapse in history. It's even likely, because people keep fighting the collapse until something forces their hands, and that's one recurrent big thing to trigger change.
That said, we never had the climate change that strongly on history.
Look, I know they didn’t fare well against Israeli F-35s and American B-2s, but the tech disparity isn’t quite as bad as them using Super Soakers for air defense.
Ten million civilians are about to deeply suffer. A multi-year drought is a key contributor.
Under international law, countries have complete and exclusive sovereignty over this airspace, just as they do over their land. They aren’t “taking someone else’s rain” because the clouds they’re seeding are effectively theirs anyway
Less rain than you'd imagine falls on the oceans, due to the land having varying elevation and temperature, whilst the oceans have far more constant elevation and temperature so the conditions needed for rain happen less.
My understanding is that cloud seeding has been going on for quite a while over Texas and the rest of the southern Plains.
It's hidden in plain sight, and the only people who ever seem to talk about it are total wingnuts who also believe things like climate change is real but manufactured by the US and other world power militaries (using secret technology) for geopolitical purposes, often conflating real cloud seeding with variations on the classic chemtrails conspiracy theory.
It's a largely unregulated continent scale weather and climate modification experiment. I haven't booked too deep into the research on it, but because powerful agricultural interests are involved, I'm sure nobody is looking too closely at externalities and would prefer to keep it that way.
Right, the chance of it working is 0-20% in some tests and found to be highy conditional. I’m in support of them trying something to help, but it’s not a silver bullet (though it is silver iodide).
> Despite numerous experiments spanning several decades, no direct observations of this process exist. Here, measurements from radars and aircraft-mounted cloud physics probes are presented that together show the initiation, growth, and fallout to the mountain surface of ice crystals resulting from glaciogenic seeding. These data, by themselves, do not address the question of cloud seeding efficacy, but rather form a critical set of observations necessary for such investigations. These observations are unambiguous and provide details of the physical chain of events following the introduction of glaciogenic cloud seeding aerosol into supercooled liquid orographic clouds.
Apparently the goal is to turn supercooled water droplets into ice crystals. This makes a more physical sense than what was my first guess, seeding condensation nuclei. But seeding condensation would release a lot of heat, since the heat of condensation is pretty big, while the heat of fusion is quite a bit smaller.
Typically the precious metals needed have a cost that is more than the water gained. That assumes there are clouds just on the verge of raining that just need a small push.
One of Iran's biggest problems is that Iran, for no good reason other than the benefit of some big corporations (kinda similar to the California situation) is one of the biggest produce and dry fruit exporter in the world, and that one thing the government would need to do is shut down that excess capacity. A thing very few countries would do because it would punish some oligarch for the benefit of the whole of society.
By oligarch I assume you mean the IRGC which controls most of Iran's economy.
In these kind of societies it's hard to think of the controlling powers as oligarchs as although they get rich off corruption, their power did not come from money but vice versa
Its obviously not as dire (yet) but I think Texas will face something like this in the coming decades. Its the kind of problem that requires people at all levels of society to cooperate and sacrifice - farmers & businesses need to draw less, people need to use less and government needs intelligent and actionable policy, plus big investment into unsexy and invisble infrastructure upgrades - so basically we're screwed.
Absolutely. It's probably worse than you think though. I work with some groundwater conservation districts in Texas. Texas has some aquifers that they rely heavily on, and they're being depleted at an unsustainable rate. Efforts to regulate the rate at which groundwater is consumed are met with mixed results because of state laws that make it very difficult to regulate pumping.
One particularly depressing example from the recent past is what happened in Hays County. The groundwater situation in Hays County is bad, to the point that springs are going dry.
Hays County managed to push something through the state legislature that'd give the Hays Trinity Water Conservation District more power to manage groundwater use (it passed overwhelmingly), but then Greg Abbot vetoed it - likely at the behest of Aqua Texas, a big water utility company that pumps a TON of water and has been pretty blatant about ignoring pumping caps and generally acted in bad faith.
The American Southwest needs to get started on desalination. It’s the only long term answer we have now, know works, and is at least within shooting distance of cost-feasible.
Well, if you’re selling the water at rates that aren’t below cost farms will remove themselves. Desalination is cheap enough for humans to live and do most work things, it’s hard to imagine it ever being cheap enough for farming.
Then tax them at a rate equivalent to their environmental cost? I don't think this is complicated (except politically, of course). You just want everyone to carry the cost of their own externalities.
Its definitely complicated. But the end of the story is that the government can not easily stop the farmers from using water in many of these drought stricken areas. Its going to be a big political battle
Dubai is paying ~$2,450 per acre-foot of desalinated water. You generally need around 2 acre feet of water per acre of farmland assuming near zero rain, it varies by crop type but goes up with temperature and down with humidity.
Farms growing food crops don’t produce ~5,000$ in profits per acre, even 1/10th that is an extreme outlier. On top of this desalinated water still has significantly more salt than rainwater which eventually causes issues. Subsides can always make things look cheaper when you ignore the subsidy.
Is that just because imported Dubai food is insanely expensive? I don't believe the math on anything but maybe indoor farming here is going to work out if the water costs anything at all.
Indoor farming can be extremely water-efficient, often at the cost of energy inefficiency, but with low solar prices and the level of sun they have in the Southwest perhaps that can become economical?
I don't know, I just do know that water shortages are a problem, are going to continue to become more of a problem, and there's currently just one technology that's affordable enough that some nations currently use it at scale. So let's get started.
The southwest, for the most part, refuses to accept the federal funding & infrastructure support that would be necessary for desalination at scale to be feasible.
Nobody wants to vote for water rationing, and the state can’t even enforce consumption limits against corporations and the wealthy.
Is it really feasible if a state can only pull it off with large federal funding efforts?
It seems like a problem those in the area will just have to deal with given that they're knowingly walking down that path. If you can't fund desalinization or other options, won't take federal funding, and choose not to region or conserve water then you collectively made your own bed.
People use very little water. Most of what is drawn is returned back to the system. By that I mean if you use 20 gallons for a shower 19 is going into the drain to be reused.
The only real usage of water is evaporation and that's stuff like growing plants and cooling towers.
Most places get freshwater from rivers or acquifers, sometimes lakes, use it for whatever, some large amount of that used water is collected as sewage, treat the sewage and discharge it downstream/into large bodies of water/the ocean.
Many systems also output reclaimed water; it's clean, but not up to environmental standards for discharge or drinking; typically excess clorination. This is often used for municipal irrigation sometimes toliet flushing, etc; uses where water below drinking standards is fine.
A handful of systems discharge treated water into their reservoirs or into acquifer recharge ponds. But there's an ick factor, even when discharge water is often held to higher standards than drinking water, so it's only done when the situation outweighs the ick.
Texas has also recently started building new reservoirs after a long time of not building any. Bois d'Arc and Arbuckle have recently been finished, others are in progress, and a few more are in planning phases.
There's a lot to hate on about Texas politics but there are some competent people trying to address water concerns. Not saying Texas is doing everything perfectly, we're still drawing on aquifers at an unsustainable rate and need to change that.
Texas is either desert or desert adjacent. We have always gotten our water by having torrential rains inconsistently.
This doesn't mean don't conserve, be intelligent, etc.
But this does mean that your water won't "balance out" year to year, you need to look at big 25-30 year intervals.
Right now the single biggest waste of water in Austin is leaky pipes. Like infrastructure pipes owned by the city. Meanwhile our water conservation budget is going to billboards telling people to rush in the shower. The entire population could stop bathing and not reduce enough to make up for the leaks happening in the crumbling water infra.
We have similar problems in Colorado re: pipes leaking. People don't want to pay the full cost of water, which includes supporting infrastructure. Municipalities are caught between these unfunded costs and taxpayers refusing to pay 1¢ more. I believe the utilities require political approval to raise rates, so that doesn't happen either.
Water in the ground from leaky pipes will travel in all directions. Some of it may end up back in the aquifer, but some will end up on the surface and evaporate. Depends on conditions near the pipe and the volume of the leak.
I can’t imagine the various legislatures in several “highly skeptical” states that are either considering or have already implemented “no chemtrails” and fluoride laws are going to find it easy to convince people to allow cloud seeding. Pretty sure Tennessee already preemptively banned it.
Yes, TN did pass that. Much of TN (especially around the capital) is temperate rainforest, so I imagine the lawmakers perceived downsides, but not upsides. Unfortunately, there is conflation or confusion between cloudseeding and sunlight reflection methods.
I hope to see this legislation in TN changed to allow cloudseeding.
Most of that idiotic crap goes out the window when real problems show up. I do believe Texans will get the same "pray for rain" BS we're laughing at Iran for now though.
Ahh yes, the old “let’s outlaw those things I don’t like, but others do that has billion dollar industries supporting it” approach. That always goes over well.
I think the first step is to develop a "we're not Texas" culture. Observe the ways in which Texas is ruining its environment and deliberately, conspicuously do something else.
For example, the aquifer situation in the Central Valley of California is in some ways similar to Ogallala aquifer in Texas. "If we don't want to end up like Texas, we need to get a handle on this." Enact laws and conservation measures which make it difficult for those coming from out of state to bring their ecologically irresponsible practices with them. Ideally, reduce the ecological impact wrought by well-established California interests as well, but if necessary grandfather them in in order to prepare.
UAE does this too, but with the UAE I always find it funny how their infrastructure is not build at all to handle rain well. Periods of rain (most of the time) go hand in hand with traffic and road problems, or even flooding. I can see why they need the water, but the effect on their city infrastructure build for heat is also not nothing.
What is the deal with the image of the article ? Mosques are as empty in Iran as churches are empty in the west. Yes the government is tightly coupled with religion, but this image isn’t representative of Iran at all.
It's a real picture of a real event that's related to the current situation so idk what you're looking for. Plenty of larping christians prayed after 9/11 too, when things get dire people tend to turn to their imaginary friend(s)
Here is a short video to tell you all you need to know about what sort of people are now running Iran, and just what they think of the average captive Iranian over whom they misrule, while you wait for the books.
Christian (includes Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist) 59.5%, Muslim 4.4%, Hindu 1.3%, other 2%, unspecified 7.2%, none 25.7% (2011 est.)
I occasionally see headlines like this and imagine them as part of an opening montage in a movie setting the scene for why society is dystopian/collapsed. Not that I have anything against cloud seeding, more that individually "X climate mitigation effort begins" headlines seem small and isolated but when taken together they start to become foreboding. We're not there yet but that's the point. Only when looking back will it become clear that taken in their totality we'll have a little map that shows us how we ended up somewhere.
I think it's used in Mendoza (Argentina). They have very clean air, and sometimes they get big hailstorm the size of a gold ball. With the seeds, they get instead a lot of small ice crystals that (mostly?) melt while falling and are not harmful for people or farms. IIUC it's the same amount of water in the same place, but in a friendlier formfactor.
Dubai has an entire active operation. It looks like it does work, but how well is debated. Seems to have enough of an impact (correlation or causation) that they haven't shut it down yet.
> However, there are only 24 permanent residents and five active farms on Hamnøya. Therefore, there is regular transport of tankers, concentrate feed and livestock trucks.
> Hamnøya is an island in Vevelstad Municipality in Nordland county, Norway. The 16.6-square-kilometre (6.4 sq mi) island lies about 500 to 700 metres (0.3 to 0.4 mi) off shore from the mainland of the municipality, separated by the Vevelstadsundet strait. The island is only accessible by boat and in 2021 it had 35 permanent residents living on the island.
I'm not sure if it's cheaper to upgrade both posts, but a bridge doesn't look so silly.
It's about time to start preparing for global geoengineering. Spraying our atmosphere with stuff that reflects light would buy us time to get emissions under control, and help avoiding the worst scenarios. Best of all, we know it works, thanks to emissions from maritime traffic and the spike in temperature rise after they got cleaner.
Yeah and then we'd face a global economic depression and mass civil unrest since those major emissions are emitted while doing things like distributing goods like food.
This is the sweet summer child thinking that lead to protests in Canada and France. The people whose livelihoods are tied up in these industries will not go quietly. Even if their oligarchs are defanged.
Is this the usual "we must stop the big corporations" argument, pretending that those who work at them and those who depend on their products will not complain? Or maybe you are thinking concentration camps and mass graves.
And now we wait for the headlines about the unprecedented, record-breaking floods and the harm those bring, too, before global media bends over backwards to label anyone noticing the obvious causal relationship to be a wacky tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist.
Weather modification has been a well understood, but not particularly effective program that has been run in various places across the US for decades. The main difference with chemtrails is that those are a bunch of nonsense conspiracy theories that assume that the government is trying to do widespread mind control. Weather modification is just trying to get it rain to rain a tiny bit more, with limited success.
All this time the chemtrail people I know have been talking about weather control, I hadn't heard of mind control being part of it.
My take has been yeah I know cloud seeding and solar geoenhineering is real, ergo some amount of chemtrails are "real" in that they are deliberate particulate being sprayed and not just water. While the thing the chemtrail people claim that seems dubious is the scale and other nuances - claiming that all contrails are chemtrails. It's the scale that we don't know and that I assume it's pretty small because it seems expensive and pointless to do it constantly. But I don't know how I could ascertain the scale at which it's done either.
The chemtrail conspiracies have always been a catch all for any idea except "it's a contrail or non-hidden spraying of some sort". To quote the 20 year old snapshot of the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chemtrail_conspir...:
> The term "chemtrail" should not be confused with other forms of aerial dumping (e.g. crop dusting, cloud seeding, aerial firefighting, although the principle is much the same. It specifically refers to covert, systematic, high-altitude dumping of unknown substances generally for some illicit purpose, be it that of Governments, terrorists, private corporations, or all of the above.
> Among the theories proposed for the purpose of the alleged "chemtrails": atmospheric and weather modification, biological warfare, mind control, occult purposes, or other functions associated with a New World Order.
Ironic that Iran is an anagram for rain. If only they built water reservoirs or other infrastructure instead of trying to build nukes, or drones that kill innocent people in Ukraine.
Iran's military spending (as percentage of GDP) is fairly similar to that of the U.S. and European countries. The most recent numbers I could find (from 2024) indicate that they spent 2.0% compared to 3.4% in the U.S. [1], although there have been reports that military spending has increased significantly in the most recent budget.
I agree with the sentiment that the humanity should focus on producing something more useful than bombs, but bringing it up specifically when talking about Iran comes off as a bit disingenuous, especially when they have been recently bombed by both the U.S. and Israel. [2] Imagine the roles were reversed: How would we react to an Iranian or Russian citizen suggesting that the U.S. or an European country should focus on infrastructure instead of building an army?
In Iran one of the armies (IRGC) controls most of the economy, including agriculture, dam building and exports, three areas which are very linked to the water mismanagement. Add the fact that their generals are getting rich through corruption you can imagine the situation is a bit different than the US army
Regardless the budget you are quoting does not include the billions that are invested yearly on Hezbollah, Hamas, PMF and Houthis which are strategically considered and used as an extension of their armed forces
What are talking about? Iran attacked Israel with ballistic missiles ( before the 12 day war) , not to mention funding the proxies ( ring of fire).
If it invested the money in water infrastructure instead of nuclear weapons or Hizbollah they would not be in such dire situation.
They're building nukes? Awesome, looks like you have more information than the IAEA. Unless of course you're talking about the same Ayatollah bomb that Iran almost has since 1984[1].
The drones are produced by Russia btw. You know, kinda how you guys keep saying that you'll punish China for supplying components for them. Meanwhile every single drone that Ukraine uses is built with either Chinese components or is a modded Chinese drone to begin with.
None of which is true of course. Not even the North Korea claim. NK applied to leave the NPT immediately after they deemed the US untrustworthy in 2003, The only country to ever withdraw from the NPT. I would hardly call that hidden.
When you build all the technology needed to actually build a nuke, when you enrich uranium to near weapons-grade, but you never actually assemble the nuke, are you trying to building a nuke? Or are just messing with everyone, trying to make them think you're building a nuke when you're totally not building a nuke (pinkie promise)?
Either way, if you are threatening to annihilate another country, I wouldn't gamble on the latter.
Israel also said Pakistan was trying to build nukes, but they were stopped by the Indian PM in the 1980s from launching a preventive attack.
The silver lining is that we don't have to suffer the internet commentators saying "Pakistan has been weeks away from nukes for fifty years!"
You can choose to put your head in the sand about a theocracy that enriches uranium to 60%, holds up mushroom clouds in their protests, and repeatedly violated the NPT with clandestine facilities. Others won't be so naive.
Iran can of course build a nuke in a relatively short timespan if they want to, but for a range of reason they have made the decision not to. Perhaps they should have built a nuke, if they had one Israel and the US wouldn't have bombed them.
> if they had one Israel and the US wouldn't have bombed them
If Iran had one nuke we’d bomb them relentlessly.
Their delivery mechanisms and ground infrastructure aren’t advanced enough to guarantee launch, and a single Fisher Price nuke is not game over. Iran with the capacity to build a bomb can be dealt with now or later. Iran with an actual nuke has to be dealt with now, or else be accepted as a regional nuclear power. (Which would mean a Saudi nuke. Which would mean a Qatari nuke, and probably also Emirati nuke.)
It's really amazing how a bunch of politicians in the US including can just repeat a claim and Trump can just prime a statement like "the JCPOA was a terrible deal" and people that should be smart will gradually start believing it without ever reading a single word of the JCPOA document.
No they can't. Canada can. Japan can, SK can. But Iran poured concrete into the rods of its only, then completed heavy water reactor that would have been able to produce the plutonium needed right after they signed the JCPOA before actually receiving any of the concessions they were supposed to get which would have actually given them leverage.This was also detailed in Wendy Sherman's book.
The entire airspace around Iran is controlled by the US's allies and Iran's enemies. Iran would never be able to fly a bomb anywhere close to Israel. They would need a ballistic missile delivery mechanism which's research was confirmed by the US to have been stopped in 2003.
Honestly I don't see why any country would ever enter a long-term agreement with the US. The Constitution says that the president negotiates international agreements but that Congress must ratify them. Due to procedural rules basically making it impossible for Congress to pass legislature, any agreements that don't go through Congress are simply executive agreements that can be terminated with a stroke of a pen by a future president. This means that any remotely controversial agreements can't be expected to last beyond the current president's term.
Iran supplies Shahed long range drones to Russia for years now. They became their staple of terror bombings since.
They are also deployed domestic production of them in Russia but a substantial amount of components (foremost motors) still delivered from Iran. If you look at the chart of Russian Shahed launches you can see a lagging dip in early August after Israel's bombing of Iran in June.
When you say lopsided, are you considering only the deaths since 2022, or the 14K+ additional deaths that occurred in the war since 2014? Because it evens out a lot if you do.
The civilian nuclear program. Not the enrich to 60% and build secret underground enrichment facilities in violation of the NPT -- for no reason whatsoever, I am assured -- nuclear program.
It was not reservoirs but lack of rain that led to their problems. Now if only you had reduced your emissions they would not have this problem. I’m glad you care for them so much
This is quite a distortion of the facts to push an agenda.
Desalination technology can solve their problems completely, but they armed proxies that attacked the two countries in the region (Saudi Arabia and Israel) that can help them.
They also imprisoned the one qualified guy in their country who blew the whistle on their water mismanagement (e.g. farming water intensive crops in a desert), Dr. Madani.
You could read the Wikipedia page to learn the other man-made reasons behind this crisis. That's preferable than coming here to play defense for a corrupt theocracy. Not that I doubt that climate change is one of the causes.
You think that's the only person that talks about the oligarchs excess farming? It's being talked about nonstop. The government just doesn't do anything about it.
Iran has desalination facilities(75 in 2022 to be exact). But not enough and obviously only by the water. Iran has way less energy production than Saudi Arabia, which per capita would put it at a 4th or so. That's with the fact that Iran is a massively industrialized economy which none of the states in the area are. A lot of the UAE and especially the modern desalination plants are built in collaboration with France, Spain, China and Japan. Desalination technology transfer and construction by third parties in Iran is specifically restricted by the US.
One of the things that would have helped Iran's energy problems is nuclear energy and we all know how that goes. It's kinda cute how you don't think that every single one of these facilities is a target for the US and Israel if Iran does not have any weapons deterrent. Iraq's civil infrastructure was leveled by the US in the beginning of the war in 2003.