Iran is in a bad predicament. Largely self inflicted but that in no way diminishes from the horror of a looming humanitarian disaster.
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?
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse#Droug...
But you have to admit it would be very funny if a theocracy was forced to abandon it's capital by forces of nature.
That said, we never had the climate change that strongly on history.
Water for farming and power stations are the things that will be hit first.
And it’s not just water going away—it’s impingement by salt as well.
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.
Some of these "bad decisions" are ignoring the old systems, and ways. The hubris of "modernization" as better.
The water systems of old Iran are fascinating, and well covered if you hunt around for the info. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat
The dubious part is the coditions to rain are chaotic patameters and unpredictable.
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).
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
It's a way to take someone else's rain.
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.
"78% of global precipitation occurs over the ocean" [1]
[1] https://gpm.nasa.gov/education/articles/nasa-earth-science-w...
Iran isn’t operating under the protections nor restrictions of international law. Neither is its relevant neighbor. (Practically.)
What they choose to do and how the other chooses to interpret it is very much…up in the air.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1716995115
> 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.
https://library.noaa.gov/weather-climate/weather-modificatio...
China also had a big program. They tried to create rain for the Beijing olympics
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 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.
Language sure is interesting.
I guess there's also a spectrum of what covert means. If a government does this but only announces it in places where only a few people hear about it from the official source, I guess that still counts as public and so not chemtrails.
> Any idea except "it's a contrail or non-hidden spraying of some sort"
Meaning the chemtrail conspiracy is "contrails are actually cover ups for chemical spraying that isn't otherwise known", not just "if chemical spraying is covert, then people made a language rule saying it should be referred to as a chemtrail instead".
I.e. chemtrails refers specifically to the conspiracy about a contrail based cover up for covert chemical spraying by world powers, not just a term for a claim that someone somewhere has sprayed chemicals covertly.
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.
I think OP is talking more about groundwater depletion:
https://abc7amarillo.com/news/local/panhandle-runs-on-water-...
Nobody wants to vote for water rationing, and the state can’t even enforce consumption limits against corporations and the wealthy.
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.
It isn't common, but states have absolutely forwent federal funding to stand their ground, and in my opinion they should do it more often. Its a huge weakness in our federal system that states are so dependent on federal funding for long lived programs.
But I have property in Arizona and I have a real hard time imagining this state saying no thank you if offered water. It’s sort of a big deal out there these days.
My main concern there is that states can and should turn down federal funding if it comes with strings the state isn't interested in accepting. Our federal system becomes fairly useless if states are so dependent on federal funding that we can no longer have 50 different experiments running to try out different legislative approaches.
So desalination only makes economic sense after removing all farms from an area.
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.
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.
Just because it may not be “your thing”…doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.
I think folks get caught up on golf course water usage, but every course around me uses reclaimed water. If houses were built there, that would no longer be reclaimed water, but potable water. Also I am convinced that landscape chemical usage would go up as well.
I have close family and friends in the business, I guarantee that huge efforts go into making sure not a single drop of irrigation isn’t used unless it’s needed. I can tell you that my neighbors don’t pay that much attention to their exact irrigation needs—simply watering for as long as they can, when they can. I doubt seriously that replacing a golf course with more homes would net much water savings…at least around me.
Also, pretty sure you will be hard pressed in 2025 to find courses actively discriminating anyone who has the $$ to spend to play a round. Every course I have played in the last 40 years seems to have all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds, ethnicities, and income.
I think the folks who try this ecological impact argument and want to push homes into that space just don’t think through all the consequences or assume there is a greater landscape effort than it actually takes. It’s a lot of work, but is it less that the combined work of 200 homes? Probably not. A couple of tractors vs 200 mowers? Landscape chemicals on perhaps 20 acres of the 150-200 (tees and greens, spot treat everywhere else) vs 3 homes per acre treating their whole lawn? 300-400 more vehicles driving in and out of the area everyday?
You want to outlaw them and let them go wild, I can accept that argument and can’t counter it but for “golf is fun and people enjoy it.” However if the concept that houses are better ecologically…I think that is a huge stretch.
For more people across a broader socio-economic background. I mean come on let’s just acknowledge the elephant in the room: golf is a rich sport for upper-income/rich people that requires a massive amount of space that then often has a deleterious effect on surrounding real estate (i.e. inflates it and prices people out).
Yeah, not gonna attract the lower income folks because it’s not a zero dollar hobby, but from experience I know the middle class is well represented.
I hope to see this legislation in TN changed to allow cloudseeding.
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.
[0] https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG...
The only real usage of water is evaporation and that's stuff like growing plants and cooling towers.
You have seperate drainage for shower water and effluent?
That’s certainly not the case here in Australia.
Here, typically storm water and household waste water are carried over a common system. Usually if it rains more than 3mm in 24hrs the treatment systems are overwhelmed and untreated waste is sent out to sea. Coastal areas anyways.
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.
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.
Source: https://archive.is/b1bp1
https://www.texaswater.org/prop-4
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.
Religions
Muslim (official) 98.5%, Christian 0.7%, Baha'i 0.3%, agnostic 0.3%, other (includes Zoroastrian, Jewish, Hindu) 0.2% (2020 est.)
Compared to the United Kingdom; https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/united-king...
Religions
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.)
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.
What you're describing would, by contrast, would kill hundreds of millions of not billions of people in a few years or more realistically, cause extreme levels of violence to undo it.
Indeed, I imagine anyone who actually managed to do such a thing would be violently murdered by the public and their death celebrated for centuries.
BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4172yl0l1o
Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/pictures/iranians-pray-rain-drought-...
EDIT: yeah, let's not use arabnews as a news source please: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_News
What is your opinion on Al Jazeera then?
Hacker News guidelines[1] recommend posting the original source, not BBC over Arab News.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
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.
Independence? That's just your opinion. They are clearly better at marketing than the Saudis.
The corporate governance is significantly different as well.
Compared to whatever tf the UK thinks it’s doing.
Why should UK citizens want their government to invest in infrastructure and defence capabilities if they’re just handing same to radical Islamists.
> But I must make one thing absolutely clear: there can be no question of the BBC ever giving in to government pressure.
The UK is run by tyrannical bureaucrats, not the Government.
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.
Re Saudi Arabia “journalist” you do realize he was from a famous intelligence community family. Hardly a simple “journalist.” On balance what MBS has done in terms of freedom and modernization of his country should be appreciated not put down simplistically. Statecraft is not always clean.
The world isn’t that simple as presented to western audiences.
paxys•2mo ago
UebVar•2mo ago
thepratt•2mo ago
malfist•2mo ago
magicalhippo•2mo ago
Come on now. It's not nowhere, there's 24 people living on that island, of course that's worth building a $45 million bridge for them[1].
(just the latest silly bridge project here in Norway)
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/nordland-fylkesrad-vil-bygge-bro...
gus_massa•2mo ago
> 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.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamn%C3%B8ya,_Vevelstad
> 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.
Polizeiposaune•2mo ago
meindnoch•2mo ago
Marsymars•2mo ago
gus_massa•2mo ago
adgjlsfhk1•2mo ago
CapitalistCartr•2mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye
testing22321•2mo ago
drewmate•2mo ago
First I'd heard of it... though Salt Lake City did just have its rainiest October on record.
WhereIsTheTruth•2mo ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/18/united-arab-emirates-is-usin...
BurningFrog•2mo ago
But it obviously can't create more moisture than already is in the air.
DANmode•2mo ago
I’m a little surprised how this has gone under the radar,
considering the black box “effing with the weather cycles” truly is.
blackoil•2mo ago
DANmode•2mo ago
It’s being discussed here (and elsewhere) like the US company talking about it is broaching a new concept.
testing22321•2mo ago
No need to point the finger at the nasty Chinese.
DANmode•2mo ago
Aurornis•2mo ago
It’s more of a modulator on top of weather, not a switch you can flip to induce as much rain as you want on demand.