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.
Old techniques like Qanats and Shabestans aren't going to help Iranians deal with effluents in the water, or straight-up water misuse by businesses controlled by the Ayatollahs.
> 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.
In Iran the cause of the water shortage is at least 99.9% the current government's policies. If global warming accelerated matters it was by days or weeks probably.
But you have to admit it would be very funny if a theocracy was forced to abandon it's capital by forces of nature.
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).
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
IRGC is a bunch of oligarchs who operate for their individual interests. It’s not as much of a unified entity as you’d imagine. It’s a vehicle for corruption.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Louisiana refused federal highway funding for long enough that their highway system went to shit. They refused due to a federal mandate that the drinking age be raised to 21.
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.
They shouldn't be my problem, and I say that as someone who lived in a flood prone home with no flood insurance as it was ridiculously expensive for pretty terrible coverage. I wouldn't have lived in that house if I was unable or unwilling to deal with the consequences of a flood, no one else should either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Parks need to be landscape maintained, so does new development—-often in very similar ways that a golf course is (water, chemical, maintenance). Unless around you simply doesn’t have the open land space to support the area’s park and development needs, what is actually wasted?
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.
I think the point is that you can't ban houses through policy but you can ban golf courses. So like it or not (and I sympathize with your point), the policy knobs that can be used to curb water can only directly influence things like golf courses, but they can indirectly affect home water usage through utility pricing.
Public parks directly serve way more people than golf courses and don’t discriminate based on income (or class, ethnicity, etc) to the same degree, if at all.
I have absolutely enjoyed my time on the golf course, but much like recreational cruise ships I’ll be perfectly content with them gone too. Just because I enjoy something doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate how wasteful it is and would oppose ending or at least reducing it.
I just don’t see the waste. Unless you are just going to let those spaces go wild again you will have similar efforts to maintain the spaces and with potential similar water usage.
> you will have similar efforts to maintain the spaces and with potential similar water usage.
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).
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.
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.
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 BBC is a public service. Saudi Arabia is a country with a LONG list of RECENT human rights abuses, migrant abuses and exploitation, human trafficking, child sex trafficking, and shamelessly slaughtering journalists on foreign soil.
Oh wait… “public service” that destabilizes countries and then you come in and preach such things about human rights when one of the root causes were in fact your nice public service. Just look up how BBC supported the Mullahs against the Shah in Iran in 79.
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.
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.
This equation is extremely reductionist in ways that end up giving the Saudi government's stance as much merit as possible, while denying it to the UK every step of the way. The implication of what you're saying is that the structure of the government and the precise way in which it owns a state media outlet doesn't really matter, if there's any ownership then it's a propaganda mouthpiece regardless of all other circumstances.
But as far I can see, authoritarian states tend to have a direct path from their governments' sacred opinion to the eyes and ears of the people, there are levers of direct influence within their media industries that let them directly dictate what the journalists will pretend to report on. One can debate back and forth about how the BBC may suffer from the biases of its British writers, implicit pressure from their government, individual cases of bias and even attempts at government overreach, but despite all of it, none of these infractions would rival even 1/10th of what countries like Saudi Arabia or Russia do with their media. Despite all of their countless issues, the UK still values independence far more than what the Saudis could even dream of. Moreover, the BBC is implicitly checked by having neighboring media outlets with no government ownership, while the countries I listed exercise degrees of total control over the entire industry.
The BBC may in individual instances be biased towards the current sitting government or pro-British views or whatever, but it is not a blind mouthpiece like these other countries. It's not simply a difference in preferring one ruthless government narrative over another.
> This equation is extremely reductionist in ways that end up giving the Saudi government's stance as much merit as possible
What I posit is absolutely symmetric, so you are just making this up.
I don't understand why the way the government body is elected (or not) is material in any shape or form here. If you are British, sure, perhaps you get a say. I am not and I don't really care what the majority of UK (or rather whoever counts the votes) thinks. As far as I am concerned, it's just another foreign entity who has their interests that are at times unaligned with me. Heck, the bigger and more perceived to be legitimate, they have more power, to the degree they had the audacity and effectiveness to interfere with my country's elections. I don't think ArabNews has such capacity.
FWIW, BBC runs a World Service targeting people abroad in their languages. Is that just out of goodness of their hearts? Gimmie a break. A state funded media is always propaganda by charter, sometimes with an ancillary news division. Propaganda does not equate to lies all the time. The best form or propaganda, and the most effective, would in fact not obviously lie most of the times, but be biased when it matters. UK is hardly alone in this. US also has similar apparatus under VOA or NPR or PBS.
P.S. I think we are getting out of the core topic. I am not debating reliability of the media per se. What I objected to is the advocacy to always link to someone's preferred media, as opposed to preferred story (either due to the quality of that particular story, website, or original sourcing).
> What I posit is absolutely symmetric, so you are just making this up.
What I said was followed by three paragraphs of me discussing why exactly I posited what I did.
> I don't understand why the way the government body is elected
Who talked about elections? I certainly never brought elections up. What I did bring up, though, is that the Saudi Arabian government dictates directly what is allowed to be a media outlet and who is allowed to be a journalist. They have ways of influencing national discourse that the UK just never had. It's not about how they're ruled (though it is also a side factor), it's that they're a far more overbearing and authoritarian state. This is what the "structure of the government" referred to - now that I read it back, I realize it could've been confused for something else.
Running international services of course has a national interest for the government (in addition to a business interest for the company). I never said that the BBC's existence wasn't good for the UK or that it was completely unbiased and independent, in fact I made sure to not paint them as unequivocally good anywhere - merely far better than what they do in Saudi Arabia. Ultimately I never was arguing about the start of the conversation (choosing preferred media vs. preferred story), but the framing of different national media outlets as completely equivalent things, just with different flavors of which party line they follow.
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?
That's usually not the bar though, many who refuse saudi media due to saudi ownership would be completely okay with al jazeera regardless of qatari ownership, even though both countries have very dubious intentions and government system
Saudi Arabia is one of the world leaders by number of death sentences. They have no qualms with putting you to death or giving you life imprisonment for all sorts of things, including "wrong-speech" in the form of leaving the state religion, or opposing the government. The UK isn't some shining beacon of freedom by Western standards, but it's not even in the same universe as Saudi Arabia.
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.
"Misleading" is a stretch. It's not even controversial imo, because his actual intent was provably the same as what the BBC represented with this stitching. It's a non-issue for all practical purposes and only a problem on paper. The fact the BBC is holding themselves to a higher standard and integrity on this is actually a very good thing here (which you allude to as well).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So sprayed metal particles from airplanes for weather modification are only "chemtrails" if it's done covertly.
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.
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?
[0] https://youtu.be/n8kSGH4I8Ps
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.
Drinking water is such a tiny proportion of total water use that it is essentially irrelevant.
Water for farming and power stations are the things that will be hit first.
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.
> bad decisions from the last 50
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
Old techniques like Qanats and Shabestans aren't going to help Iranians deal with effluents in the water, or straight-up water misuse by businesses controlled by the Ayatollahs.
> 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...
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.
In Iran the cause of the water shortage is at least 99.9% the current government's policies. If global warming accelerated matters it was by days or weeks probably.
But you have to admit it would be very funny if a theocracy was forced to abandon it's capital by forces of nature.
you mean more than the 1.1 million afghans they have already deported this year?
>>> How should we think about cloud seeding?
It's a way to take someone else's rain.
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
> Under international law, countries have complete and exclusive sovereignty over this airspace
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.
who owns the rain? what if it was just going to fall in the oceans?
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.
That's just...wrong.
"78% of global precipitation occurs over the ocean" [1]
[1] https://gpm.nasa.gov/education/articles/nasa-earth-science-w...
We’ll find out soon. Whoever is “taking” the rain is the one that owns it is my guess.
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.
Cloud seeding is real, buf unpredictable. Youre trying to get moisture to coalesce around the "seed" then fall where you want it.
The dubious part is the coditions to rain are chaotic patameters and unpredictable.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107328
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).
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
IRGC is a bunch of oligarchs who operate for their individual interests. It’s not as much of a unified entity as you’d imagine. It’s a vehicle for corruption.
I found a recent study that claimed to offer experimental confirmation of a mechanism for cloud seeding to work:
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.
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.
Cite? Silver iodide is common, silver is not particularly expensive, and cloud seeding is used quite extensively - including in quite poor countries.
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.
Source: https://archive.is/b1bp1
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.
If you own water rights, selling them to a city at near desalination rates is way more profitable than farming.
So desalination only makes economic sense after removing all farms from an area.
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.
The problem is that the farmers own the water, its not about selling it to them but getting it from them.
Farmers do not own the water that flows through their property. This is a Riparian rights concern and is quite complicated.
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
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.
Two problems with that, typically unelected bureaucrats get to set the price, and political complexity is the worse kind.
Dubai has farms fed on desalinated water and the food they produce is still cheaper than imported equivalents.
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 hard part is getting all that water to parts inland and uphill
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.
I don't really know what they're talking about, states almost never refuse federal funding for anything.
Louisiana refused federal highway funding for long enough that their highway system went to shit. They refused due to a federal mandate that the drinking age be raised to 21.
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.
I did say “almost”. I’m aware it has happened.
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.
Oh I hear you, I have family in Phoenix.
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.
Like people who build in flood zones and don’t have flood insurance, they do have a nasty tendency to make their problem your problem somehow though.
They shouldn't be my problem, and I say that as someone who lived in a flood prone home with no flood insurance as it was ridiculously expensive for pretty terrible coverage. I wouldn't have lived in that house if I was unable or unwilling to deal with the consequences of a flood, no one else should either.
Should == I wish, unfortunately.
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.
??? 20 gallons get reused, 100% of it goes back into the system. If somehow 5% was destroyed from showering we wouldn't have any water left.
Some evaporates. It will eventually come down again as rain somewhere else but as far as the original city is concerned the water is used.
You know what they meant. They obviously mean the system controlled by us - not rain and shit.
Is this true in many places in the USA?
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.
Texas is doing things to try and address it. Prop 4 passed allocating another billion a year in sales taxes to go towards water infrastructure.
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.
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 always gotten our water by having torrential rains inconsistently
I think OP is talking more about groundwater depletion:
https://abc7amarillo.com/news/local/panhandle-runs-on-water-...
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.
Wouldn’t leaks from underground pipes end up back in the aquifer and not really be a net water loss in the long term?
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.
Texas state laws make regulating groundwater use very difficult. The Trinity aquifer is probably going to go dry in ten years.
Wouldn’t it just go back into groundwater?
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.
Nothing a golf course ban couldn't reverse
Are you sure?
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.
Is there a better argument for golf courses than “think of the jobs”?
Sure. It’s a recreation that many people get joy from doing…
Just because it may not be “your thing”…doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.
I enjoy playing golf and also realize how wasteful it is. Id support repurposing the spaces near me for parks/zoning usage.
Parks need to be landscape maintained, so does new development—-often in very similar ways that a golf course is (water, chemical, maintenance). Unless around you simply doesn’t have the open land space to support the area’s park and development needs, what is actually wasted?
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.
I think the point is that you can't ban houses through policy but you can ban golf courses. So like it or not (and I sympathize with your point), the policy knobs that can be used to curb water can only directly influence things like golf courses, but they can indirectly affect home water usage through utility pricing.
Public parks directly serve way more people than golf courses and don’t discriminate based on income (or class, ethnicity, etc) to the same degree, if at all.
I have absolutely enjoyed my time on the golf course, but much like recreational cruise ships I’ll be perfectly content with them gone too. Just because I enjoy something doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate how wasteful it is and would oppose ending or at least reducing it.
I just don’t see the waste. Unless you are just going to let those spaces go wild again you will have similar efforts to maintain the spaces and with potential similar water usage.
> you will have similar efforts to maintain the spaces and with potential similar water usage.
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).
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.
Those of us who live in other states also have to prepare for the refugees fleeing ruined lands who will bring their destructive ideology with them.
How would you prepare?
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.
It’s so lucky that even though refugees from other states bring negative consequences at least refugees from other countries don’t.
Every refugee brings change. We can disagree about the desirability of changes brought by refugees from different circumstances.
Undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than legal Texans, as per the NIJ[0].
[0] https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG...
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.
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
BBC is UK propaganda and fine; Arabnews is Saudi propaganda and not fine. Who are you to judge?
The BBC is a public service. Saudi Arabia is a country with a LONG list of RECENT human rights abuses, migrant abuses and exploitation, human trafficking, child sex trafficking, and shamelessly slaughtering journalists on foreign soil.
Oh wait… “public service” that destabilizes countries and then you come in and preach such things about human rights when one of the root causes were in fact your nice public service. Just look up how BBC supported the Mullahs against the Shah in Iran in 79.
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.
BBC, literally one of the most reliable news sources in the world is according to you "UK propaganda". Feel free to expand on this
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.
[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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
> 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.
Widely held: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_independence
The corporate governance is significantly different as well.
Dude, their chief just resigned. Maybe pick another day to shill for the state-funded media?
I'd make the case that the resignations are a good thing. It shows a commitment to journalism as a profession.
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.
This equation is extremely reductionist in ways that end up giving the Saudi government's stance as much merit as possible, while denying it to the UK every step of the way. The implication of what you're saying is that the structure of the government and the precise way in which it owns a state media outlet doesn't really matter, if there's any ownership then it's a propaganda mouthpiece regardless of all other circumstances.
But as far I can see, authoritarian states tend to have a direct path from their governments' sacred opinion to the eyes and ears of the people, there are levers of direct influence within their media industries that let them directly dictate what the journalists will pretend to report on. One can debate back and forth about how the BBC may suffer from the biases of its British writers, implicit pressure from their government, individual cases of bias and even attempts at government overreach, but despite all of it, none of these infractions would rival even 1/10th of what countries like Saudi Arabia or Russia do with their media. Despite all of their countless issues, the UK still values independence far more than what the Saudis could even dream of. Moreover, the BBC is implicitly checked by having neighboring media outlets with no government ownership, while the countries I listed exercise degrees of total control over the entire industry.
The BBC may in individual instances be biased towards the current sitting government or pro-British views or whatever, but it is not a blind mouthpiece like these other countries. It's not simply a difference in preferring one ruthless government narrative over another.
> This equation is extremely reductionist in ways that end up giving the Saudi government's stance as much merit as possible
What I posit is absolutely symmetric, so you are just making this up.
I don't understand why the way the government body is elected (or not) is material in any shape or form here. If you are British, sure, perhaps you get a say. I am not and I don't really care what the majority of UK (or rather whoever counts the votes) thinks. As far as I am concerned, it's just another foreign entity who has their interests that are at times unaligned with me. Heck, the bigger and more perceived to be legitimate, they have more power, to the degree they had the audacity and effectiveness to interfere with my country's elections. I don't think ArabNews has such capacity.
FWIW, BBC runs a World Service targeting people abroad in their languages. Is that just out of goodness of their hearts? Gimmie a break. A state funded media is always propaganda by charter, sometimes with an ancillary news division. Propaganda does not equate to lies all the time. The best form or propaganda, and the most effective, would in fact not obviously lie most of the times, but be biased when it matters. UK is hardly alone in this. US also has similar apparatus under VOA or NPR or PBS.
P.S. I think we are getting out of the core topic. I am not debating reliability of the media per se. What I objected to is the advocacy to always link to someone's preferred media, as opposed to preferred story (either due to the quality of that particular story, website, or original sourcing).
> What I posit is absolutely symmetric, so you are just making this up.
What I said was followed by three paragraphs of me discussing why exactly I posited what I did.
> I don't understand why the way the government body is elected
Who talked about elections? I certainly never brought elections up. What I did bring up, though, is that the Saudi Arabian government dictates directly what is allowed to be a media outlet and who is allowed to be a journalist. They have ways of influencing national discourse that the UK just never had. It's not about how they're ruled (though it is also a side factor), it's that they're a far more overbearing and authoritarian state. This is what the "structure of the government" referred to - now that I read it back, I realize it could've been confused for something else.
Running international services of course has a national interest for the government (in addition to a business interest for the company). I never said that the BBC's existence wasn't good for the UK or that it was completely unbiased and independent, in fact I made sure to not paint them as unequivocally good anywhere - merely far better than what they do in Saudi Arabia. Ultimately I never was arguing about the start of the conversation (choosing preferred media vs. preferred story), but the framing of different national media outlets as completely equivalent things, just with different flavors of which party line they follow.
The BBC / UK version is potentially worse, because in the UK they have a situation where elected officials don’t actually run the country.
The BBC is independent in so far as an institution of unelected officials effectively run the country: bureaucrats.
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?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B9tzoGFszog
> But I must make one thing absolutely clear: there can be no question of the BBC ever giving in to government pressure.
Meaningless.
The UK is run by tyrannical bureaucrats, not the Government.
That's usually not the bar though, many who refuse saudi media due to saudi ownership would be completely okay with al jazeera regardless of qatari ownership, even though both countries have very dubious intentions and government system
UK does not have Freedom of Speech.
It does if your reference point is Saudi Arabia.
The UK is number one for wrong-speech arrests.
Saudi Arabia is one of the world leaders by number of death sentences. They have no qualms with putting you to death or giving you life imprisonment for all sorts of things, including "wrong-speech" in the form of leaving the state religion, or opposing the government. The UK isn't some shining beacon of freedom by Western standards, but it's not even in the same universe as Saudi Arabia.
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.
"Misleading" is a stretch. It's not even controversial imo, because his actual intent was provably the same as what the BBC represented with this stitching. It's a non-issue for all practical purposes and only a problem on paper. The fact the BBC is holding themselves to a higher standard and integrity on this is actually a very good thing here (which you allude to as well).
BBC is propaganda coated with a thin paint of respectability.
BBC == OK Arab News == Not OK
What is your opinion on Al Jazeera then?
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)
Are there any good books which layout out the true state of Iran on the ground today?
Not a book, but a 'fact'book; https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/iran/
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.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/NewIran/comments/1oy91ju/the_islami...
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.
It’s likely very out of date (Iran has a young, culturally dynamic population) but I really enjoyed https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mantle-Prophet-Religion-Politics-Ir... - I read it before visiting Iran as a tourist 15 years ago.
Has this ever been proven to actually work?
It can make existing moisture in the air fall as rain where you want it to. Like over a water reservoir.
But it obviously can't create more moisture than already is in the air.
It works to e.g. prompt hail to fall outside of cities rather than directly onto cities.
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.
Apparently there are companies trying similar things in the US - https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2025/11/13/cloud-seedin...
First I'd heard of it... though Salt Lake City did just have its rainiest October on record.
It has some effect, but it’s not an easy solution.
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.
the U.S did experiments in Vietnam that were fairly promising back in the 70s
Operation Popeye
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye
No, and explanations on how it could work are implausible.
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.
Governments spending money on something doesn't mean it works. Bridges to nowhere are totally a thing
> Bridges to nowhere are totally a thing
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...
Autotranslaton:
> 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.
It's at least better value than the once-proposed ~$400 million Gravina Island bridge in Alaska -- to serve 50 residents and an airport
Yeah, because Dubai is known for their prudent financials. Lol.
The UAE has partnered with the US and NASA on cloud seeding research, and the US has been doing it for decades
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/18/united-arab-emirates-is-usin...
Sure. Ski resorts in Utah do it all the time to make it snow.
The Chinese pretty blatantly used it to tailor things for their Olympics.
I’m a little surprised how this has gone under the radar,
considering the black box “effing with the weather cycles” truly is.
Considering it is done for many years all over the world no reason that particular should be on anyone's radar.
No, the concept - not the “China” detail.
It’s being discussed here (and elsewhere) like the US company talking about it is broaching a new concept.
Ski resorts in the US have been doing it for a long time.
No need to point the finger at the nasty Chinese.
See other comment.
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.
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.
Grok apparently has a sense of humor: "it's part of broader water management strategies including prayers and conservation".
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.
Mmm yeah keep digging that hole. Maybe eventually we’ll pop up the other end and find paradise.
Or we could put 3,100 people on house arrest and the major emissions will stop.
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.
Bro, we already are there... and the 3,100 are at the front of the parade to get there
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.
So covid lockdown?
So, the prayers went unanswered? Outrageous!
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.
Discussion from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45871043
Iran is in a bad predicament. Largely self inflicted but that in no way diminishes from the horror of a looming humanitarian disaster.
"Cloud seeding involves spraying particles such as silver iodide and salt into clouds from aircraft to trigger rain." So... chemtrails?
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.
https://library.noaa.gov/weather-climate/weather-modificatio...
Israel tried cloud seeding for decades and gave up after not being happy with the results https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/62/3/JAMC-D-...
China also had a big program. They tried to create rain for the Beijing olympics
Really?
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.
So sprayed metal particles from airplanes for weather modification are only "chemtrails" if it's done covertly.
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.
I'd say not quite, but closer. The original
> 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.
Ok. All of the handful of folks I've heard talk about chemtrails used the word to refer to the contrail that they thought had something added to it.
Exactly! That's spot on. Conspiracy of covert chemical spraying via contrail cover up.