Live data from Hacker News

Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites

arabnews.com

91–100 of 224 posts

Re: Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is quite a distortion of the facts to push an agenda. Desalination technology can solve their problems completely, but they armed proxies that attacked the two countries in the region (Saudi Arabia and Israel) that can help them. They also imprisoned the one qualified guy in their country who blew the whistle on their water mismanagement (e.g. farming water intensive crops in a desert), Dr. Madani. You could rea…

You think that's the only person that talks about the oligarchs excess farming? It's being talked about nonstop. The government just doesn't do anything about it.

Iran has desalination facilities(75 in 2022 to be exact). But not enough and obviously only by the water. Iran has way less energy production than Saudi Arabia, which per capita would put it at a 4th or so. That's with the fact that Iran is a massively industrialized economy which none of the states in the area are. A lot of the UAE and especially the modern desalination plants are built in collaboration with France, Spain, China and Japan. Desalination technology transfer and construction by third parties in Iran is specifically restricted by the US.

One of the things that would have helped Iran's energy problems is nuclear energy and we all know how that goes. It's kinda cute how you don't think that every single one of these facilities is a target for the US and Israel if Iran does not have any weapons deterrent. Iraq's civil infrastructure was leveled by the US in the beginning of the war in 2003.

Re: Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites

#92

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.

Re: Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> There are innocent people being killed (15K+) on both sides of the Ukraine conflict. But it's more than a little lopsided, and there's only one aggressor in the war – one who could choose to end it at any time.

When you say lopsided, are you considering only the deaths since 2022, or the 14K+ additional deaths that occurred in the war since 2014? Because it evens out a lot if you do.

Re: Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites

#94

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.

[flagged]

Re: Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites

#95
post #55
post #2

Has this ever been proven to actually work?

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.

Re: Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you build all the technology needed to actually build a nuke, when you enrich uranium to near weapons-grade, but you never actually assemble the nuke, are you trying to building a nuke? Or are just messing with everyone, trying to make them think you're building a nuke when you're totally not building a nuke (pinkie promise)? Either way, if you are threatening to annihilate another country, I wouldn't gamble on…

> if you are threatening to annihilate another country, I wouldn't gamble on the latter. you mean what Israel is doing and saying every single day? Doesn't seem to bother anyone.

In the Iran-israel conflict it's pretty clear cut who started the rhetoric of annihilating the other side first (spoiler, it was Iran)

Anyway, I cant comprehend why anyone would try to defend the actions of the Iranian regime, it's just a horrible regime.

Re: Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites

#97
post #77

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)

Re: Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites

#98

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.

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 wat…

Wouldn’t it just go back into groundwater?

Re: Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites

#99
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites

#100

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 actuall…

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.

Post reply on HN