United Arab Emirates is using cloud seeding tech to make it rain | Hacker News Reader

United Arab Emirates is using cloud seeding tech to make it rain

cnbc.com

52 pointsAlgoRitmo64 comments

> The United Nations projects that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will face absolute water scarcity across the world. The Middle East stood out as one of the most water-stressed areas with around 83% of the population in the region prone to experiencing high levels of water stress.

> Weather forecasters at the center can observe precipitation patterns in clouds and identify suitable clouds to seed, with the aim of increasing the rate of rainfall. Once they spot the right cloud, they instruct pilots to take to the air with their specialized aircrafts loaded with hygroscopic flares on the plane’s wings.

I wonder if someone did the math of what that would look like at scale. How much would using kerosene to deliver the cloud seed material to introduce rain accelerate the problem we're trying to solve here? We can only hope that we find a way to electrify that fleet of airplanes or switch to something that's much less energy intensive like drones.

The weather is not the problem. Overpopulation is. And it is a local problem, so limiting population elsewhere doesn't help.

You can call it overpopulation, I call it underdesalination. There is lot's of sun there and lot's of seawater.

According to ChatGPT it takes at least 3 kWh to desalinate 1000l of salt-water.

Following that math and its estimates on solar panels that would come down to 0.003 m^2 of solar panels per liters.

UAE is about 83.6 billion m^2, lets assume half of that can be covered in solar panels, so that would be enough to desalinate 13 trillion liters of water.

That sounds like it could be enough for a country like UAE by a factor of 10, if ChatGPT's math is right (probably not) and water can be desalinated instantly (probably not).

If your thought experiment leads you to consider that half the country, or even 5% of the country, should be covered in solar panels, then there a problem somewhere.

So your reference is “According to ChatGPT”. Did you feel anything when typing this?

So, your argument is "you used ChatGPT for this". They didn't even write the comment with GPT, they just used it as a starting point for some napkin math. The other commenter not only dismissed the idea, but also emphasized how unrealistic and poorly planned it is by responding to the contents of the content, including how absurd it would be to implement that much solar coverage. I'm sure it's fun to make fun of the large language model, but at least it provided some drive to the conversation, even if its value was in being corrected. Did you feel like your addition was significant?

No, I didn‘t intend to make an argument, I was asking a genuine question because I‘m trying to understand the perspective on the world of people who consider LLM a kind of „source“. To me OP reads like “according to my Ouija board” and I’m frightened by the idea that people on HN are using the output of LLM as “quotable facts” (and not as a tool to start further research outside of it, which would be fine IMO.) I’d like to know if the poster had any doubts using ChatGPT as a source of fact to base their calculations on, when they obviously had access to the internet with all necessary sources to properlt calculate an answer for this basic question.

Desalination is expensive, but it’s not just about the desalination simply pumping water up hill is costly.

Nevada averages 5,500 ft above sea level. Moving 1 acre foot of water up that high at 100% efficiency takes ~5.6 MWh and a single mid sized farm can use that much water hourly.

Start talking 25 inches of water per year across millions of acres and you’ll need a lot of solar. Worse, commercial reverse osmosis desalination only removes around 95-99% of salt so that farmland is quickly getting degraded.

Then don't farm in Nevada?? Humans don't consume that much water and lot of it can be recycled.

Humans generally use negligible mounts of water, the only meaningful water shortages are based around agriculture.

So don’t do water intensive farming in Nevada?

Nevada is just an example South Dakota is only 2,200 feet above sea level, but now you need an extra long pipe causing its own issues.

The point is desalination isn’t some magic fix that makes everything ok. The remaining salt is probably the biggest issue.

"The point is desalination isn’t some magic fix that makes everything ok. The remaining salt is probably the biggest issue."

No, but it is a whole lot easier close to the sea. Like most of UAEs cities are. The remaining salt, you could just pipe out in the ocean, if you go in some km towards a current and spread it out enough. Salt in the ocean is only a local problem, if it does not diffuse quickly enough.

And for deserts with a high altitude or that are more inland, no, desalination is probably not the solution.

Salt in the desalinated water not salt in the ocean.

take a black pvc pipe,stick one end into seawatter,add destillation collection crevices and overflowholes,put the other end up high on a hill

That doesn’t work. There’s a pressure difference across a desalinization system, it doesn’t output high pressure water.

its desalination and pumping via destillation by sunlight. it works.

its basically a heat driven capillary system.

"5,500 ft above sea level"

What your talking about works on small hills near sea level, but runs into real physical limitations. It's also slow and thus vastly more expensive per acre foot than commercial systems.

You can't fix shortage of agricultural or industrial water with desalination because you end up with a bag of potatoes for $50

Desalination only solves water shortages for human consumption. Water shortages mean famine

A single hectare of potatoes need about 7,000 tonns / m3 of water. Desalination costs $1/m3, The cost of growing russet type potatoes for the fresh market was $2032 per acre. So potatoes will be 3 times more expensive

For wheat, the difference is even worse

True, but if you want to grow in the desert, there are more efficient methods and crops to grow, like in closed greenhouses, that keep most of the water.

Why not ship the potatoes in?

People screaming overpopulation are always and everywhere on a slippery slope to eugenics.

Carrying capacity is mediated by technology. WRT water, wastewater reclamation and desalination have a lot of gains that aren’t widely deployed. Also rewilding and reforestation can do a lot to mitigate creeping aridity.

This doesn't have to be true anymore. Not all "we have too many people" people believe we need to FORCE depopulation. We have strong reason to believe that simply giving people sex ed, ample forms of birth control, and women's rights leads to a self selection of fewer children. Every country that has done these things has seen its fertility drop.

Personally the earth can easily, EASILY, support more than ten billion humans if we stop being so damn stupid about resource utilization. Remember that we already produce an immense oversupply of food. Every human that is hungry is not a resource production problem, but a lack of empathy problem. The earth can only struggle to supply billions of humans if you insist that nothing can happen without a strong profit motive.

> Every country that has done these things has seen its fertility drop.

And this result is somehow supposed to be a good thing? Every country that has this result, no matter how we theorize that it got there in the first place, is now facing a demographic crisis

> that simply giving people sex ed, ample forms of birth control, and women's rights leads to a self selection of fewer children.

The devil is in the details here, and programs focused on contraceptives in developing nations have a very checkered recent history.

> the earth can easily, EASILY, support more than ten billion humans if we stop being so damn stupid about resource utilization

This is sort of what I'm driving at.

You better give some references about this "checkered recent history" because for example the programs US had for Africa were removed by GWB in the beginning of century when there was still less then billion of people in Africa. Now there is close to twice as that and Africa is not able to feed itself because population is growing faster than its capacity to produce food.

Normally those who stand against birth control have some very clear political agenda to use the size of the population in their advantage.

I'm not making an argument against birth control.

So as an example of checkered history, I'm referring to things like the push for circumcision as a measure to fight AIDs which has counterintuitively lead to a drop in condom usage in some places[1]. This is a great example of well meaning people from Europe and the US intervening in a way that makes things worse.

There have been concerns around HIV risk with DMPA[1] and ethical concerns about around the initial trials of the drug[3].

There were forced sterilizations in South Africa as recently as 2005[4].

There were similar issues in Kenya in the early 2010s[5].

My point was that people should look upon population alarmists with some skepticism, and when they talk about birth control in Africa I think it merits extra scrutiny.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3362967/

[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7232639/

[3]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17441692.2019.1...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51637751

[5] https://www.hhrjournal.org/2015/07/kenya-forced-sterilizatio...

I don't see how any of this is relevant to the issue. I'm talking about birth control that is family planning, programs that provide contraceptives and these incidence are something completely different.

My original statement was "programs focused on contraceptives in developing nations have a very checkered recent history.".

Forced sterilization falls neatly in that category.

These examples are about infectious disease control and not about family planning.

That's acting like we don't literally trade resources globally to maintain our population level

We can do this because the overpopulation is not happening globally. If for example Ukraine and Russia had the same population growth than Africa and Middle East is having then there wouldn't be no grain available for Africa or Middle East. But there are limits to overpopulation and it is water.

Cloud seeding is illegal in Utah, because you're taking rain that would have fallen on someone else's field and making it fall on your field. Water rights are a serious business here in the desert.

It's not that we can't do these things, it's just that it's not always a good idea.

California & Nevada actively practice cloud seeding, I wonder if that affects Utah.

Why are these people farming in the desert to begin with?

Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be there?

There are a -lot- of stuff grown in desert climates, believe it or not. I think it's a fine idea, just that the price needs to accurately reflect the water usage and only then determine if it's worth continuing or not. Right now it's not really factored in at all, and cities are starting to crunch for water.

As an anecdote, I currently live in the desert, and the pecan farmers nearby use so much water that we get mosquitos pretty badly at times of the year.

> rain that would have fallen on someone else's field

Or in the ocean?

Here in Calgary we use cloud seeding to reduce the impact of hail storms. If meteorologists predict a hail storm, they will seed the clouds outside of urban territory to reduce the property damage caused by the hail

> The NCM said it does not use any harmful chemicals in its operations. “Our specialized aircrafts only use natural salts, and no harmful chemicals,” the organization told CNBC.

How many times have companies been wrong about the harm chemicals they use in products have on humans and the rest of nature? How many times have they simply withheld knowledge of harmful chemicals in consumer products or outright lied?

I think weather control is a mistake because I cannot trust those leading or manufacturing it. Even if someone posts a link documenting the exact chemical composition being used in these cloud seeding projects, it won't mean much to me because I am not a chemist and I am also jaded with a lifetime of reading about companies producing harmful products that they insisted are benign or even healthy. I don't trust what they publish anymore by default. We have to breath the air they are pumping those "salts" into, we have to drink the water.

It shouldn't be absolutely impossible to trust them. If ie those 'salts' are naturally occurring in atmosphere in already reasonable concentration (ie I am sure few atoms of uranium are roaming around me currently, but sure as hell I hope its just few and apart) and they just locally temporarily increase their concentration to seed droplets around dew point.

But that's probably about it, anything else and I agree with you.

I will do some reading up on the different techniques being used. I am just at a low point in my trust for companies at the moment.

> If ie those 'salts' are naturally occurring in atmosphere in already reasonable concentration (ie I am sure few atoms of uranium are roaming around me currently, but sure as hell I hope its just few and apart) and they just locally temporarily increase their concentration to seed droplets around dew point.

In this particular case, they are not using anything that is already floating around in our atmosphere. They created some proprietary seeding agent they only refer to as "nano material" and that it contains titanium oxide. Who knows what impact it will have.

> Al Mandous said the center started manufacturing its own seeding agent called nano material, a fine salt coated with titanium oxide, which is more effective than what it uses currently.

Doesn't a seeding agent described as a "nano material" that is coated in tatanium contradict their earlier claim that they "only use natural salts?"

> “Our specialized aircrafts only use natural salts, and no harmful chemicals,”

Based on this: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-arab-emirates/precipitat... I don't think it's working or making any real change.

There are two clues for this: 1. There is no mention of historical precipitation improvements in the article; and 2. If it was successful I'd expect more countries to be doing it.

China practices cloud seeding. You find it being used in odd places, but it isn't very rare.

I wonder if large-scale cloud seeding could have the effect of taking rain from places that would otherwise get it?

It would have to, unless you also consciously increase the rate of evaporation at the same time. Could be bad news for countries with arid neighbors to their direct west.

Sounds a bit like the dispute between Ethiopia and Egypt over Nile Water (Ethiopia is building a dam) so definitely plenty of political precedent for conflict over water resources and this will exacerbate this.

I don’t think it can be assumed. if the rain increased vegetation, i wouldn’t rule out an increased water cycle and greater amount of water in the area in general. Honestly, i wouldn’t be surprised if it benefited neighbors. I’m no expert and there are countless variables, maybe a high percentage of the rain used then sent right into the ground as waste water- never to have the chance to evaporate. or never taken up by vegetation at all. Time reveals all, despite whether this was a hasty experiment.

True, while it will certainly remove moisture from the air that would necessarily have fallen elsewhere, it's difficult to say whether or not it would cause measurable decreases in rainfall in places that would notice it. For example, we know that reforestation actually increases precipitation downwind, as trees draw water out of the Earth, which then evaporates out of their leaves. However, a nation that's seeding clouds isn't going to be doing it because they're trying to create rainforests, they'll be doing it because they want agriculture and clean drinking water, and it's unclear whether or not that can possibly give more than it takes from downwind neighbors.

Possible but a lot of rain just falls in the middle of the ocean, so not a great loss.

If that moisture they're making fall out of the sky is guaranteed to end up falling above the ocean otherwise then sure. Otherwise you'll get conflict.

Which will now wash a load of filth from the land into the ocean instead.

the moisture has to come from somewhere, nothin is free

https://www.makerain.com/

I live in Dubai, and the rains this year appear to be more frequent than the last two years. Perhaps the new seeding material is showing results

in Dubai and whatever they’re doing this definitely working - over just the last month-ish we’ve had a 4-8 days of extremely heavy rains (and gov alerts to stay in), when just two years ago it’d be a surprise if it rained 3 days all year

That's actually climate change and the desert is prone for that. I don't think they are seeding these heavy rains as usually they can turn into a disaster.

I imagine it would take a very serious effort to green up a hard desert like that, but it is well known that forests are capable of generating rain through photosynthesis and evapotranspiration.

Some large scale projects have already been undertaken, such as the restoration of the loess plateau in China, or the currently ongoing effort to establish a green belt across Africa to stop the Sahara desert from spreading southward.

It's amazing how much new tech is getting tested in the middle east. In the next 30 years I think they are the future.

This tech is not really new - in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, "cloud seeding" airplanes have been flying for years (to avoid hailstorms rather than to make it rain), although the efficacy of the method is disputed, so it's not really widespread. I only learned that this is done where I live when I saw a small airplane flying dangerously close to an approaching storm (which GA aircraft usually do their best to avoid) and then read an article about how they miscalculated the strength/direction of the storm and barely managed to avoid it.

Wikipedia article (only available in German): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagelabwehr#Einsatz_in_Deutsch...

Article about the history of anti-hail airplanes in the Rosenheim region: https://www.hagelabwehr-rosenheim.de/geschichtliches.php

It's been happening in the US for quite awhile too.

For example, Colorado regularly performs cloud seeding and other weather modification techniques - https://cwcb.colorado.gov/focus-areas/supply/weather-modific...

It's a huge pile of dead sand with load of petrol... They're fighting the clock to stay relevant by buying all kind of foreign assets and attracting investors but no amount of tech will change the fundamentals

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