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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

> 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...

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.

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.

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.

you mean more than the 1.1 million afghans they have already deported this year?

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.

>>> How should we think about cloud seeding?

It's a way to take someone else's rain.

who owns the rain? what if it was just going to fall in the oceans?

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.

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...

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.

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).

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.

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.

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