As someone of Turkish origin with Kurdish, Bulgarian, and Greek roots (somehow my genes don't fight each other!), I'm deeply saddened by the current state of the region. Growing up in western Turkey, I didn't give much thought to the eastern part of the country, let alone Iran. Funnily, my first real interactions with Iranian culture didn't happen until I moved to Germany. Aside from their cuisine being the only one besides Turkish where I actually enjoy the rice (pilav/pilaf), I've found Iranians to be such warm, kind people who have suffered far too much due to politics. Maybe that's why we connected so deeply... We share similar struggles, though I recognize that Turkey's situation involves much less external interference than Iran's... ours is mostly our own doing.
I hope the rulers solve this problem as quickly as possible without causing pain to the civilians.
I grew up in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a region full of natural resources and, thankfully, aquifers and natural water reservoirs. However, centuries of extraction mismanagement and, more recently, over exploration of mineral resources puts these water resources into jeopardy. (Other problems include mining in open pits and with sludge dams that led to two of the worse environmental disasters in the world in 2015 and 2019, in Mariana and Brumadinho.)
The most interesting part is that Minas Gerais has unusual top-of-the-hill aquifers, instead of in valleys. The rare mineral formation in its mountain tops collects water and only slowly dispenses it to the subsoil, keeping its quality.[0] Needless to say, unfortunately I hold very little hope for it, considering it also sits on some of the most desirable iron ore deposits in the world.
You forgot to mention what may be the most serious water problem in Brazil. Agribusiness invests heavily in the Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna. In the Cerrado originate the vast majority of Brazilian rivers, which supply water to almost all of Brazil. Its trees, with deep roots, retain the scarce water of the region. This entire region has been deforested for the production of soybeans and cattle ranching. Brazil is a great exporter of water, which it currently does in the form of meat, soybeans, coffee, and paper.
Today we are experiencing unprecedented droughts in the region. In the future, we will pay a much higher price.
Wow. That’s a hydrological feature I’ve never come across in my studies. Thanks for sharing.
Short tangent: I want to stop and admire that you shared an article in Portuguese and in seconds I could read it with Safari’s translation feature. It even translated labels on the images, and got the hydrologic cycle figure right! (However, I think “Rio de 28 Old Women” is probably an error.) This makes me feel connected with you in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a generation ago.
I feel like machine translation is the unsung hero of the recent AI wave. Gone are the days of just barely being able to discern the meaning of Google Translate. Now I can just read it.
I don't know how useful LLMs will ultimately turn out to be for most things, but a freaking universal translator that allows me to understand any language? Incredible!
Machine translation has certainly become better, and that's amazing and wonderful to see. Definitely an amazing thing that has come out of the AI boom.
However, it has led to many websites to automatically enable it (like reddit), and one has to find a way to opt out for each website, if one speaks the language already. Especially colloquial language that uses lots of idioms gets translated quite weirdly still.
It's a bit sad that websites can't rely on the languages the browser advertises as every browser basically advertises english, so they often auto translate from english anyways if they detect a non-english IP address.
Not sure that every browser advertises English, but mine certainly does. However, as I'm in Portugal, many websites ignore what my browser says and send me to translated versions, I assume based on my IP. That causes problems because the translations are often quite bad, and they do it with redirects to PT URLs so I can't share links with people who don't speak the language.
Does "advertises" in this context mean what's put in the "Accept-Language" HTTP header? Might be worth seeing what that value specifically is the next time this happens. A "clever" IP-based language choice server-side seems far too complicated and error prone, but I guess that's what makes it so "clever."
Early in my career I spent a lot of time thinking that HTML was antiquated. "Obviously they had 20th century ideas on what websites would be. As if we're all just publishing documents." But the beauty of HTML eventually clicked for me: it's describing the semantics of a structured piece of data, which means you can render a perfectly valid view of it however you want if you've got the right renderer!
I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data. Yes, there's a canonical language which, in many cases, contains information that gets lost when translated (see: opinions on certain books really needing to be read in their original language).
I think Chrome got it right at one point where it would say "This looks like it's in French. Want to translate it? Want me to always do this?" (Though I expect Chrome to eventually get it wrong as they keep over-fitting their ad engagement KPIs)
This is all a coffee morning way of saying: I believe that the browser must own the rendering choices. Don't reimplement pieces of the browser in your website!
Yeah! I don't know what methods Safari on iOS uses, but in general translation has become pretty magical. It feels like we've kind of slepwalked through the invention of the Universal Translator. I just haven't heard as much gushing about it as I feel it deserves. I can just effortlessly read a sciency news article originally written in Portuguese!
In terms of translation quality, it's still DeepL > Google > Apple, with Apple a fair bit behind and generally more stilted (and obviously with far fewer languages).
A nice thing with LLMs is that you can ask them for a more comprehensive and detailed translation, and explain the nuances and ambiguities rather than trying to match the style of the original. This is great for things like group chats in a foreign language, where it’s full of colloquial expressions, shorthand, and typos.
Always interesting when people select an environmentally friendly technology that will help the transition away from destroying the environment somewhere or indeed everywhere else as the "villain" in this discussion. As if oil or coal extraction were without their controversies.
Never on which table? “Exporting” environmental degradation is an incredibly widely discussed issue. Especially for South America, due to illegal rainforest clearing for soy farming to feed the NA/EU cattle industry, and lithium mining in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.
NB: "West" is less a term of hemispheric fidelity (Australia and New Zealand are typically seen as "western" countries, despite being in the eastern hemisphere), than it is of cultural derivation (on which Brazil has claims, via Portugal), and far more prominently, geopolitical and industrial significance, focusing on the industrial, colonial, and financial powers of the world, largely the US, western Europe (a large portion of which is ... in the eastern hemisphere), AU and NZ as mentioned, and arguably Japan.
The term is often used to avoid (or sometimes conflate) what have become problematic and/or obsolte terms, including colonial empires, advanced vs. undeveloped countries, NATO vs. Soviet Bloc states, or the similarly cardinal-directed "Global North" vs. "Global South".
Pedantry on the point (my own included) isn't particularly illuminating or interesting.
> However, unpublished national observations revealed groundwater depletion in some plains from as early as the 1950s. This coincided with the gradual replacement of Persian qanats, which were sustainable groundwater extraction systems and UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites9, with (semi)deep wells.
It also is a safe bet that water consumption per capita went up, too.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if qanats couldn’t support current water usage.
Maybe that “coincided” doesn’t imply “they stopped using qanats, so the water table dropped” but “qanats weren’t sufficient anymore, so they started drilling deep wells, and the water table dropped”?
And the reason qanats weren't sufficient anymore, was that they pursued a policy of food independence, due to sanctions/a desire for political autonomy.
I'm not so sure they could have done much different.
We tend to forget that the 1950s and 1960s were a period of large-scale engineering: intensification of agriculture, massive construction of dams, roads, mines etc., where nature and environmental footprint was at best an afterthought. In the US, in the Soviet Union, and also in (the Shah's) Iran.
Current environmental movement is downstream from that period - a reaction to abuses that happened. At least where the political situation tolerated its emergence.
Note that the Aral Sea, which lies geographically nearby, dried up for nearly the same reasons - too much water consumed - even though the Soviet Union was not in a position where they "couldn't have done much different"; they had plenty of productive soil elsewhere, being literally the largest country in the world and having been blessed with a lot of chernozem.
The underlying factor was the technocratic Zeitgeist which commanded people to "move fast and break (old fashioned) things". Such as qanats in Iran or old field systems in Central Europe.
Sanctions, including an attempted blockade [1] of oil exports, imposed by the British Empire, still in existence at the time, in response to a dispute over the ownership of Iranian oil fields, which were a primary factor in the fall of Mossadegh. See e.g.:
The article does say that a number of qanats was overdrawn.
But it also says several other things, pointing to poor water management policies, extreme damification drying up wetlands downstream, lack of necessary maintenance on some qanats, and more.
Clicking through the link to the original paper, the point seems to be that qanats are inherently sustainable because they only produce as much as goes in. You may gradually exceed their capacity, but there won’t be a sudden “oops, no more water” crisis as can happen when you pump an aquifer dry.
The saddest thing about Iran I’ve noticed is the stark contrast between the current state of the country and the intelligence of the people I’ve met from this country.
Consider too the selection bias in those you've met from Iran, presumably outside that country. Both on ideological and socioeconomic / aptitude bases.
I'd first encountered a similar observation in the 1970s or 1980s, then directed largely at those from Soviet Bloc countries encountered in the West. Typically these were academics, engineers, or similarly highly-skilled professionals, who presumably found greener pastures outside their homeland. Presuming that these were necessarily representative of the larger population ignores sampling dynamics.
These predictions assume that nobody will do anything, which is almost never true. The crisis is no less real just because a lot of resources was put into delaying its effects.
Back then they said Tehran will go out of water if there is no rain in coming weeks and it is raining in Tehran, now. Also they rationed water for a few weeks. Many regions of Tehran only had water during the night.
It is unlikely Tehran will just evacuate all at once. They will do something drastic when the problem can no longer be ignored. And random events like rain will delay the inevitable for a while longer.
Perhaps this is how climate change will end up as well.
Ever hear of reading the article you comment on? There was no mention of "moving all at once". As stated, moving the capital from Tehran "would take decades"...
It IS climate change, to a large part. And yes, I think you're right it's how climate change will show up for us as well.
There will always be lot of other factors - the first time we're going to really collectively notice sea level rise is on the high tide during a storm surge. The rest of the time, the change will be within the range of variation that we're used to dealing with.
As far I remember a large reason for the water crisis is subsidizing water for agriculture which does not fit the local climate
This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence
sounds like if 90% of their water goes to agriculture, mostly export, and their country is cash strapped due to their habit of kidnappings, then maybe there's a simple solution here
> This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence
You say that if it was some cultural oddity, and not a completely understandable reaction and exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation.
Their country is cash strapped and needs to be independent because of US sanctions. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected government in the 50s which led to the Islamic Republic.
That's true, but on the other hand the CIA today isn't forcing Iran to sponsor terrorist organizations or arrest women for being immodest or keep Islamists in charge. If they want to eliminate the sanctions then the path to doing so is clear and would have tremendous benefits for the Iranian people.
I like the idea of working with nature to solve problems. As a start, instead of, as you suggest, depopulating Tehran, they could populate it with trees. Chad is a perfect example of how to turn a deserted landscape into a "Great green wall of Africa" as they call it. And they did in only two years.
Use less water? Probably by recycling the water that is actually used. If las Vegas can survive in the desert, any city can. The problem is getting the money to apply the fixes required.
True, and they haven't dried it up. Given some starting amount of water, recirculating it through the system more efficiently will keep the "running out of water" problem at bay, right?
Rain water collection structures that distill H2O in terms of pH.
Gonabad qanat network, reputedly the world’s largest, extends for more than 20 miles beneath the Barakuh Mountains of northeast Iran. The tunnels are more than 3 feet high, reach a depth of a thousand feet, and are supplied by more than 400 vertical wells for maintenance.
Sounds like it would be cheaper to build desalination plants on the coast, and pipe the water in. Iran certainly has the technology and brainpower to do that.
They share the same gas field with Qatar, who does all their desalination with all the excess gas production they can’t sell.
Qatar has no surface freshwater or groundwater. So all of their water is desalinated. It’s often still quite salty to the taste though - the last few ppms would be an exorbitant cost to remove.
However, Qatar has 3 million people. Iran has 92 million people - 9 million in Tehran alone. So their half of that gas field in the Gulf contributes far less energy per capita.
And even if the energy is free (unlimited natural gas, fusion, magic, whatever) desalination is still fairly expensive. I think only about 50% of the cost is energy, the other half is CapEx, operations, and replacing the membranes as they get used up.
I have read about experimental desalination techniques that do a better job, and use less energy, but I haven't heard much about that, lately.
I'd think that this kind of research would be a priority. It won't be long, before we start having water wars (like olden times, but with nastier weapons).
The low hanging fruit have been long picked. Reverse osmosis is within 50% of the thermodynamic limit.
If you have gigawatts of low grade waste heat (Iran does, in theory), you can run multistage flash distillers of the waste heat, and those have more than an order of magnitude separation to the thermodynamic limit (they also have lower CAPEX, lower maintenance and lower water pre-treatment requirements than reverse osmosis).
I wasn't talking about what they were discussing (desalination for farming). I was talking about moving an entire city, as opposed to getting enough water to deal with just that city.
Actually it says the desalinated water is too expensive even for farming, it’s only used for heavy industries, so it’s certainly not a solution for the domestic supply of 9 million people.
And don’t confuse moving the capital city with actually relocating Tehran. Tehran’s not going anywhere. What they’re proposing is building a new capital city, but it’ll be the rich and the political and religious elite who move there. The millions of poor and powerless living in Tehran will get left behind. Some will be able to migrate south, but many won’t.
Not surprising. A country that invests all of his money on nuclear weapons and threatens the West with bombings- will actually care if it's capital is drying up?
I used to think people didn't actually believe the propaganda they were fed, but now I've come to realize it's the only thing many know about the world.
It's not completely wrong, though. Iran has spent significant resources on a nuclear weapons program, as well as sponsoring foreign terrorist organizations and other military activities. We can argue about whether those things are right or wrong but they really happened and consumed resources that could have been used to improve water infrastructure. Guns or butter.
Believe it or not, other things do happen in the country aside from what is reported on in western media. Claiming this is all they do is heinously ignorant.
Don't presume to put words in my mouth. No one is claiming that military activities is all that Iran does. But the reality is they do choose spend a fortune on military aggression. These are optional activities. They could choose to stop and devote those resources to civilian infrastructure if they wanted to.
Back when I read Dune as a teenager I didn't know what a qanat was and I didn't bother looking it up. I might have to read it again with this new understanding. I seem to remember them featuring quite a bit in Children of Dune.
So... given that the Iranian regime is not paying any heed to the experts, does this mean that the end of their regime will be because of their own arrogance and incompetence?
Iran has 3 million illegal immigrants, FYI. (Or had; they recently implemented mass deportations.)
Immigration inflow is caused by lax border control, not by being a great place to live. No matter how bad it is, there's always someone worse off willing to try their luck.
Not only is that wrong, it’s not relevant to the topic of a regime doing dumb things and then trying to scapegoat.
I think the extent to which it’s effective may be a proxy for an electorate’s intellectual health. So while we see failures to take responsibility (what role models the world has for leaders…), that scapegoating doesn’t always work. And if so, not for long.
What got me thinking about this is the Conservative guy up here in Canada has been trying this playbook and it’s just not working. Worse, it’s actually eroding his party’s power in a very measurable way.
Tehran becoming intolerably difficult to live in because of basic resource mismanagement will be a very hard one to spin. But I suspect we will see an attempt at scapegoating.
I can't answer that, but for a long time, there have been predictions that water and foot shortages will trigger (civil) wars and / or mass migrations. Whether it'll be the one or the other depends, I think, on how free a country is. A non-free country will have a strong police / military force that may resort to deadly violence in the case of an uprising. A truly free country will vote the regime out. Somewhere in the middle it'd be said police / military that would take over.
For my uninformed take, Iran is not a free country, the US is somewhere in the middle but I don't think an insurrection against the current regime (which has been deploying the military to mass-abduct people) would end well.
Unlikely. My country have been through this (at a whole country level, not just a single city) for two years. It sped up desalination projects. People re-adjusted to the lack of water. Prices adjusted. Lots of water is wasted and very little water is actually being used for drinking. At the end, the rain came and it coincided with many desalination plants starting operations.
The prime minister suggesting evacuations is probably political. It is much easier to adjust to lack of water than to move your home/job somewhere else.
They’re already straining to truck in enough water for survival now WITH some of the wells still working. If the ability to source water locally stops the people of Tehran will either need to move or die. With aquifers running dry from iran to Afghanistan they’ll have to migrate even further. I think we could see the entire region plunge further into chaos as the water crisis worsens.
That's just a Western pipe dream. The water crisis could trigger a revolt but the fundamentals for such revolt have to be there rather than the water crisis being the sole reason.
> people of Tehran will either need to move or die
No. I've lived (along a million other people) without water for many months during a hot summer episode. It was a major lifestyle degradation (and major doesn't even begin to describe it) but death was not a threat (though there was fear of disease spread due to possible degradation of sanitary conditions but that didn't happen either).
Being efficient in watering golf courses in the desert in certainly nice, but maybe it's time to question having over 50 golf courses in the desert with an impending massive water shortage.
The next one is likely Utah, they are drying up the Great Salt Lake for alfalfa production, producing the next Owens Lake, likely making Salt Lake City and other cites unhabitable within a decade or two.
From the article, Iran has depleted its aquifers in an attempt to maintain food self-sufficiency. While the sanctions did not restrict food imports, sanctions may have induced this policy by limiting exports to raise capital and more generally making a regime insular.
In 10 years there won’t be a regime in Iran because Iran won’t exist as it does today. With the collapsing water table people are going to be forced into either death or migration.
I don’t want to be a doom and gloom guy, but the climate change collapse is starting to happen in front of our eyes—and not just in a far off ‘eventually this will be a problem’ way.
A major factor, but also include aging infrastructure and population growth. The giant data centres around the world are going to use up high amounts of water and electricity.
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
...
While failed rains may be the immediate cause of the crisis, they say, the root cause is more than half a century of often foolhardy modern water engineering — extending back to before the country’s Islamic revolution of 1979, but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’ policies since.
Am I missing something? How data centers in US/EU evaporating water thousand of miles from Iran affect it? Does it disturb the rain cycle in Iran or something?
Not sure if serious... but just in case, very simply put...
DC pulls water out of local water supply.
DC uses evaporative cooling (not all use closed systems, and even those that do see some loss over time)
Water lost to cooling is now in the atmosphere.
If the DC (and other local users) withdraw water faster than local conditions allow it to be replenished, you end up without any local water.
of course not, but as far as i understand there are a few factors that are relevant for local water supplies:
- evaporation from cooling. the water will come down as rain again, but not necessarily in the same region
- when disposing the water into the sewers, the water might get "lost" into the oceans, where it's not available as drinking water
- when disposing water used for cooling into the rivers it was taken from, there might be environmental issues with water temperature. i know that this is an issue with rivers in europe where the industry is allowed to measure and report their adherence to the laws regarding the maximum allowed water temperatures themselves and, to no ones surprise, the rivers are too warm.
so water is not destroyed, but it can be made unusable or unavailable for the locally intended purpose.
Its a thing that cannot be generalized. However, many datacenters use evaporative cooling. Especially when the DC is built in a region with relatively warm outside temperatures, it‘s basically the only viable way to get rid of all that heat.
I hope the rulers solve this problem as quickly as possible without causing pain to the civilians.
The most interesting part is that Minas Gerais has unusual top-of-the-hill aquifers, instead of in valleys. The rare mineral formation in its mountain tops collects water and only slowly dispenses it to the subsoil, keeping its quality.[0] Needless to say, unfortunately I hold very little hope for it, considering it also sits on some of the most desirable iron ore deposits in the world.
[0] https://www.projetopreserva.com.br/post/os-raros-aquiferos-d... (in Portuguese)
Today we are experiencing unprecedented droughts in the region. In the future, we will pay a much higher price.
Short tangent: I want to stop and admire that you shared an article in Portuguese and in seconds I could read it with Safari’s translation feature. It even translated labels on the images, and got the hydrologic cycle figure right! (However, I think “Rio de 28 Old Women” is probably an error.) This makes me feel connected with you in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a generation ago.
I don't know how useful LLMs will ultimately turn out to be for most things, but a freaking universal translator that allows me to understand any language? Incredible!
However, it has led to many websites to automatically enable it (like reddit), and one has to find a way to opt out for each website, if one speaks the language already. Especially colloquial language that uses lots of idioms gets translated quite weirdly still.
It's a bit sad that websites can't rely on the languages the browser advertises as every browser basically advertises english, so they often auto translate from english anyways if they detect a non-english IP address.
I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data. Yes, there's a canonical language which, in many cases, contains information that gets lost when translated (see: opinions on certain books really needing to be read in their original language).
I think Chrome got it right at one point where it would say "This looks like it's in French. Want to translate it? Want me to always do this?" (Though I expect Chrome to eventually get it wrong as they keep over-fitting their ad engagement KPIs)
This is all a coffee morning way of saying: I believe that the browser must own the rendering choices. Don't reimplement pieces of the browser in your website!
In my experience, users who genuinely don't want English will most definitely have their browser language set to the language they do want.
I think what you might be seeing is that many users are OK with English even if it's not their native language.
By the way, the name of the river translates to “River of the Old Ladies”. I don’t know where the label got the 28 from!
"Rio de 28 Old Women" sounds like a theme park ride.
it comes at the sacrifice of many non-western countries and this conversation is never on the table
it's such a shame things that could otherwise last for thousands of years will get destroyed by a few decades of mismanagement
Also the reason for the existence of the Norwegian port town of Narvik, connected to Kiruna by the world’s most northerly train line.
The term is often used to avoid (or sometimes conflate) what have become problematic and/or obsolte terms, including colonial empires, advanced vs. undeveloped countries, NATO vs. Soviet Bloc states, or the similarly cardinal-directed "Global North" vs. "Global South".
Pedantry on the point (my own included) isn't particularly illuminating or interesting.
Wikipedia's disambiguation page suggests the vagueness of the term: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_(disambiguation)>.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/irn/ira... says Iran’s population today is over five times that of 1950.
It also is a safe bet that water consumption per capita went up, too.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if qanats couldn’t support current water usage.
Maybe that “coincided” doesn’t imply “they stopped using qanats, so the water table dropped” but “qanats weren’t sufficient anymore, so they started drilling deep wells, and the water table dropped”?
Humans are notoriously bad heading off long term consequences.
I'm not so sure they could have done much different.
Current environmental movement is downstream from that period - a reaction to abuses that happened. At least where the political situation tolerated its emergence.
Note that the Aral Sea, which lies geographically nearby, dried up for nearly the same reasons - too much water consumed - even though the Soviet Union was not in a position where they "couldn't have done much different"; they had plenty of productive soil elsewhere, being literally the largest country in the world and having been blessed with a lot of chernozem.
The underlying factor was the technocratic Zeitgeist which commanded people to "move fast and break (old fashioned) things". Such as qanats in Iran or old field systems in Central Europe.
https://harpers.org/archive/2013/07/the-tragedy-of-1953/
1: https://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/new-york-times/march-...
But it also says several other things, pointing to poor water management policies, extreme damification drying up wetlands downstream, lack of necessary maintenance on some qanats, and more.
The saddest thing about Iran I’ve noticed is the stark contrast between the current state of the country and the intelligence of the people I’ve met from this country.
Consider too the selection bias in those you've met from Iran, presumably outside that country. Both on ideological and socioeconomic / aptitude bases.
I'd first encountered a similar observation in the 1970s or 1980s, then directed largely at those from Soviet Bloc countries encountered in the West. Typically these were academics, engineers, or similarly highly-skilled professionals, who presumably found greener pastures outside their homeland. Presuming that these were necessarily representative of the larger population ignores sampling dynamics.
Don't think that it can't happen here too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
It is unlikely Tehran will just evacuate all at once. They will do something drastic when the problem can no longer be ignored. And random events like rain will delay the inevitable for a while longer.
Perhaps this is how climate change will end up as well.
There will always be lot of other factors - the first time we're going to really collectively notice sea level rise is on the high tide during a storm surge. The rest of the time, the change will be within the range of variation that we're used to dealing with.
Amusing/telling/sad how these self proclaimed anti-imperialist Islamists cargo culted western technohubris just the same
- Bill Mollison
- H. L. Mencken
This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence
sounds like if 90% of their water goes to agriculture, mostly export, and their country is cash strapped due to their habit of kidnappings, then maybe there's a simple solution here
You say that if it was some cultural oddity, and not a completely understandable reaction and exactly the same any state with "western culture" would have done in the same situation.
This sure is an interesting way to frame fifty years of organized sanctions
Gonabad qanat network, reputedly the world’s largest, extends for more than 20 miles beneath the Barakuh Mountains of northeast Iran. The tunnels are more than 3 feet high, reach a depth of a thousand feet, and are supplied by more than 400 vertical wells for maintenance.
The Iranian mullahs locked up everyone who warned them about the upcoming water crisis.
Qatar has no surface freshwater or groundwater. So all of their water is desalinated. It’s often still quite salty to the taste though - the last few ppms would be an exorbitant cost to remove.
However, Qatar has 3 million people. Iran has 92 million people - 9 million in Tehran alone. So their half of that gas field in the Gulf contributes far less energy per capita.
And even if the energy is free (unlimited natural gas, fusion, magic, whatever) desalination is still fairly expensive. I think only about 50% of the cost is energy, the other half is CapEx, operations, and replacing the membranes as they get used up.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-world-first-israel-begins-p...
I'd think that this kind of research would be a priority. It won't be long, before we start having water wars (like olden times, but with nastier weapons).
If you have gigawatts of low grade waste heat (Iran does, in theory), you can run multistage flash distillers of the waste heat, and those have more than an order of magnitude separation to the thermodynamic limit (they also have lower CAPEX, lower maintenance and lower water pre-treatment requirements than reverse osmosis).
I wasn't talking about what they were discussing (desalination for farming). I was talking about moving an entire city, as opposed to getting enough water to deal with just that city.
I suggest you read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
And don’t confuse moving the capital city with actually relocating Tehran. Tehran’s not going anywhere. What they’re proposing is building a new capital city, but it’ll be the rich and the political and religious elite who move there. The millions of poor and powerless living in Tehran will get left behind. Some will be able to migrate south, but many won’t.
I’m convinced my conjecture was wrong.
No issue.
But the number 100 billion was mentioned as the cost of moving the capital.
Tldr: City that outgrew its water supply recommends moving to a place with more water.
Although you wouldn't really get that from reading the article, which seems more about blaming people for Tehrans rapid growth and weather conditions.
Immigration inflow is caused by lax border control, not by being a great place to live. No matter how bad it is, there's always someone worse off willing to try their luck.
I think the extent to which it’s effective may be a proxy for an electorate’s intellectual health. So while we see failures to take responsibility (what role models the world has for leaders…), that scapegoating doesn’t always work. And if so, not for long.
What got me thinking about this is the Conservative guy up here in Canada has been trying this playbook and it’s just not working. Worse, it’s actually eroding his party’s power in a very measurable way.
Tehran becoming intolerably difficult to live in because of basic resource mismanagement will be a very hard one to spin. But I suspect we will see an attempt at scapegoating.
For my uninformed take, Iran is not a free country, the US is somewhere in the middle but I don't think an insurrection against the current regime (which has been deploying the military to mass-abduct people) would end well.
The prime minister suggesting evacuations is probably political. It is much easier to adjust to lack of water than to move your home/job somewhere else.
> people of Tehran will either need to move or die
No. I've lived (along a million other people) without water for many months during a hot summer episode. It was a major lifestyle degradation (and major doesn't even begin to describe it) but death was not a threat (though there was fear of disease spread due to possible degradation of sanitary conditions but that didn't happen either).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake#Shrinking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq0FhcfAbG0
Cape Town is already there.
I don’t want to be a doom and gloom guy, but the climate change collapse is starting to happen in front of our eyes—and not just in a far off ‘eventually this will be a problem’ way.
I think the impacts of climate change vs growing populations became real to me around 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
...
While failed rains may be the immediate cause of the crisis, they say, the root cause is more than half a century of often foolhardy modern water engineering — extending back to before the country’s Islamic revolution of 1979, but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’ policies since.
Datacentres don't consume water.
For example, only 60% of Equinix’s DCs use closed loop, non-evaporative cooling systems…
https://www.cdotrends.com/story/4492/balancing-energy-and-wa...
The parent comment said DCs don't use water. This claim is easily proven to be incorrect.
But, correct, DCs outside Iran have little/no impact on the situation in Iran today.
DC pulls water out of local water supply. DC uses evaporative cooling (not all use closed systems, and even those that do see some loss over time) Water lost to cooling is now in the atmosphere.
If the DC (and other local users) withdraw water faster than local conditions allow it to be replenished, you end up without any local water.
- evaporation from cooling. the water will come down as rain again, but not necessarily in the same region
- when disposing the water into the sewers, the water might get "lost" into the oceans, where it's not available as drinking water
- when disposing water used for cooling into the rivers it was taken from, there might be environmental issues with water temperature. i know that this is an issue with rivers in europe where the industry is allowed to measure and report their adherence to the laws regarding the maximum allowed water temperatures themselves and, to no ones surprise, the rivers are too warm.
so water is not destroyed, but it can be made unusable or unavailable for the locally intended purpose.
Iran probably hasn't built (m)any of those yet but that will be the next step.
Your kidneys are filtering 200 liters of blood per day. OMG, where's all that blood coming from?!
That isn't a closed loop exactly although there is a complex system connecting my digestive/urinary tract with my bladder etc.