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Yes, that is right. I didn't forget to mention it, just thought the Minas Gerais case was the most unique geologically as opposed to the far-too-common negative externality problem as is the agricultural excessive use of water + deforestation. But you are completely right. I actually live deep in the Cerrado region now, in Brasília, and I can see first-hand the negative effects of over exploration of water in the region.

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!

Thanks for the kind words! And nice to know about the Safari translation, glad to know it brought us close together!

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!

At the risk of making a comment that goes against HN comment guidelines;

"Rio de 28 Old Women" sounds like a theme park ride.

Yes, it was heartbreaking. The gut-wrenching book "Arrastados"[0] by Daniela Arbex does a good job of retelling some of the stories from the Brumadinho disaster.

[0] For those that do not speak Portuguese: I think the book title can be translated as "The Dragged Ones".

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.

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.

They have plenty of mines for iron amd otber metals in western countries as well. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte,_Montana

Oil drilling has worse side effects.

I don't know much about Turkey, but I assume they are referring to Erdogan. Turkey was a pretty solid democracy and he turned it into an authoritarian regime.

Erdogan also has some interesting ideas about the economy. A quote from his Wikipedia article: "He has pushed the theory that inflation is caused by high interest rates, an idea universally rejected by economists. This, along with other factors such as excessive current account deficit and foreign-currency debt, in combination with Erdoğan's increasing authoritarianism, caused an economic crisis starting from 2018, leading to large depreciation of the Turkish lira and very high inflation."

The resulting crisis has its own article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_economic_crisis_(2018%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%2527%C3%A9...

A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mossadegh nationalized and refused to concede to western oil demands.

No, you see the instant a western power interferes with a region, all agency is immediately stripped from every single person there. It's really sad, they all become puppets or automatons reacting purely to external stimulus.

The number of countries messing around in that region is long....

From the US, Russia and china to local powers like Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran themselves.

Either you're a scholar studying the region, if not your comment feels naive at best

I personally am not well read on this, but I know lot of people blame the US and the UK since after they overthrew the democratically elected socialist government and installed a brutal dictator[0], the only elements that survived to oppose the dictatorship were hardened islamists, who later took power from the US backed Shah[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

"How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." - Hemingway

Humans are notoriously bad heading off long term consequences.

While the romantic in me is hoping that qanats would indeed still do the job, we don’t know how hand-picked these hydrologist opinions are.

It seems universal that it is easier to drill more wells than to tell people to use less water.

Sanctions in the 1950s?

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.

Afforestation, green houses, swales, center pivot irrigation and no till agriculture are highly effective methods that conserve water or let it accumulate in the local area.

Dams are highly ineffective when the goal is water conservation. Censorship and punishment are also highly ineffective methods for water conservation.

Yes, they do, but if what goes in is insufficient by a wide margin, people who can afford to will start drilling for water.

Assuming that the water taken through qanats would eventually make it into aquifers (fat from unlikely, I think, as it takes water from underground that’s less likely to evaporate) one could even argue that tapping rainwater with qanats prevent aquifers from getting refilled, so it’s taking from the same water source.

It underlines much anti-immigrant sentiment today, in that immigrants are a self-selected sample of the hardest working and most motivated people from their country of origin, whichever country that might be.

There's a lot of Americans here in London, from all over the US, and virtually none of them are anything at all like the stereotypical flyover-state USian - and yet in the US itself, there's plenty of those. Heck, go to any of the countries where smart, hard-working immigrants are said to come from and you'll find plenty of dumb, lazy or just not-that-capable people

So it's almost inevitable that e.g. a Somali who ends up in Leeds is going to be smarter, more motivated and harder working than both the average Leeds native and the average Somali.

"water has run out" is a binary event

probably less, your examples are related to weapons and an arms industry innovation is accelerated by sanctions and boycott. This has happened to the Israeli weapons industry due to lack of access to weapons especially in the 1960s and 1970s

That doesn't sound correct. My understanding of the history is that Iran democratically elected a socialist who wanted to nationalize Iran's oil fields so they could keep the oil revenue inside their country instead of giving it away to BP and Exxon. The British orchestrated a coup to install the old monarchy (the Shah), who brought back the British extraction companies and harshly repressed Shia Muslims. Then in 1979 the Shia hardliners toppled the government in the Islamic Revolution which is where the current government originates from. The last real democratically elected president of Iran was the socialist one, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Not to the same extent.

Iran is somewhat special in that a culture of highly valuing education and producing high quality scientists has persisted among the populace, despite a half century of despotic religious rule.

There are no other countries that come to mind that manage to do this despite such a large, long period if government-populace mismatch. Other countries that produce large quantites of scientists generally have a government that actively supports the pursuit of science. Those countries aren't immune to flareups of anti-intellectualism but they are generally short-lived.

No. I'm from Bangladesh, and when you meet Bangladeshis you can easily understand why the country is the way it is. Same thing for Denmark. But Iran baffles me.

It was pretty dire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis

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.

It appears the solution to most hard or intractable problems is to post pithy aphorisms on the internet.

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

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.

This is a pretty weird take in a HN submission about modern agricultural practices causing drought in urban Iran. Like, the problem you're suggesting is already happening, right now, except it is water related not about food.

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.

In world first, Israel begins pumping desalinated water into depleted Sea of Galilee

https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-world-first-israel-begins-p...

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).

Qatar and exorbitant cost are an iconic duo, surprised they haven't gone through the trouble considering the general trend of glamor and excess

> I suggest you read the article

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 what are the sanctions due to?

Oh they'll be thinking way beyond his reign!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277273782...

The American "regime" has a country that people are literally fighting in line to get into.

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.

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.

Maybe, but the southwest of the US uses more water than it has and can import. With droughts and overconsumption, the water supply is at risk. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_North_American_me...

LOL. Las Vegas water prices are ridiculously low for the paltry amount of water they have. It's hard to get people to not waste the water when the price is artificially kept low.

Las Vegas water is less expensive than mine, and we have in excess of 10x the precipitation and everything is naturally green.

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 climate change collapse is starting to happen in front of our eyes

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

There is more water in Iran than before global warming, not less. Oh and in other places where there is less water due to global warming, like Spain, there is no water shortage.

Sorry but this one is just 100% the fault of the government involved. It could have easily been prevented and it was known to the month when it would happen decades in advance, nothing was done.

Here are some key sections from the article:

“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.

Yes, they do.

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...

There is an ongoing public discussion here whether they should be built next to rivers or the sea for that purpose.

Iran probably hasn't built (m)any of those yet but that will be the next step.

Many data centers use evaporative cooling, since it's much cheaper than closed loop. This requires a constant input of water.

Yes and just like our bodies, that closed loop is cooled by a rack of evaporators on the roof.

The blood comes from liquids I ingest (and some food and air). If I don't drink, I'll die quite quickly.

That isn't a closed loop exactly although there is a complex system connecting my digestive/urinary tract with my bladder etc.

If this is true, why have I heard about data centers demolishing local water supplies? Is this incorrect?

Apparently, you don't urinate like the rest of us; humans are not a closed loop. Neither are most data center cooling facilities, but I think it's pretty clear that level of fact is wasted here.