The Middle East is running out of water, and parts are becoming uninhabitable

https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_c68d65f14dea3cfd383f1627438ca5c7

by Bender • 5 years ago

97 122 5 years ago

lite.cnn.com

inglor_cz7• 5 years ago

It is not running out of population, though. Actually, to the contrary, most Middle Eastern populations are still growing. (For example, birth rate for Iraq was 28.1 per 1,000.)

I expect the eastern Turkish borders to become a mass migration flashpoint, with possible EU investments, too.

rnd02• 5 years ago

That just means that the habitable parts will become increasingly denser and -as you pointed out, people will be migrating away.

inglor_cz7• 5 years ago

"people will be migrating away"

If just 5 per cent of contemporary Middle Eastern population moves to the EU, liberalism here is going to be toast. Together with the welfare states that Americans so admire.

tsjq3• 5 years ago

It is not running out of population, though.

that's an intriguing point, indeed. not only in this context, but also in any context .

eg. extreme poverty? doesn't matter, population increases.

extreme unemployment? doesn't matter, population increases.

extreme climate change effects? doesn't matter, population increases.

extreme violence/wars ? doesn't matter, population increases.

population just keeps increasing, man! people aren't reducing their copulation.

sokoloff2• 5 years ago

Seems like we’ve got a big fucking problem.

lotsofpulp2• 5 years ago

Women gaining financial independence, education, and access to cheap and convenient contraceptives? Population decreases. And I would bet copulation, for at least some portion of men, decreases.

torben-friis• 5 years ago

I expect the eastern Turkish borders to become a mass migration flashpoint, with possible EU investments, too.

That's been the EU's dirty laundry for years already. Plenty of groups here complain about it.

eat_veggies• 5 years ago

the malthusian obsession with population growth and birth rates in the middle east, and xenophobic comments about immigration in this thread are truly disgusting.

inglor_cz7• 5 years ago

To be fair, population growth and birth rates in Subsaharan Africa are even higher.

Let us just be nice and pretend that there can be no negative consequences to massive population growth in arid areas.

newsclues• 5 years ago

Inconvenient problems still require discussion and solutions.

benque2• 5 years ago

If any given area produces more people than they can handle, then it should be their problem. The dominant ideology in middle east is religious authoritarianism. If you're a liberal democracy, then its a self goal to get immigrants from there.

whoisthemachine2• 5 years ago

It is interesting (but maybe not surprising) that greater adversity seems to increase birth-rate.

Meanwhile, some European countries are experiencing declining birth rates [0], so maybe some balance will be found?

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

lotsofpulp2• 5 years ago

It is women lacking financial independence and access to convenient contraception (such as IUDs and birth control pills), hence being subjected to unwanted pregnancies. In the vast, vast majority of cases.

dogma11386• 5 years ago

Most of the Middle East has easy access to salt water and plenty of sunshine for low or zero emission desalination.

anonu• 5 years ago

Agreed. The Middle East spans 15+ countries, 5 timezones and has a population of 300m+ .... so saying the "middle east" is running out of water definitely lacks specificity

inglor_cz7• 5 years ago

A lot of exceptions apply.

Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, is located at an altitude of 2,250 meters (approx. 7 thousand feet). It has almost three million people. Pumping required amounts of water from sea level to such heights is quite a challenge.

Tehran is at 1200 meters. Tabriz, 1350 meters. Mashhad, 1000 meters altitude and far from the sea.

dogma11386• 5 years ago

Tehran is quite close to the Caspian Sea, Tabriz is close to Lake Urmia which while it’s shrinking is a huge salt water lake.

Sana’a is indeed more problematic but if pumping water isn’t feasible the pumping people closer to coast is.

ramraj07• 5 years ago

It seems there are fewer molecules of water there still than the number of armchair geopoliticians in the west though!

Y_Y2• 5 years ago

This is very difficult in practice. Progress is being made on making efficient and scalable solar stills though. The US DoE is even running a challenge on this topic: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/american-made-challenges-s...

dogma11386• 5 years ago

Israel desalinate 80% of their household water.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/how-israe...

It’s population is 8M, Jordan is 10M at least as far as the article goes seems like the model can work for them too.

koheripbal• 5 years ago

They also have two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Why should upstream nations deny them fresh water and then tell them to use ocean water?

Turkey has built major dams to deny water to Syria, Iraq, and Kuwait, and no one cares because Turkey is a strong NATO member.

Turkey also has access to the sea, fyi. Maybe you should recommend they desalinate water and let the fresh water flow again?

objektif2• 5 years ago

May be only if Syria, Iraq, and other oil rich countries let free oil and gas flow to Turkey. I wish what you said was that easy.

steelframe• 5 years ago

Why should upstream nations deny them fresh water and then tell them to use ocean water?

This is the premise of "water right" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_right), and as freshwater scarcity exacerbates, it's why a lot of people are anticipating armed conflicts over land on which freshwater exists.

robjan• 5 years ago

The brine, which is a byproduct of desalination, is pretty devastating to local sealife.

MrFantastic2• 5 years ago

https://www.fastcompany.com/90338907/a-new-breakthrough-lowe...

specialist• 5 years ago

Crazy noob notion:

Can brine be used for carbon capture?

I casually poked around a bit to see if sodium or chlorine were part of any CCS projects. I know nothing about chemistry, so didn't get very far.

fomine3• 5 years ago

They also have enough fossil fuels for desalination. I wonder they choose which plant.

azerous• 5 years ago

Doosan I&C, a Korean heavy industry company, sells both nuclear power plants and desalination plants. Countries only need to pay money.

joelbluminator8• 5 years ago

Well a lot of those countries don't have money. Lebanon is pretty much bankrupt for example. Iran is close to that. Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Sudan, many many super fragile countries. It's not that the problem isn't technically solvable, it is, but many of these countries are on the verge of social and economic collapse.

User232• 5 years ago

You mean they’re on the verge of joining the eventual Sino-Russian common market.

Edit: I suppose we’ll see if predictions of Iran’s imminent social and economic collapse are any more true now than they have been for the past 42 years. Too bad we can’t put a few dollars on it. I trust the Lindy effect more than some NGO’s social science model.

nradov5• 5 years ago

Rich countries close to the Middle East have an incentive to donate power and desalinization plants to bankrupt countries in order to keep those areas habitable and thereby prevent chaotic mass migration.

tsjq3• 5 years ago

they have a ton load of oil money: make good water from sea water. and next: how about Rain water harvesting ?

tsjq3• 5 years ago

kudos OP for the lite.cnn link . sweet.

jptech• 5 years ago

But the video is not shown.

pram• 5 years ago

There is also stuff like Saudi farms using non-renewable fossil water for crop irrigation, which seems insane.

b0tzzzzzzman• 5 years ago

Interesting, have not heard that term before.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_water

Scoundreller2• 5 years ago

Here’s a bunch in egypt. If you scroll in more, you get a more recent photo showing even more.

Of course you build these near the border so you’re draining someone else’s water too.

Zoom out.

https://goo.gl/maps/ufQFRKi2xiGPnB9b9

And a bunch in Saudi Arabia:

https://goo.gl/maps/eDUog8FP6EpXMmj58

wisethrowaway4• 5 years ago

Afghan population has increased from 9 million in 1960 to 40 now, but it's not raining any more.

mcny3• 5 years ago

The last time I checked afghanistan had an infant mortality rate of over one hundred. That's a hundred babies dying per thousand live births before the age of five I think.

I know once you get infant mortality rate down to about five, the last five is very difficult to make go away but a hundred? That is such unnecessary pain and suffering that should be relatively easy to reduce.

luckylion4• 5 years ago

Not sure when you checked, but it's been steadily sinking and is under 50 now, and there's no reason to believe it won't continue that way (it fell even under the Taliban). I'm not sure they'll get to Western levels, but they're closing the gap.

Havoc2• 5 years ago

Agriculture in a desert is insane anyway.

nradov5• 5 years ago

What's the alternative other than mass starvation?

Havoc2• 5 years ago

Grow the crops somewhere less insane and put them on a ship.

Also not ideal but a bit more sustainable than draining aquifers

hourislate• 5 years ago

Scientists have been predicting Climate Change/Global Warming for the last decade +. I'm not smart enough to predict the future but a lot of smart folks already have. Without some kind of break through change, water scarcity will drive regional wars and the greatest human migration the world has ever seen. I suspect the day will come when those Oil tankers that carried oil could possibly carry 10's of 1000's of desperate people crashing on the shores of distance countries daily. We here in NA are not safe from the affects of this climate change since it's also happening in our back yard. There are millions of people leaving south and central America trying to reach the Land of Milk and Honey. We will be over run with 10's of millions in the coming decades if things don't change.

I wish water was as interesting as space so some billionaire would take up the challenge of figuring out how to efficiently desalinate the ocean waters and solve one the greatest challenges facing billions of people around the world....

volandovengo• 5 years ago

This lite.cnn site is awesome! Text without ads & trackers that bloat the cnn.com site.

tpmx3• 5 years ago

It would do well with a tiny amount of additional CSS to make it work well on large screens, but I guess they don't want to make it too nice to use for that segment.

Jtsummers2• 5 years ago

IIRC, this site was put together, in particular, for low-bandwidth users (like mobile phone users back in the feature phone day) where every byte cost. CSS would be an unnecessary and potentially expensive addition for those users.

primeradical2• 5 years ago

Yeah just two adjustments makes it infinitely more readable on a 1080p monitor, body { max-width: 768px; margin: 0 auto; }

ksaj• 5 years ago

I've been using it since the Raspberry Pi 3 days (before rpi 4 came about) because ads affected them so severely. And now that we have the pi4 that can handle the load, I still have not changed from reading CNN from the lite page. And that has carried over to all my other devices. I just Google the title if I want to see pictures or video in the article.

I used to do the same with Twitter, but these days there is nearly no difference between the mobile and the regular versions.

antisthenes• 5 years ago

One hopes that soon we'll discover technology to display X kb of text without also loading 100X kb of Javascript.

Abishek_Muthian• 5 years ago

I read HN on Kindle[1], So low bloat websites like these are always a pleasure to read on Kindle's forever experimental browser.

The websites needn't be text only, Reducing useless elements like Techcrunch's content wrap can go a long way to improve readability and accessibility.

[1] https://hntokindle.com/ (Disclaimer: I built this)

h2odragon• 5 years ago

Obvious smart ass remark: Isn't that pretty much what the area is known for?

morpheos1372• 5 years ago

Most of the land area of the middle east has always been uninhabitable or marginally inhabitable for the duration of human civilization. Fortunately global warming should increase evaporation and rainfall. The driest periods are always ice ages.

The Middle East is running out of water, and parts are becoming uninhabitable

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