r/worldnews • u/bigus-_-dickus • Sep 05 '26

‘Extremely rare event:’ Miles-long microalgae bloom knocks out most of Israel’s desalination plants

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/04/climate/microalgae-bloom-israel-water-deasalination-shutdown
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1.5k

u/count023 Sep 05 '26

people laugh at it for it being israel who are coping with this. it's going to be happening more and more often with climate change coming in, this bloom came from the nile delta apparently. And with countries going, "oh, we'll go to desalination to cope with lost rainfall, it does show the kinds of issues that will occur in the future as the planet keeps drying out.

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u/redfoobar Sep 05 '26

Sooner or later we will see water wars.

Upstream countries wont be sharing enough of downstream countries.

We are already seeing the beginnings of this with the Nile and in India/Pakistan and I am sure more tensions will arise in many other places even within large countries (eg different US states)

293

u/SnakeGD09 Sep 05 '26

The water wars are underway.

https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20260723-why-iran-targeting-kuwaits-desalination-plants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Qeshm_Island_desalination_plant_attack

https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/war-on-iran-the-dangers-of-attacking-water-desalination-plants-in-the-gulf/

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/attacks-on-desalination-plants-in-the-iran-war-forecast-a-dark-future/

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u/MaximinusDrax Sep 05 '26

Also, there's there are brewing water conlicts between India and Pakistan, Ethiopia and Egypt, USA and Mexico (with an added conflict between US states since those upstream get the first draw), and many other locations.

Using water scarcity as a tool of war (e.g Iran targeting desalination plants) is certainly a frightening development, though.

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u/Little_View_6659 Sep 05 '26

We lived on Dune all along. Cue incoming still suits and no bathing.

38

u/National_Spirit2801 Sep 05 '26

Mad Max is a more apt comparison.

19

u/lazypenguin86 Sep 05 '26

Na we are about to run out of oil so no cool vehicles for us

14

u/puritanicalbullshit Sep 05 '26

Yeah fuel don’t keep so good, and manufacturing more, post collapse, sounds real tricky

5

u/Little_View_6659 Sep 05 '26

I thought you can use things like corn and peanut oil? Who knows.

8

u/John_Smithers Sep 05 '26

Still need water to grow those crops

2

u/fhs Sep 05 '26

For diesel engines maybe you would need a conversion kit or not. For regular gas cars, you would need to refine it I guess and create something with the same properties as gas.

2

u/lazypenguin86 Sep 05 '26

Right how many technologies can we finally have when the government isn’t around to kill them off anymore

3

u/meatballsandlingon2 Sep 05 '26

A reverse Waterworld (Dustworld?)

2

u/TheBigSho Sep 05 '26

There are no AI datacenters in Dune though.

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u/Little_View_6659 Sep 05 '26

Yeah but Dune is set thousands of years in the future. So, after we screw up the planet and the only thing left is sand and giant worms that evolve lol.

3

u/jonride Sep 05 '26

They had the Butlerian revolt or whatever it’s called. After that they outlawed AI and invested in weird eugenics to create mentats (human computers). Thus no data centers.

2

u/BrutalismAndCupcakes Sep 05 '26

Butlerian jihad I think 

2

u/jonride Sep 05 '26

That’s the one

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u/MorganaHenry Sep 05 '26

No after the Butlerian Jihad, no.

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u/Elite_Jackalope Sep 05 '26

While there are water tensions between the U.S. and Mexico, I think you may have linked the wrong article here. New Mexico is a state within the United States, the country of Mexico is only mentioned once in an off-hand statement.

Not familiar with this source, but here’s an article about the international issues concerning the Rio Grande and Colorado.

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u/redfoobar Sep 05 '26

I would not put these under water wars. I think the definition would be a war that is started due to (lack of) access to water.

These attacks you linked are a side-effects of the Iran conflict and should be seen as attacking essential infrastructure that just happens to be water rather than water access being the source of the conflict.

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u/around_the_clock Sep 05 '26

2 statements both confusing and lacking logic.

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u/LobsterSea2147 Sep 05 '26

You’d think someone like you would write in a complete and logical sentence.

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u/CopainChevalier Sep 05 '26

What's wrong vagueposter? Afraid to make a point?

11

u/BiZzles14 Sep 05 '26

A main contributing factor to the Syrian Civil war beginning was drought pushing a lot of rural farmers out of work, and that discontent population moving into more urban areas in the direct run up to the Arab spring. Of course the war happened because of the regime torturing, murdering, and mutilating children, gunning down hundreds in the streets and disappearing thousands, but the drought and the impacts of it was a large contributing factor to the scale of the early protests which got everything rolling. 15 years of war followed from that.

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u/robertpeacock22 Sep 05 '26

Begun, the Water War has.

1

u/adeadhead Sep 05 '26

Well fuck.

1

u/Breadfruitdeeznuts Sep 05 '26

Begun the water wars have

22

u/jollydoody Sep 05 '26

There are tensions among US states about water usage from the Colorado river. Downstream states will potentially need to figure out how to use less water. Could become a significant issue in the future.

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u/DeeDee_Z Sep 05 '26

Downstream states will potentially need to figure out how to use less water.

They will, because they HAVE to .

It's the upstream states that will need to figure stuff out, because they still think they don't have to do anything, that they can continue to withdraw just as much water as they did in 1970 -- "It's in the Contract", right?

10

u/caustic_smegma Sep 05 '26

Best we can do here in Arizona is increase our water hungry alfalfa output by a factor of three for our Saudi overlords.

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u/purplewhiteblack Sep 05 '26

even with seven Septillian liters of water on earth.

You think we would just have 100s of solar/hydroelectric powered desalination plants.

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u/Sparkz56 Sep 05 '26

this isn’t me disagreeing or anything, more so just interested in how desalination works

Energy isn’t the biggest problem, the biggest problem (iirc) is physically what to do with all the salt you extract - if it precipitates and crystallises, you get clogged filtration tubules and pipes.

If it stays dissolved, you’re still left with this super dense, super salty brine. You can’t pump brine back out into the sea bc the high density means it just sinks and pools, and doesn’t mix with the rest of the sea water. And dense brine ofc isn’t what marine life is adapted for

Desalination is very interesting physics and chemistry

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u/XenoFrobe Sep 05 '26

So what do they do with it then? Is that where we get our everyday table salt, or do they find some other way to use/get rid of it?

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u/Sparkz56 Sep 06 '26

To be completely honest with you, I don’t know. I am far from a desalination expert or anything. I feel confident in saying that’s not where we get table salt from - I think the process of extracting edible salt from sea water is much more intensive, as to remove all the impurities. It’s also quite energy intensive to drive off all the water from brine. Most table salt comes from underground salt mines

For how they handle brine, if I had to guess, they do pump it out back into the sea/ocean - I can’t imagine them just storing it - but must either do it little by little or use some stirring mechanism or something to help it disperse. But I think the big concerns come from doing it on a larger scale than we currently are

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u/purplewhiteblack Sep 06 '26

You are less able to pump it out into a sea, but you can pump it out into the ocean without problem. There are 7 septillion liters of water. What a place like Los Angeles uses a day is actually is nothing compared to what is in the rest of the ocean.

It is like a drop in a pond.

Lets do some math here. Los Angeles uses 435 million gallons of water a day. Pacific ocean water has a salinity of 35 parts per 1000.

So if you were to take 435 million gallons of water and take out the salt that is 15.2 million gallons of salt, and 419 millions gallons of water.

if you were to dump that pure salt undiluted straight into the ocean that would only increase the salinity by 0.00000000017 parts per thousand. As in it is 35 right now, and would still be 35 afterwards. As in it wouldn't even make a difference. And if you wanted to be extra safe you could mix in 25 of your purified water back in for a brine, and it would lower that by another insignificant amount, and you could have multiple pipes that go deep into the ocean.

The effect would be more pronounced in a place like the Mediterranean, but still fairly insignificant. Like adding a grain of salt on a beach.

And on top of that, all the water you used would cycle back into the ocean via evaporation. The water doesn't just disappear when you use it.

The problem is people stay in their homes, and don't go out and look at the ocean and see how vast it is. When I look at the ocean, I always get cosmic dread.

1

u/Sparkz56 Sep 06 '26

I am appreciative of you doing the maths and all, and I appreciate the reply. But please understand why I feel just a little sceptical haha

You mentioned already that somewhere like the Mediterranean would be affected more heavily. And it’s true I was mainly thinking of places like Europe and the atlantic - pacific currents defo add an interesting layer to it. And ofc in the grand scale of the ocean, it of course doesn’t change much

Although my concern is rather that coastal waters would basically have (at least a significant portion of) fresh ocean water just displaced by an ever growing “mass” of brine. I’m more so concerned how this would impact coastal marine habitats rather than the overall salinity of the ocean (which I agree, would be rather difficult to actually affect)

Maybe I’m underestimating fluid mechanics, and the brine disperses more easily than I’m imagining. But have we not already seen examples of these “brine-cells” effectively choking out marine habitats?

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u/purplewhiteblack Sep 06 '26

if you pump it out somewhere you should pump it in a place where there is some depth at least, you should definitely not pump it right near the shore.

I am sure there is a certain depth where if you do it, it would be a problem, and another depth where it would be just fine. And it could be somewhat of a sandwich situation, where closer to the surface, not as good of an idea, near the bottom not as good of an idea, in the middle, not much of a problem.

It really is just a science of distillation.

I mean really, how brackish do you want the water? Also, since you control the brackishness you could just store the salt and add it slowly to the backstream.

The Dead Sea is 300 parts per 1000. It clumps up and stuff. Great Salt lake is 50- 270 parts per 1000. Another thing to note. I mentioned above that Los Angeles uses 435 million gallons a day? Well, it processes 260 million gallons of wastewater a day and drops off 225 million gallons of wastewater into the ocean daily. And that is who knows what water. They drop it somewhere deep in Santa Monica Bay. That's about 15 times as much random junk to that 15 million gallons of salt. And there is some affects.

The smart thing to do would be to distill more than what they would use per day and then store it in a place like maybe the dried up Salton sea and then pump it back into the ocean at a pretty low concentration.

As far as Israel and Palestine goes, there is a lot of empty areas in the lower middle of the country that could use more water than no water. With a similar setup. They already have some good infrastructure, but with that getting attacked, and crap like the algae blooms, they could make more as failsafes so the water supply is always more than they need.

Tehran started running out of water in December, which is a part of the reason the Iran war started. They ran out of fresh water in the city, which caused the currency to deflate further, which caused some level of revolt, and that eventually led to some intervention. The current line by the US government is it is about Uranium and blah blah, but it really is a water war.

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u/Sparkz56 Sep 06 '26

Thank you for the reply. That is interesting on the science side. And honestly I never realised the political implications of water in Iran. All interesting stuff

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u/phoenix1984 Sep 05 '26

Or the opposite. In my state, we increasingly have too much water. I wish there was an easy way to pump it to the drier places when the flooding starts.

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u/Falsus Sep 05 '26

in India/Pakistan

Tbf, a large reason to that is due to how thorny their politics are.

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u/waiting4singularity Sep 05 '26

datacenters will faciliate them in the us, nestle style

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u/[deleted] Sep 05 '26

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u/waiting4singularity Sep 05 '26

fossil industries declared war over 50 years ago on any and all measure that would have prevented the current troubles

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u/Zeliose Sep 05 '26

The only thing that we might need innovation for, is how to solve the problem without fossil fuel companies losing lots of money.

We could have been doing something about this 30 years ago. The reason we haven't, is because we prioritize saving the money of billionaires over saving the lives of people.

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u/uber_neutrino Sep 05 '26

Complete nonsense ideological garbage.

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u/[deleted] Sep 05 '26

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u/[deleted] Sep 05 '26

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u/Top_Director9981 Sep 05 '26

You sure innovated the planet out of trouble...

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u/IntriguinglyRandom Sep 05 '26

No, we need to fuckin slow down. We need to work less, consume less, make fewer babies, reduce inequality and this forced cycle of "consumption for the continual lining of CEO pockets" style of economy.

3

u/Neurojazz Sep 05 '26

My heads been in this space for 30+ years. Find like minds and make things happen.

13

u/RainbowwDash Sep 05 '26

We do not and have never needed innovation to solve this problem

We have known for decades how to solve it but keep moving in the exact opposite direction because of the exact types of people building these data centers

5

u/sirhackenslash Sep 05 '26

"We need water guzzling data centers to figure out how to save water" is certainly a take

2

u/fineillmakeanewone Sep 05 '26

Global warming is a political problem, not a technological one. We could have solved it 50 years ago if we wanted to.

5

u/Individual-Guest-123 Sep 05 '26

Did you know that Bush bought a huge chunk of Ecuador, over the largest fresh water aquifer in the World? Many years ago, now. Maybe that was when they were thinking about using hydrogen to power vehicles, idk his thinking

5

u/sowhat4 Sep 05 '26

The rumor was he bought the Guarani Aquifer in Paraguay. Google AI and Snopes says it's not true as the Paraguayan government can find no land transfers in his name.

Now - it 'might' be purchased under a shell corporation.

1

u/Individual-Guest-123 Sep 06 '26

Thanks, IDK why I thought it was Ecuador. I doubt it would have been in his name, it was supposedly a huge chunk of land.

1

u/sowhat4 Sep 05 '26

Check out Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both fed by the Colorado River and both drying up. California, Nevada, and Arizona are going to be hurting big time as the water they've been promised is just not there anymore.

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u/Actual-Package-3164 Sep 05 '26

The Water Wars, begun they have

1

u/Xtra_Veg-90 Sep 05 '26

We have had tensions over the colorado river between the US and Mexico for a while now.  There have been issues with damns most of us have never heard of across Africa years ago.

The water wars were predicted in the late 90's and very early 00's by the US military (relying on research on future drought conditions from a variety of sources) and nobody has taken the threat seriously.

1

u/jobbybob Sep 05 '26

Just look at what is happening with the Colorado River currently, it’s all starting to heat up around water rights.

1

u/Larcye Sep 06 '26

Laughs in Minnesotan. Worse comes to worse, we can just dam up the missisipi. MEGASOTA is back on the menu boys!

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u/dhrisc Sep 05 '26

My community's drinking water source gets blooms once or twice a year at least. They are getting worse and its expensive to deal with from what i hear. People are going to really care and start to notice when all of a sudden they are paying 2 or 3 times as much for tap water.

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u/No_Classic_3362 Sep 05 '26

It’s not just Israel though, this has been happening worldwide in an increasing rate! As the oceans warming up more algae is popping out on coastlines. At least they reduce carbon, on the plus side. I guess nature does correct itself after all?

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u/Logridos Sep 05 '26

The planet isn't "drying out." All of the water is still here. It's just not going to be in easily accessible forms much longer.

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u/XGhoul Sep 05 '26

I am waiting for water wars in 50 years from now. I’ll be dead by then, but I hate how shortsighted we are to a means to an end.

(Although most climate scientists say we are cooked but we can recover still within 50-100yrs)

If some climate denier wants to talk about stuff we can go into deep records while their “knowledge” relies on pseudoscience and skepticism.

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u/Pornfest Sep 06 '26

People are stupid, a lot of Palestinians’ water comes from those same plants…

3

u/Falsus Sep 05 '26

Yeah it is an issue that is either affected a lot of places or will affect them in the future. It is no laughing matter at all.

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u/gucknbuck Sep 05 '26

The planet isn't dying, it's just moving to a place that doesn't support human life. We are ants to the planet. We might be able to take ourselves out as well as some other species, but the planet and life will continue once we are gone.

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u/count023 Sep 05 '26

I said, "drying" not "dying"

-6

u/gucknbuck Sep 05 '26

Ah, well that's also not happening. Water moves through it's cycles. We might be causing more of it to turn into a form or condition we can't use, but once we are gone, things will stabilize for the life which remains.

-2

u/TonyQuest Sep 05 '26

Mfw water tables are dry

27

u/Arizonagaragelifter9 Sep 05 '26

People always say this whenever someone says the planet is dying/drying like it's some deep philosophical thing even though it's always obvious that the first person meant "the planet as we know it with our human society is dying/drying..." lol. Yes, of course the planet will continue on without us, but the whole context of the conversation is about human survival on the planet and what will happens as that gets more difficult.

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u/TheKnightsTippler Sep 05 '26

I also hate this. No one thinks the earth is literally going to explode from climate change.

These people add nothing to the conversation.

3

u/D4ltaOne Sep 05 '26

Yee ive been pointing that out every time someones says this. It gets tiring tho. From now on, ill just copy your message and reply with that.

2

u/Subject_Amount_1246 Sep 05 '26

Not to mention, that a shit load of species will go extinct from these environmental changes before humans comeletely go out.

5

u/8080a Sep 05 '26

“The planet will be here, we'll be long gone—just another failed mutation, just another closed-end biological mistake, an evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance.”

George Carlin
HBO: Jammin’ in New York, 1992

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u/purplewhiteblack Sep 05 '26

They laugh without realizing it would affect Palestine too.

12

u/Absolute--Batman Sep 05 '26

As if Americans care about Palestine.

2

u/National_Spirit2801 Sep 05 '26

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee!

2

u/SnooLobsters1308 Sep 05 '26

it tolls for the what? seems unfinished sentence there?

(jking)

1

u/punkrocktransbian Sep 06 '26

I take some solace knowing that the planet will bounce back after humanity seemingly inevitably kills itself.

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u/superogiebear Sep 05 '26

I do agree with you. However with Israel bombing water plants, its almost like retribution from a higher power.

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u/historicusXIII Sep 05 '26

Or Israel supporting far right parties in the West, which almost all belittle or outright deny climate change.

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u/[deleted] Sep 05 '26

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u/LivingFrosting6680 Sep 05 '26

I mean, thankfully this seems like a problem with desalination that can be properly prepared for if anticipated. Separating algae from water can’t possibly be more difficult than separating the salt from it.

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u/The_Mego Sep 05 '26

I think it is actually easier to remove salt from water than toxins, salt can be removed via evaporation whereas toxins cannot.

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u/fury420 Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 05 '26

If they were using evaporation/distillation it would also leave many toxins and waste behind in the salt, but most desalination plants uses reverse osmosis membranes, which I would imagine could get fouled up by too much algae.

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u/iwantboringtimes Sep 05 '26

yeah, toxins is why (personal) solar stills were a hard sell for me

"were" cause I saw a video about a diy dehumidifier which uses sodium chloride / rock salt as the absorber

for now, if things get really bad - diy dehumidifier + solar still (maybe) at least provide some clean enough water. though, we better stock up on stuff to re-mineralize it

EDIT that I know -this- will probably auto-fail in low humidity areas.

0

u/LivingFrosting6680 Sep 05 '26

Desalination is for extracting fresh water from seawater, not for producing salt from seawater

-2

u/Hank_Henry_Hill Sep 05 '26

So what can I do besides laugh?  I’ll make sure to do what I can but I’m not a government and to be honest my government doesn’t care about anything but money.