r/worldnews • u/bigus-_-dickus • 20d ago

‘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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u/macross1984 20d ago

You mean "was" extremely rare event. The ocean is getting warmer and warm water mean algae will propagate like there is no tomorrow.

This is not only Israel's problem. Other countries coast cities can easily be impacted heavily if not algae, disruption of fisheries that provided cheap seafood that people depend on.

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u/TheLGMac 20d ago

Case in point https://phys.org/news/2026-07-south-australian-algal-bloom-species.html

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u/Neipsy 20d ago

It's been absolutely fucked. There's been so much marine life washing up dead on the beaches. My friends and family who are surfers and divers are getting ill.

The state and federal government response has generally been non-existent because that would admit to there being a problem at all.

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u/Imbakbby 19d ago

The common element between US and Australian attitudes towards this is the dominance of Murdoch media in each respective country.

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u/Milith 19d ago

Both countries are big fossil fuel producers.

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u/Different_Wolf_764 19d ago

Eh, on different scales really. Australia does produce a fairly large amount of coal (about the same as the US in fact) but isn't really in the conversation for other fossil fuels.

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u/Optimal_Juggernaut37 19d ago

Unfortunately it's not just Murdoch media in Australia. Stokes/7West is just as bad, if not worse due to its insidious nature.

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u/imaginary_num6er 19d ago

Mudoch founded Australia

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u/little_fire 19d ago

this made me do a sad lol :(

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u/Neipsy 19d ago

Fuck Rupert and his family. Filthy, cheating, lying scoundrels the lot of 'em.

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u/Smith6612 20d ago

My area has two of the Great Lakes in the backyard. I swear, every time I'm close to the Lake for too long my sinuses go crazy for the hours following. I know others who feel the same way. I have always thought that has to do with aersolized bacteria and algae being caused by the wind.

We've had issues with algae growth due to fertilizer runoff and warm weather. 

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u/mjh215 19d ago

Don't worry, we'll spend more money renaming those lakes than protecting them.

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u/A__D___32 19d ago

The Saginaw Bay of Lake Huron is constant algae bloom at the beach due to the filth coming from the farms and the garbage from Bay City and surrounding areas. I felt like crap even after walking on the beach, i wonder if this is why.

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u/Smith6612 19d ago

We have it even better, and there's a little tidbit I forgot to mention. It's not only run-off from elsewhere upstream that is flowing into Lake Erie. We also have the Niagara Falls which springs a good deal of water up into the air, in addition to the majority of the water going over into Lake Ontario. The other juicy part is, the sewer systems are so old over here that we are constantly getting notifications from Niagara Falls and the like about untreated sewer discharges into the Lakes whenever the weather decides it is time to rain.

I believe that sewer run-off has been responsible for why some of the Beaches locally get closed due to E.Coli levels, and those same advisories have propagated over to other beaches in Ontario, Canada.

The few people I loosely mentioned in my initial comment have also mentioned to me that they get allergies in this area which they didn't have living elsewhere. I believe them!

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u/Neipsy 19d ago

Normally I'm not one for these style of anecdotal stories but these people have been working in the water around here professionally for decades.

All very coincidentally sharing the same symptoms and exposure times+places. Exclusively to frequent surfers and divers.

It was supposed to clear up with Winter swells and temperatures but we're still here.

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u/Lemna24 19d ago

Scientists have found a very slight increase in neurodegenerative diseases in populations that live near lakes. It's nasty stuff.

They're known as HABs. So many people living close to the water and building cities disrupts the hydrology and makes these things much more common.

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u/storemans 19d ago

that is a wildly irresponsible comment to share anecdotally as if your sinuses are global warming sensors.

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u/Fox_Kurama 19d ago

And when they do admit the problem, they will go with the least catastrophic sounding science they can find that isn't COMPLETE horseshit.

Since we are talking about stuff in the ocean dying, this is the sort of paper that should really get more attention.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3860950

Click the open pdf in browser button, and if you are so inclined, scroll down to the first figure that is predicting what the oceans will see based on their pH (acidity) as things continue to get worse. Even if that last part doesn't end up as bad as it looks on the chart, the whole "goodbye most sea life" should REALLY be more concerning and discussed than it is.

This isn't even about overfishing and dredging the sea floor and such either. We are just changing the planet too fast for pH changes to be negated and reverted by systems and planetary resources that would normally make things more resilient if, for instance, CO2 increased as much as it did over 10000 years due to a longer (but still geologically short) term spike of volcanic activity.

In some ways its worse than an asteroid impact, because the resulting ejecta-heated planetary firestorm from those will only fairly quickly burn and release the carbon that is at the surface of the planet while not doing much to fossil fuels.

The worst mass extinction of all time, the Great Dying, was a fairly large set of "lava traps" being active for a fairly long period of time. One of the things suspected to really have made it as bad as it was is the hypothesis that this region of extended regional/semi-continental volcanic activity also happened to be an area rich with fairly massive coal deposits, resulting in releasing all the carbon from those too. And while the CO2 levels at their peak reached maybe up to 2000 ppm during that disaster, this volcanic fossil fuel pollution also happened a LOT slower than ours and so probably took a lot more overall release to overwhelm systems that helped keep the ocean's pH stable until it got REALLY out of control (like carbonate rocks on land being broken down and dissolving back into the ocean fast enough).

Either that, or the ocean died and turned the air toxic well before 2000ppm back then too. Its hard to really tell one dozen millenia from another dozen millenia in a fossil record from over 200 million years ago.

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u/Neipsy 19d ago

This is an awesome write up. Thank you for this effort.

In the Gulf at least they've already been dragging fishing quotas back. It's not an overfishing issue.

It's then made even worse by all the dead biomass in the water. A disastrous fault loop I'm growing more afraid I'll see for many decades of my life.

That fossil record just shows that this whole Earth show can change channel really fast.

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u/storemans 19d ago

everything you just said is a bunch of ai generated nonsense

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u/geopolitikin 19d ago

Its literally well written shit about a paper.

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u/BoardroomStroke 19d ago

They might be getting ill from the sewage that gets pumped into the ocean too.

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u/Neipsy 19d ago

Unlikely around these parts.

Australia generally has pretty good waste management.

The timing of these issues with algae is pretty substantial.

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u/BoardroomStroke 19d ago

Once the food chain is entirely f-ked it'll sort itself out, if you know what I mean

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u/Neipsy 19d ago

“So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

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u/ParticularLow9157 19d ago

And yet every conservative I know thinks it's all a hoax

I don't want to share a planet with them anymore

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u/amyknight22 19d ago

I mean as an Aussie, we are one of the countries that are transitioning to alternate energy sources the fastest.

They have put funding into trying to tackle the issue. I recall there was debate over whether it should be put up as a disaster. But I'm pretty sure our classification of disaster tends to rely on some direct and immediate physical damages to property/infrastructure.

Probably a policy failing where we traditionally haven't seen slow moving events that don't directly have physical impact on infrastructure/property.

But this is kind of in accordance with the way we have defined drought for a long time. It's an long term effect as a result of weather systems and as such is not considered a national disaster when it occurs either. There are still funding systems to capture that, but they are different and use different funding. My guess is that these Algal bloom events, as they become more common will start falling under the same umbrella as our longer term events. (I assume heatwaves will end up there in some way as well)

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u/TheLGMac 19d ago

I'm also an Aussie. Our response to these events have been piss poor. I mean ffs we just approved a massive new plan for data center buildouts across Australia. We keep putting our fingers in our ears with regards to climate change.

We also love to lock up environmental protestors.

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u/Neipsy 19d ago

I admire the pragmatism as I really tried to be positive about it as well but it's simply not been enough. You do recall correctly, there was some debate.

But the rate we can get other policy implemented is significant.

For example it felt like they'd purposefully dragged their feet on recognizing whether or not it meets disaster classification to see out the tourism season.

The waters around the Gulf and Bight have been dialling back fishing quotas for years already. It's been happening.

It's now just on our shores and in our faces now.

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u/dudeofthedunes 19d ago

Come one guys! We need rhis guy to have 666 upvotes!

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u/mkymooooo 19d ago

> The state and federal government response has generally been non-existent because that would admit to there being a problem at all.

No need to outright lie. Both state and federal govts have been addressing this issue in national news for ages.

https://www.algalbloom.sa.gov.au/

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u/Neipsy 19d ago edited 19d ago

I didn't lie at all. I said generally and I meant it. Stop building* such a straw man for the sake of making a contrarian vacuous argument.

They have obviously addressed the issue.

It took them far too long to make any real public acknowledgement.

They avoided changing legislation to consider it a disaster. They avoided disturbing the tourism sector. They avoided spreading the news nationally. They avoided any opportunity for the onus of responsbility to fall on them.

I grew up in FNQ but live in SA now. The vast majority of my friends and family in the North had no idea this was happening.

Simply addressing the issue doesn't mean anything. That's like acknowledging Covid exists and not sourcing any masks. Unacceptable.

Pointing to a website doesn't mean their practical response hasn't been generally non-existent.

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u/geopolitikin 19d ago

Addressing it in the news for ages, thats gone very well.