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UK Team to Study Rainmaking Machines
RobertB-DC writes "The BBC reports that a Edinburgh University team has received a grant to research Wind-Powered Rainmaking Machines. You have to have winds blowing towards a mountainous coastline, but the article says that the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf are well-suited. For a cautionary note, though, the BBC includes a link to the story of a 1952 cloud-seeding experiment gone terribly wrong."
I guess the US has already tried to use this as a weapon. I came across this article where rain making was used in Vietnam. The UN has also already banned the use of weather control as a weapon. So much for the weather machine in Command and Conquer.
An amusing excerpt from that link:
Yeah, see, these things work on kinetic energy, and by seeding the clouds you gave them more mass and produced more rain. Sure, you (obviously not you you, by the way, unless you are the one responsible for this) could stop it this way, but putting energy into a chaotic system when you don't know what you're doing is nearly always a mistake.
Cool link, thanks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I share another posters scepticism - spraying as much silver iodide or ice as a plane can carry into the air created 250x normal rainfall out of nothing? Sure...
Australia has far more need of enhanced rainfall than Britain. There have been extensive trials by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and overall cloud seeding does not work.
To quote from a summary of CSIRO's findings: "CSIRO has shown that in Australia cloud seeding is effective only in a limited number of weather conditions. Cloud seeding will never break droughts; cloudless skies will never produce rain."
CSIRO have also produced guidelines for water managers considering trying cloud seeding. My take on their conclusion is: it won't work, save your money.
There are other consequences to irrigation as well. Take, for example, the state of the Great Plains aquifer, which underlies Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and in fact most of the middle of the country. Aquifers are a resource in a delicate balance between the amount of water withdrawn and the amount of water recharged from streams and precipitation soaking into the ground.
:-(
Currently we are withdrawing water from the Great Plains aquifer about twice as fast as it is being replenished. My geology book from last year claimed it'll be used up in another 10-15 years. If that happens, some MAJOR changes are going to result. We'll have to decrease agricultural production to about 25% of current levels -- not enough water to plant the crops as densely as we hvae been. Cattle ranching will suffer, too -- not enough water to maintain the current herds.
This process is only being exacerbated by the prolonged drought throughout the western half of the country. Remember the Hayman fire in Colorado last summer? And the literally hundreds of other fires? That's because the entire region is as dry as a bone: we haven't been getting normal precipitation levels. Colorado (which is my home state) lost about three quarters of the crops that were planted this year due to the drought. Mandatory watering restrictions were in place all summer, and have already been announced for next year.
Then, of course, there are going to be some pretty severe economic repercussions. For a state whose primary industry is agriculture, a 75% decrease in crop yields, be it because of unusual drought or a depleted aquifer, is HUGE. Food prices -- especially for energy-intensive products like beef -- will go up. People will not be happy.
It's a mess.
Oddly enough something similar occurred in Rapid City on June 9m 1972. Stories from the NWS and MPR.
It is very very hard to seed clouds. You've got to get the silver iodide (or whatever) concentration just right- too many condensation nuclei and all you get is suspended fog. Too few, and the dropplets grow too slowly (collision is a major growth process). There've been many attempts over the years, but it is really really hard to prove correlation in the wild.. (send refs if you know otherwise!)
You seem quite scheptyc about rainmaking. Well, Russian government disclosed that it used several technologies for local weather control. There was even a program on TV about this. That confirmed the old suspicions people had about the strange weather changes during holidays in Soviet Union. For several years, people noted that if rain was about to come to Moscow in 1st of May, then as magic, clouds would disappear. However there was a side effect, as, somewhere around Moscow rain would fall like in the tropics. This was always considered as popular fantasy. However, this summer, a TV program showed one of the crews specially prepared for those missions. They showed nearly everything, from preparing the ingredients up to seeding the clouds. In an interview, one guy told that they were doing it since the 50's and there was already a whole science behind it, from how to stop rain up to how to make it fall. There were side effects dangers and whole models to avoid certain critical situations. There were several types of ingredients on use. Silver iodide occurred to be one of the least used. The most popular was... concrete powder.They say it is tremendously effective.
that the Chinese are planning to use rain/anti-rain making technology for the Olympics? I remember hearing that in the mainstream media. Here's a link
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Hydrogen: Have any significant pockets of atomic hydrogen been discovered yet? Do we know how to "drill" for hydrogen without the risk of a huge explosion?
Is Hydrogen yet viable for all our energy? No. Should we stop researching it? Again, no.
Also, the usage of 'hydrogen' as a power source is somewhat ambiguous. "Drilling for hydrogen" isn't probably the approach we'd want to take. Using the tides to extract it from saltwater or some other similar approach is probably a better one.
Tides: The amount of energy tends to be insignificant unless the tides are really huge, like at the Bay of Fundy, in which case the power generators are already there.
Are you arguing that we can't make any advancements in tidal energy sources, and that all the places that can generate the energy are already tapped? I've read many articles about producing cheaper generators that, if deployed en masse, would generate a fair amount of power in lower tide areas. And even those types that are installed at the Bay of Fundy can be improved for efficiency. The process of creating the solar panels tends to be harmful to the environment.
Processes can be (and will be) improved, and even with their harms, they're far less dangerous than nuclear waste with a half-life of hundreds of millenia.
Who said we were relying on one power source?
Wind: you need lots of windmillsSee above statement.
We pretty much are going with these cleaner options where they are available, but they don't replace fossil fuels.
Except for nuclear power, which doesn't deserve to be considered a 'cleaner option'. Keep in mind that uranium doesn't grow on trees. It, too, has to be mined and processed. Even that fact, though, pales when you consider:
Oh, and nuclear waste isn't usable as a weapon [...] So we bury it in the ground instead.
I'm not talking about a bomb. I'm talking about burying the stuff in *your* backyard. I'm talking about malicously polluting your water supply and/or farmland for the next 150,000 years.
In conclusion, I feel that the probability that the fission power waste will either be used as a weapon or will be mismanaged and cause great amounts of contamination sometime over the next 150,000 years is pretty close to 100%. We're just not responsible enough to use this power source. -Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.