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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."
This is good news for my grant application to deploy a sand-making machine in Algeria.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
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.
North Devon experienced 250 times the normal August rainfall in 1952. [...] She recalls: "Mum identified her by this huge wart on her back because she hadn't got no head, or arms, or legs when they found her".
I hate to be skeptical, but... the article seems to imply that this rain making experiment caused all this water to suddenly fall out of the sky. But what makes my "bullshit" meter go off is whether there is that much water in the air in the first place. I mean, 250 times the normal rainfall? I could see if you had some natural storm system come in that just happened to have a ton of moisture, but just to create out of "thin air" (so to speak) that much water out of normal conditions just doesn't sound plausible.
Particularly since if it were that easy, we would never have droughts.
Something isn't adding up here.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Who wants odds on how long before weather is used as a weapon in war?
It's real, now. No need for speculation. The secretive European Union has been launching tornadoes and hurricanes and floods against the Americans for decades, unfortunately it's only resulted in more sturdy trailer-home designs...
Hrm...
If you force the rain to come down, NOW, RIGHT HERE, aren't you preventing the rain from falling on your neighbors? What if there is a drought and the neighbors need the rain?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Irrigation doesn't affect the weather?
It certainly does on this planet, boyo.
Irrigated areas create different wind profiles, put water into the atmosphere (after all, that's how plants get water, it gets pulled up through the roots into the body of the plant by the capillary force of the water that's *already* evaporating off the leaves), and usually correlate with changes in species distribution and surface temperature.
Are these changes necessarily bad? A messy question. But they certainly take place.
Facts, ol' son. Start by getting facts.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
In regards to the great flood of '52, I've got to repeat the old mantra.. "correlation does not predicate causality." (eg, "everyone who goes to the dentist dies")
..if even just 5% of our research science budget went to blue sky research, it would be a good thing (and IMO would pay back ++). If only our 'philosopher king' were less of a king and more of a philosopher...
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!)
Even if you can make clouds, it doesn't mean you make rain. At all.
Now if they could only figure out the upper reflection vs greenhouse effect balance, more clouds might help solve our global warming problem. Or make it much worse.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
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.