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Should We Change the Weather Even If We Can?
jonerik writes "According to this article in today's Christian Science Monitor, science will be able to make significant changes in weather systems in the next few decades. More than simply seeding clouds to produce rain, the technology will be available to nudge hurricanes out of the path of population centers, for instance. The big question is 'Should we?' 'Even if we can do this, is this something we really want to do?,' says Dr. Ross Hoffman, a vice president with Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc., who adds, 'Before we can really control weather, we have to be able to observe the weather and forecast the weather much better than we do now.' On the other hand, according to the article the genie may already be out of the bottle: 'According to the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization (WMO), at least 25 countries are engaged in weather modification projects to enhance rain and snowfall, or suppress hail. In the United States, 12 states have had weather modification programs. Texas runs a program at the county level for rain enhancement, while North Dakota is focusing on hail suppression.'"
We already have changed the weather by all the polution we produce. So why not.
Maybe we can change it for the better.
Given the protections for natural habitats and that people are hit with large fines for plowing fields because that impacts wetland noone legally can change weather. That is if it is though through.
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It's interesting to see that fantasy is also sometimes able to predict the future. David Eddings talked a little about this in one of his series. The point being that when you change weather in one part of the world, the air, energy and such have to go, and come from, somewhere. The effects could be huge...
hmmmm?
I may sound like a horrible person here, but I really think that as soon as we start screwing around with nature, we throw the balance out the window. The human population is already way too large as it is. Much like developing cures for disease, stopping hurricanes from hitting population centers is just another way to screw over any form of population control. We may save more lives now, but I bet you its going to cost us in the end.
Hurricanes kill lots of people in countries where housing is not well developed. I remember seeing a news broadcast from Nicaragua as one hurricane was approaching and the people being interviewed were basically saying, "we have no shelter - we are going to die."
I am not as concerned with changing wind/rain patterns as I am about reducing the amount of O3 in the atmosphere or ice at the poles.
I think the answer to this, like the answer to many questions, is a resounding, "It depdends!" For example, what environmental benefit does hail bring? Would it not be better to control hail, thus sparing millions of dollars in crop and structure damage? What benefit do we get from tornados? Hurricanes may be a tough one, because while they do cause lots of property damage, they bring rain and affect weather patterns farther inland than you would think. What about causing unseasonal monsoons? Would that cause environmental problems, or would the influx of water into the system be beneficial?
Having the technology is good. There's nothing wrong with that. Using it, however, requires proper thought on the part of those who would use it.
Ultimate weapon? Tell you what, a duel: You get weather control and I get the nukes. :)
I just think we've crossing the "ultimate weapon" line.
Storm is not the most powerful of the X-Men, after all -- though close. (Who is? Hmm. A major theme there is teamwork.)
for "stealing" somebody else's rain. Not to mention the legal "oops" factor that happens when you nudge that hurricane just a liiiiiiiiiiiittle too far to the left.
For other weather control in fiction you might want to check out Poul Anderson's "Orion Shall Rise."
KFG
Why shouldn't we? If done responsibly, environmental effects will be minimal, "ruining" nothing. Perhaps our forefathers didn't have to, but given the choice, do you think they would? An ever-shrinking amount of arable land is being used to provide food for an ever-growing world population. Why not use everything in our power to maximize (safe) production of food so that the world can eat? (yeah, yeah, we should do something about population control, but face it -- it's not going to happen).
In that vein, I'm sure you're against irrigation (nature didn't put a waterway where you need it, so tough shit), fertilizer (if the ground isn't rich enough to grow your food, tough shit), or even sowing seeds (hey, if nature didn't grow these food plants there, it must've been for a reason, right?). I'm sorry, but no. Man has been changing his environment since the first day he learned to walk (picking berries from bushes means less food for some animals, killing animals for food means less food for the natural predators of those animals, the development of farming causes vast tracts of land to be deforested, etc). Controlling the weather is not a revolutionary step. It's an evolutionary step in man's ability to control his surroundings. So long as we're responsible about it, there's nothing to lose and everything to gain.
People talk about lofty goals such as ending world hunger - this would go a long way. All though the dangers are unknown and possibly severe, I don't think there is a chance anyone will wait and see. They didn't with cell phones, and this would have a much larger impact.
Random is the New Order.
Dont't you see? Man isn't part of nature, we're seperate from it, we only seek to destroy it. Seriously though, I would say that human cultural and technological evolution can be seen as part of a natural process. We are, after all, creatures of the earth, we've got just as much right to use the land as any other animal, we're just hundreds of thousands of times more efficiant at doing it (stupid baboons, let's see you develop a written language!).
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
"Why not use everything in our power to maximize (safe) production of food so that the world can eat?"
Uh, people aren't starving due to lack of food. People are starving because governments decide to starve them.
There's plenty of food to go around, it's just not being distributed.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Would be like a world without tigers. Safer, maybe, but less interesting.
"Chaotic" does not mean random, so it does not mean that ramifications will never be known. We may find conditions in which something we can do will very regularly (and perhaps through magnification of effects - chaos that is) increase rainfall or evaporation off the ocean in some area. Taking advantage of the regularity that we discover in the chaos will not prevent us from seeing the ramifications of our actions.
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This problem makes it extremely hard to do weather modification in a scientific way. We don't have access to a "control atmosphere." There is no fixed reference point to compare results against. We can never tell if our manipulations were the true cause of the effects we observe. And if we perform experiments in closed laboratory conditions, then we are no longer studying the real atmosphere by definition.
If we gave serious thought to large-scale weather modification, we'd be insane. We only have one atmosphere. Not only is it unscientific, it's dangerous.
The earth has been heating and cooling for hundreds of thousands of years. Ice ages have come and gone before and now we are just in a warming trend. The truth is humans have inhabited the planet for a very insignificant speck of time and we still know very little about the planet. Why is the center liquid? What causes magnetism? Its a theory, someday it could be proven either way.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Fuck with it at your own peril.
No, fuck with it at our peril.
If you're of the scientific bent that says that humans are adversely impacting the ecosystem, then customizing the weather to mitigate the human impact to the global ecosystem is our responsibility.
On the other hand, if you're of the other scientific bent which says that the planet's been around for a few billion years, the self-destructive monkeys that populate less than a third of its surface area can't do jack to it, then attempts to customize the weather will be generally be met with chaotic results (causing the companies working on such projects to go bankrupt prior to succeeding).
Of course, if the coin lands on its side, then you sould watch the [awful] movie version of The Avengers and thereby learn that weather control can be used for great evil and terrorism and such. Alternately, it'll run on Windows causing an ecological disaster -- think "memory leak" from the clouds. (And all the terrorist religious zealots will praise their respective gods as said respective gods unleash rain for forty days and forty nights on the infidels who are on hold with Microsoft tech support.)
Tee hee hee.
One of the largest difficulties in forecasting weather is something called the "chaos effect". It's the theory that one small change in one portion of the world can lead to drastic changes down the line in another portion of the world, such as the wind from the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Asia eventually adding just a bit more speed of wind to a super hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricanes are huge heat-transfer engines. The only reason that hurricanes form is to transfer heat in the atmosphere from the tropical latitudes to the temperate and polar latitudes, thus helping keeping the world at stable temperatures. Severe hail storms in the American midwest are a way for dryer air to head east off the slopes of the Rockey mountains to the eastern United States, thus keeping the east from being as muggy as a tropical rainforest in the afternoon.
Say you nudge a category five hurricane south of hitting Miami, Florida. Instead, it strikes near Havana, Cuba, causing considerable damage and devistation. In a time where altering the weather is obvious, the Cuban government is outraged, and begins to launch terror attacks in the southern United States due to the high death toll caused by the Americans changing the path of the hurricane instead of hitting Miami and causing billions of dollars of damage. This example shows one effect - if the weather could be controled by westen nations, smaller nations, or other western nations would retaliate with terrorism, or all out war, thus causing much more widespread damage than the hurricane would ever do.
The hurricane, and others like it, are directed south, or out to sea in the Atlantic, away from the eastern seaboard of the United States. As a result, the western coastline of Europe, espically the British Isles, get lashed by severe windstorms in the fall, while the eastern United States freezes in much colder airmasses going unmoderated from Canada. A number of hurricanes passing over the same portion of water creates upwelling, thus changing a considerable amount of the sea surface temperature in the Atlantic, messing up the North Atlantic Oscillation, and throwing weather patterns in the eastern United States and Europe into chaos in the wintertime.
Severe thunderstorms are prevented in the central United States, preventing dryer air from flowing east to offer relief to high heat indexes in the Eastern United States. With the lack of dry air, heatwaves intensify, and thousands die in large metro areas thanks to the already present heat-island effect. (300+ alone died in 1 weekend in a Chicago heatwave in the 90's)
In the end, the worldwide weather patterns are thrown into chaos, which is thus controlled by more chaos, and so on and so forth, until the process gets out of control even of the weather controllers, and then the average person, the average you & I, get to suffer for it.
This project, above all others, should be halted immeidately, for our sake.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
The main problem I see is that rich countries will be able to create the weather that they need, where as poor countries will get whatever we don't want. I guess this happens with everything else (ie food, medicine etc), so this will just add to their problems.
I'm not against cloning, in fact I'm all for it, so I'm not some anti-progress/science guy.
But ever heard the expression, "The flap of a butterfly's wing can affect the weather halfway around the world" (note that halfway is the farthest distance possible!)?
If we mess with the weather on a big scale we risk F@#king up the whole goddamn planet! We don't have even remotely enough knowledge of the weather to do such a thing. We're messing with a CLOSED system here, if you make more water in one place that means there is less somewhere else!
PLEASE don't mess with the weather!
Question everything
Most third world countries pollute much worse than the United States. They are simply smaller, so their absolute CO2 admissions are smaller than the United States. Kyoto exempts many of these countries.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
If they think there's anything wrong with developing technology that could have mitigated killer cyclones and torrential floods.
I think you'll hear a resounding silence.
Someone will do it when it becomes technologically possible, no matter how many people say we shouldn't. Clone is a good example.