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.'"

Comments

we alread have

[bigskinnee]

We already have changed the weather by all the polution we produce. So why not.

Maybe we can change it for the better.

Do we understand enough?

[www.sorehands.com]

Before making any changes, we should know what we are doing and all the ramifications. Then once we know that, we should then consider if we should change.

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.

Re:Do we understand enough?

[Malcontent]

" Before making any changes, we should know what we are doing and all the ramifications"

It will take many decades before we know what the ramifications are. Weather is an enourmously complex system. I doubt the people who stand to profit from weather modification will willingly wait one year let alone decades.

As usual the extent of peoples concern for the rest of mankind and the future is but a shadow of their love of money.

Re:Do we understand enough?

[darthBear]

Weather is actually a chaotic system as Edward Lorenz discoverd in the 1960s. Small changes to the inital conditions of the system very quickly result in massive differences in behavior. An often (perhaps over) cited analogy is the butterfly effect in which the flapping of a single butterfly's wings in Japan causes a storm in Alaska.

What this means is that the ramifications will never be known. We cannot measure the weather precisely enough to make meaningful long term predictions nor can we control our actions precisely enough such that their effects can be known.

See this or this for more information on chaos.

Re:Do we understand enough?

[WatertonMan]

Edward Lorenz' "butterfly effect" analogy is vastly overstated. First off while this effect does happen in certain nonlinear systems, to assume that this is what is going on in the weather everywhere is in lack of a proof. While this may have been true in the models being used at the time, the fact that the models were chaotic doesn't imply that real weather is. I half suspect that the reason the butterfly effect was pushed so much was to explain why all those models condradicted one an other as as much as a real guess about the nature of weather.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to applying chaos theory to weather. And in some situations it probably fits. However most of us who did physics studied lots of systems that stabilized or didn't behave chaotically. Even some chaotic "systems" had a range where they weren't chaotic. (Using the term system and range or starting point loosely)

I don't have the article handy, but New Scientist had an article a few months ago that compared the predictions of nonlinear behavior with measurement of how the weather corresponded to models. The article strongly argued that the problem was poor models and not chaos. The following is a similar paper.

It's very nice to say that some problems are in principle "unknowable." However, as I said, that is sometimes a crutch of late in science. Hard isn't undoable.

Population Control

[mr. phantastik]

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.

Re:Population Control

[Christopher Thomas]

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.

I'll bite.

You are making several questionable assumptions in your post.

First of all, you're assuming that there is a size that the human population "should" be. How did you derive this value, and what was it? As far as I can see, the human race can survive at just about any population level it pleases - there's just a sliding scale of consequences, which in turn depends very strongly on _how_ people choose to run their lives. So both the desired population and the effects of maintaining this population are pretty arbitrary decisions.

Second of all, you're assuming that there is a "balance" that must be maintained. Historically, the ecosphere has done a very good job of maintaining itself despite far greater changes than humanity has wrought. There is a continuum of possible balance points, each with their own consequences - where we want to place the balance point is a decision, not something dictated by nature.

Much like developing cures for disease, stopping hurricanes from hitting population centers is just another way to screw over any form of population control.

Hurricanes do not contribute substantially to population control.

Neither does disease, really. We'll always die of _something_. The lag time is pretty much irrelevant over the long term. The period of fertility for women is pretty much the same, so people could live to age 300+ without affecting the number of children they had over the 20-year window. The number of children per couple is a social issue, not one of longevity.

In summary, your argument makes no sense.

Re:The ultimate weapon

[MacAndrew]

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.)

Re:Absolutely

[Dynedain]

So you change the weather patterns so that hurricanes don't hit the coast (or at least not as hard).....suddenly, fertile farmlands 200 miles in from the coast have a severe drop in annual rainfall....those interviewed say "we have no food - we are going to die"

Indeed, there *will* be lawsuits. . .

[kfg]

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

Are you kidding me?

[Drakonian]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the potential benefit of this is bigger than any single item you can name. I think it's probably safe to say more people have died of drought and resulting famine than all other non-natural causes combined. Certainly more than war.

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.

Re:i'm sure farmers wouldn't complain

[Yorrike]

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).

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!).

A world without Hurricanes

[RevDigger]

Would be like a world without tigers. Safer, maybe, but less interesting.

Chaos

[DaveOnNet]

"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.

Not real science.

[pclminion]

Science requires controlled conditions. Suppose you were trying to prove that cyanide gas kills fruit flies. So, you put some flies in a jar, hit them with cyanide, see them die, and write a paper. No respectable scientific journal would publish your work, because you didn't have a control. You should have had another jar, where the fruit flies were not given cyanide. Otherwise there is no way to establish a causal link between the cyanide and the deaths of the flies.

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.

Re:Not real science.

[Virtex]

I see it a bit like drug testing. If you give a drug to one person and a placebo to another, you can't really draw any conclusions from it since the two people aren't identical. So what you do is conduct the test on a larger population and draw upon the overall differences between the groups. Weather testing could be performed in a similar manner by choosing a number of locations and testing the technology on some now, and some later. If things go well, the results should show an overall difference between the two groups.

Re:Not real science.

[GenetixSW]

You have a very interesting point there, but I partially disagree, at least when it comes to comparing our results from the "control".

Our control condition would be, more or less, all past meteorological data. Sure, it changes drastically from day to day, but it's still fairly periodic on an annual basis.

A profound effect on the weather would be measurable and very easily noticeable. Say we manage to increase the rainfall in a region: we'd see a markedly increased rainfall which would then become the norm after several years. This rainfall might possibly adversely affect water levels elsewhere, which would also be measurable.

That's a simplistic example, but my point is we'd still have a basis for comparison, so in effect we would have some form of control condition.

Re:Oh come on

[pnatural]

Fuck with it at your own peril.

No, fuck with it at our peril.

Ask the millions of drowned Bangladeshis...

[vudufixit]

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.