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

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.

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

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: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.

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.