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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.'"
If you can make it rain on my bosses house.
We already have changed the weather by all the polution we produce. So why not.
Maybe we can change it for the better.
could this perhaps explain the strange pattern striping in the sky i see so often in the california mountains?
Waka waka waka!
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.
Fight Spammers!
I know a lot of farmers in rural NSW in Australia that are suffering from drought wouldn't mind. Although i think it will become a bit like genetically modified crops, or pesticide. The 1st world countries that can afford the technology will get it, but the 3rd world will have to wait.
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
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.
Weather control may be bad for many reasons, not excluding military purposes. Imagine if you could cause endless crippling storms to descend upon your enemy. The possibilities are endless. I guarantee that as soon as it's feasible, the military will jump on it. Or even before it's feasible.
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.
Those "unles you're Hindu, but then nobody cares what you think anyway" comments are what makes you so hated in the first place. Why must you inject your horrible racist attitude into the situations that do not involve race at all? I suggest that if you want people to take you seriously, you do not push your beliefs in situations where they do not matter.
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.
As a big supporter of population control, I feel I must respond to this. Population control is not about finding ways to kill existing people or even turning a blind eye to ways to save existing people from being killed. Population control is about trying to reduce the number of births. Once a person living their life, I don't think anyone in their right mind would say its in the best interest of humanity to let them die (and, please, let's not get into an abortion discussion here). The way to curb the population explosion is through economic, societial and educational reform.
You don't favor weather control? Fine. But please don't wrap yourself in the cloak of population control. You make us look like monsters. Population control is very humane. It has nothing to do with letting people die.
GMD
watch this
We do not know the consequences of our actions. That is why there has been a ban on human cloning. However a weather disaster could cause distruction on a much larger scale. Imagine a tornado flying through the streets of New York due to a weather modification mishap.
The problem is we are already modifying the weather unintentially. Suv's with their horrible gas consumption and emissions, methane emissions from the cows of huge farms built where rain forests used to stand to supply Mcdonalds with beef. American culture has already thrown the environment out of wack!
Also, modifying the weather would be like playing God, and for that we might be punished in ways I do not want to imagine. I'd hate for another world flood...
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
and not only that, but what about skywriters? there would be some tough, new competition there, hehe.
During the WWII bombing campains over German cities we managed to get fire tornados 8000 feet tall and 2000 degrees F whipping over cities. Even forgetting about nukes and just considering conventional weapons we have long passed any real military need to use natural weather to damage property.
This is an arguable item on many levels. I believe that because we can make a hurricane move away from the coast we should. An even better notion would be to calm the storm a bit and let it hit with a lessened force (this was actually tried in the 1970s with devestating effects, so perhaps trial and error should not occur near populous coasts).
And for anyone who says we shoudl NOT modify the weather, I have a wakeup call for you. Your argument is weak because humans are always going to adapt their environment to suit their needs. This is human nature and it flies in the face of our ability to survive. Our natural instinct is to change our world in order to suit our needs, from changing arid land to farmland or building a shelter so that the rain does not soak us while we sleep. We are always going to seek ways to make our environment more appealing to us and this is just the next logical step in that direction.
Hammer of Truth
At least, that is what the insurance companies will do the first dozen or so times. They will eventually get sued by the people that were adversely effected by the hurricane's new route. It'll all balance out, eventually. The rich will still get richer.
Sex - Find It
Why should we use electricity?
Our forefathers didn't need it to see
What about those with whom the weather is at odds?
Think of them, you insensitive clod!
Don't give me none of this "nature theme" business.
Here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, the insurance companies pay part of the tab for seeding hail clouds to reduce the size and hardness of hail to reduce their costs for damage claims. In some cases it has helped wildlife and farm animals because birds and small animals have been killed in the past by large hail stones. In the 1980's there were several hail storms that cost the insurance companies millions of dollars but since they started seeding the clouds damage has been kept to a minimum
We should screw with the weather.
Any undesired ramifications can be swept under the rug as effects of "global warming", which can easily be curtailed by passing laws restricting carbon dioxide emissions which can be controlled by reducing the size of automobile engines and/or increasing hunting limits on larger animals, such as elephants.
I guess I'm really digressing here, as even talking about such consequences is irrational. Changing the "weather" every day couldn't possibly result in a "climate" change.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
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
And Lord, it wasn't good.
And the brethren went away edified.
According to this article in today's Christian Science Monitor, science will be able to make significant changes in how weather systems effect you. More than simply standing under a tree, the technology will be available to 'build a house' to keep you dry, and warm. The big question is 'Should we?' 'Even if we can do this, is this something we really want to do?,' says groog, a vice president with Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc., who adds, 'Before we can really control our eniviroment, we have to be able to observe the weather and forecast the weather much better than we do now.'
in short:
in russia, the weather controls you!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And then we will get a M$ distro of linux!
Of course, the M$ programmers will be complaining about the unusually cold weather.
Of forest fires.
The park service (or whoever it is that's in charge, I dunno) seems intent on supressing any little forest fire that comes along. Oh, we can't have fires, it'll hurt the trees, or it'll destroy homes, or something. Problem is, sooner or later you'll have a dry year, and a fire that gets out of control, and there's all the dead wood left over from the fires that didn't happen.
So instead of lots of little fires that aren't likely to kill trees or do too much damage, you end up with a few really big ones that *do* cause damage, and a lot of it.
There are lots of other examples of similar effects- trying to control beach erosion with breakwaters, and controlling flooding with levees are two examples that come to mind.
Anyway, point is, *maybe* I'd think it was okay to try to redirect tornadoes and destructive storms and the like, but just deciding 'this is a vacation hotspot, it should never rain here' (or even something less drastic), is almost certainly not okay.
True, the population is too high
To maintain order some will have to die
How should we choose them, the poorest and the worst?
Since it's your idea, how about you go first.
Don't give me none of this "nature theme" business.
All of our medical technology has basically pulled us out of the Darwinian game of life. If it weren't for modern medicine, hemophilia would likely have been (nearly) eradicated by natural selection already.
I realize with a name like "I'm a racist" that you're obviously a troll. But I'm going to reply for the benefit of others who might actually be swayed by your words.
We haven't pulled out of the Darwinian game of life, as you put it. We're simply replacing natural selection with artifical selection. We, as a society, have decided that advancing our species solely on the basis of physical fitness is not in our best interest. So we're tipping the balance so that physical characteristics don't play such a dominant role in who gets to pass their genes on. Intelligent people who may be physically weak will still get a chance to live and pass on their genes. Don't give me this "that's not the way Nature intended" crap, either. It's our species and we certainly deserve the right to modify a system that, while successful in developing robust animals, doesn't really fit the needs of our civilization without a little help from us.
GMD
watch this
In fact, I'm writing a letter to my congressman to introduce legislation to prevent any butterflies from flapping their wings in Beijing. That ought to keep any crazy weather changes from happening.
Hey, given that the FCC regulates TV & radio because our airspace belongs to the public.... does that mean we have rights to the weather conditions too? er, I mean, the federal government bureaucracy has rights to the weather? er, I mean, the federal government will begin taxing us for clouds in the summer and sunshine in the winter and rain when it's needed for the water supply?
Anyhow, let me know when I can buy a Precipitation Suppression System to mount on the roof of my house to regulate my own chunk of air. I'm sure it will run XP, so also send me the link on how to hack it for Linux.
Ever heard of chaos theory? The weather system has shown to be chaotic in it's worst sense. That, for example means that small effects can have HUGE consequences, and not only huge, but highly unpredictable. Now it's true that literally EVERYTHING on our little planet affects the weather in some way or another producing the apparent randomness of the whole lot. So if we invent technology tochange it, it wouldn't be of any consequence. I mean, some weather machine is just as likely to produce a catastrophe as a buttefly in Mexico. So why not, we could maybe control immediate catastrophes if we spot them in time (of course it's impossible to predict such things as tornados). But then, how can we be sure that any modifications of the weather will turn out as intended? It's not "well, now we press this button and this happens", it's rather "now we press this button, and... gee, who would have thought!". Anyway, it will be very interesting to see how this thing turns out.
Water rights and international accords for allocating them are nothing new. Many river cross boundaries. Even bitter enemies (e.g. middle east) often can at least come to accomodations they can accept even if they protest them.
On the other hand few things can get more bitter since the supply is inelastic and its use critical. We (the US) certainly dont give mexico one more drop of water than we absolutely have to.
In the werstern US states more than the eastern US or in europe, Water rights are in fact more critical and more precious because the water distibution is paradoxically plentiful where it existis yet generally sparse. In fact its more sparse than the typical homestead land grant. hence in days of yore the guy that homsteaded around the water source effectively owned everything as far as he wanted to (or till the next watering hole) regardless of the actual property boundaries.
In the US west we have very recently reached the elastic limit of the supply. Many places (e.g. santa fe new mexico) are pumping at an unsustainable rate (which by the way causes depletion that is also irrevrsable even if you quit pumping it). And california, which has routinely taken unused water rights form other sates can no longer do so and thus is actually going to experience not just a water limit but an actual deficit when those rights are asserted by others.
So now we come to the final frontier: rain allocation. My guess its that the moment the amount of rain taken from the skys reaches a value that causes a depression of rainfall eleswhere that is detectable on the scale of the annual varialtion, perhaps like 1 or 2% of the available rain, then there's gonna be a show down.
Since weather is generally west to east, the eastern states will be robbed. This also means it will propably show up first intra-nationally rather than internationally since in the americas the countries are mostly divided north-south more than east west (or when they are east-west there is a mountain range making the rain issue partly moot). Even europe may experience some pain because some scientist belive the gulf-stream is about to be overrun by colder artic "underwater" rivers. This should depress their expected rainfall. Good thing they formed the EU or theired be some fights.
Interestingly specualtors are already buying up land in many northern US states on the assumption they may get some sort of water right allocation.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Tornados and hurricanes kill people. They are also fairly predictable. Change the weather, prevent tornados/hurricanes. In 1998 alone 23,000 lives wre lost to hurricane/tropical storm related causes.(source:Insurance Site) You want to tell families of victims we shouln't change the weather? This is about saving lives. If you don't change the weather, people die.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
one more thing to deplete mercilessly(sp?) then bitch and moan about in 50 years....
Is this the beginning of a time when countries can undertake weather-based warfare against others? Want to cripple the US economy? Just alter the weather patterns.
I assume that weather-tinkering (for benefit) in one part of the world could easily change weather patterns (possibly in a bad way..) in other parts of the world. Who is going to decide what manipulations go ahead -- the more powerful economies?
What's your GCNSEQNO?
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.
If you can get that thing to 13K feet with a sizable load of silver iodide, you let me know :)
Hammer of Truth
I know a lot of people get upset about screwing with nature, but as i've said above, technical progression in our wiring, you cannot stop us scientist types doing it.
Perhaps knowledge gained through weather control could actually _SAVE_ our species, because we can use it to create a suitable environment when we populate other planets.
The problems with this kind of hypothetical debate are the contradictory assumptions.
If we assume that we will hypothetically understand enough to change the weather, why can't we also assume that we will hypothetically understand the consequences of such an intervention as well?
So far mankind seems to be doing pretty well.
Someone you trust is one of us.
How about using the weather a new weapon? Why not send a hurricane, tornado, and floods to Iraq? What about Hail storms with basketball sized chunks of ice? America could finally get rid of all the evil on earth with out starting one war!
but imagine if the terriorist got ahold of this technology? Oh my! We must fully develop and exploit this technology before the evil terrorist. Then we can sit back and start a huge database containing everyones credit card purchases. Damn, I love America.
Don't label people who are protesting backfires as "environmentalists."
See, I happen to be an environmentalist and I don't oppose backfires. Most environmentally conscious people don't. The people you heard about aren't environmentalists, they're idiots.
I'd like to think there's a difference.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Relax and grab your towel, this is not new. Life forms on other planets have routinely attempted weather control when they become advance enough. Generally this is about 100 to 200 earth years after the discovery of radio technology.
By the way, this is also why the Seti project has been completely unsuccessful at detection other life forms since they are all dead.
It is also why, the people of planet beta-3 have told me to tell you earthbeings, not to fret about your water. they're going to exterminate you and water their lawns with your planet.
have a nice day, so long and thanks for all the fish.
--ford perfect.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The best way to learn what the ramifications are has to be to go ahead and change the weather. If we don't like what happens, we can just change it back.
No need to make this more complicated than it is.
I'm changing the climate, ask me how.
it's the only way we (England) are ever going to win the Ashes from the Aussies :-(
The more advanced the technology, the more open it is to primitive attack
to counter act the effects of global warming then yes....infact, if they create some way to remove the exess CO2 in the atmosphere then hell yes.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
If we just put nice strong DOMES over our cities there wont be a problem...
Look a raging hurricane... good thing the dome can withstand it!
Dammit I was promisde domed cities back in the 70's.... where the hell are they!
Weather control could (potentially) be a better offensive/defensive weapon than tactical nukes because it won't leave an area irradiated. Hell, you could even use it on your own territory to impede an invading force.
Fallout is some nasty shit, so's a nuclear winter. Biological agents have a high risk of unintended consequences. By comparison, most chemical weapons are pretty nice, they may require serious cleanup, but their effects are relatively predictable, and the usually do not render an area uninhabitable for extremely long times.
This, of course, assumes that your control of the weather (and the associated consequences) does not cause destruction other than what was intended.
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
Didn't humans evolve to such a state by letting the monkeys that weren't clever get eaten by the lions?
It seems to me that we humans had to do more than let the monkeys get eaten. From the lack of animals more like us, it seems that we must have done quite a job of killing off slightly weaker species - perhaps species that were slightly more intelligent but didn't have the time to develop defenses against brute force.
When we started recognizing the value of diversity, we started backing away from the "nature" of unenlightened animal behavior: kill off anyone you don't know that uses the same resources you use. Some balance between strength and intelligence was optimal for defense and survival.
As the rate of growth in our ability to leverage intelligence has increased, we've started valuing it more and the balance is shifting. I think that's great because it seems that intelligence brings happiness more effectively than strength. Evolution has labored merely to optimize survival but conscious beings labor to optimize happiness. When the two conflict, it is right for us to defy evolution.
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Would be like a world without tigers. Safer, maybe, but less interesting.
OK, I'll bite.
Before anyone takes this seriously, it's circumstantial recollection, so your mileage may vary.
I'm sitting in the UK at the moment. We have flooding. Quite severe flooding.
Homes are being destroyed, impressive looking barricades are being erected in liable areas, and the most disturbing thing of all is that it seems to be becoming a trend. For an example, take a look at this. It's not normal.
Perhaps we have had a particularly freakish decade? Perhaps the climate is changing. Hard to say -- I believe that global warming most certainly has something to do with all of this.
I was snowboarding in Italy over Christmas this year. There was little to no snow on Rittner Horn in the dolomites. This was also the case last year when I was there.
A friend, who has been going to that particular mountain for about 20 years, has consistently told me that it was once possible to ski down from his family's hut to the ski-lift, ride up, and ski back to the hut. When I was there, this was patently not possible, but this story was backed up by many people with whom I spoke.
It can't be that global warming has no effect.
Weather control will be implemented 50 years after people stop laughing about it?
Why doesn't anybody ever take the long view, anyway? We have the whole universe and all of eternity to play with. This short-sighted obsession with Earth is stupid. All we've got here is an early prototype--a testbed for developing the technologies to survive beyond its gravity well. Weather control, terraforming... these things are only the first stepping stones of our development.
If we survive, in a million years this whole galaxy will be our "homeworld". Who then will care what happened to one little planet orbiting one unininteresting star? So what if we turn this planet into a stinking cesspit of death, in the process of getting our species truly started as an enduring entity in this universe? There are far worse places, uninhabitable worlds by the billions. I say exploit the earth for all it's worth! There's plenty more resources where these came from. And if constantly putting ourselves on the brink of extinction is what drives us to greater heights of technology and expansion, then so be it. The sooner we test weather control and terraforming and all the rest here on Earth, the sooner we'll be able to do a good job of it on Mars--and the sooner we'll have to. And all that won't even be the prologue of our story.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Well, I for one do NOT like my weather cold and grey. Living in the North of England, I'm lucky to see three days of sun a year. And even then it's freezing cold to make up for it. Having it cold, cloudy and rainy every single fucking day is just downright depressing. Some days I just stay in bed because I just don't want to face another day of such misery. I look out of the window and see it absolutely pissing it down with rain, and think "Fuck it, I'm not going outside in that." Then I just go back to sleep. On New Year's Day, I could barely see 50 yards it was so foggy. What a fucking joke.
If we do find out how to change the weather, it would be an absolute god-send. Imagine, waking up to a warm, sunny day! It'd be like being on holiday every day! No more miserable fucking rain and cloud and wind. I could actually ENJOY leaving the house. It's amazing how much a little sun can cheer you up, so imagine having it sunny every day. It's no coincidence that places with the grimmest, darkest weather have the highest suicide rates. Changing the weather could make millions upon millions of people happier, which can only be a good thing.
Although if you're worried about it affecting the climate, then we could compensate for it by making it permanently cold, cloudy and wet in all the sunny places. Let THEM see what it's like to live in constantly miserable weather. Then they might change their oh-so-fucking-optimistic outlook on life.
Why should we? Are we so arrogant now that we think we can do a better kob than nature? Nature has 4 billion years of experience, why mess with it?
It's not like we need to change anything. If you want to help people then make better ways of predicting nature to avoid hurricanes and monsoons. Don't go messing with nature and playing god.
I am making great progress on my weather control device, and I don't see any significant issues that should delay such wonderful mayhem! If it makes people more comfortable though, I will blackmail the world's goverments into abandoning all weather research (among other things). That way, you'll know that weather catastrophe-causing machines will only be in the possession of responsible people like myself and my henchmen.
BTW, CmdrTaco, if you are interested, I wouldn't mind at all doing a Slashdot interview, answering the 10 highest moderated posts/revenge requests. Slashdotters, if you're interested in seeing someone's house torn to shreds by preternatural tornados, or small tropical island nations decimated by a freak hurricane, just let Taco know you'd like Slashdot to interview me. And make those requests interesting and malevolent!
"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.
If the land you are living on is no longer habitable then move the hell away! People who die in droughts are people subject to natural selection. If you want to live in a barren desert wasteland then don't bitch about the consequences and sure as hell don't be hitting me up for pocket change so you can live there.
There is no reason to muck with the weather because some people don't get it and move to places that can actually sustain life.
Whats next? Designer weather patterns? "Look it's North Dakota and we can all go out on our slippin slides in January."
Nature does a fine job. Fuck with it at your own peril.
I know that the logical question is "should we?" There are bound to be some consequences that we don't understand but what better way to try to understand than to experiment?
If we proceed carefully, I think that it is unlikely that we will cause any disturbances that are more catastrophic than a volcanic eruption or other large natural event. The world always seems to recover from these events.
If we do gain more understanding and are able to tune our weather the benefits could be enormous. Imagine steering hurricanes away from population centers or directing a little rain to an area that needs it or directing it away from an area that is already flooding.
Why stop now?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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
also talked about this in The Wizard of Earthsea, where the wizards had to deal with a certain "conservation of weather" -- bringing rain to one place would bring drought to another, and so on. A lot of the philosophy espoused in those books is related to the Tao De Ching, of which she did a translation.
and double or triple our population problem as well...
But even with all the hurricanes in the world, England would still fail to win. Maybe a drawn series is a possible...
--- My dad's political betting
"Population control is about trying to reduce the number of births."
I find one thing aggravating about this. When people make this statement, they often neglect to mention that this applies only in countries where the birth rate is way out of control (e.g. Kenya which used to have avrg. 8 kids/woman). In other, developed countries (e.g. Europe, N. America) there is no harm in having 2-3 children/couple to maintain a sustainable population. Currently, the populations in these countries are drastically shrinking and are only kept afloat by immigration. This is bad because, as a few recent studies have shown, there is a lower percentage of children comprising the total populations of these countries. As far as I am concerned, that is a very bad thing.
end rant. sorry for the OT post.
After reading through the article (and accompanying articles as well) I am truely torn in the middle on this issue. On one hand we would be able to save countless number of lives, relieve economic burden on goverments for disaster relief funds, increase potential agricultural yield and more importantly possibly help slow/stop the onset of global warming.
On the other hand without the destructive forces of nature the balance of the globe's delicate echo system would be effected. Without floods, fertile top soil would not be replinished by decomposing matter from rivers, streams and oceans. Without bush fires (naturaly occuring ones) flora and fauna which are normally controlled by nature's on destructive processes would run rampant and out of control. The list goes on.
Being a man of science I am truely torn with these issues, on one hand we would be able to improve overall quality of life globally and possibly use such methods to terraform less hospitable lands (and even planets) with such controlls, but on the other we would be going the natural order which have their reasons for occuring known to us or not. Even with strict legislations by world goverments and UN what is to stop politcians from lobbying to have small amendments made to such legislations? Even a mighty oak tree can be fell by a tiny termite, all it needs is time.
Simon Bar-Sinister already did it. Underdog kicked his ass and destroyed the Weathermachine. Appears to me that a few people are due a leeetle visit from you-know-who (and he just took his pill).
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
This is as good an argument as "But think about the children". The real question is, of course: Can we really prevent weather catastrophes without harmful side effects, both short and long term? If we save 5000 people from a tornado, but doom another 5000 people (or more, or less) to a flood in a possibly distant part of the world, should we do it?
I feel that is the question being asked here. We don't really understand the atmosphere. We may understand it well enough to prevent a single hurrican from happening in a certain area (or causing it to happen), but we don't know enough to understand the implictaions on a global scale. Our atmosphere is a highly comple system that intertacts globally. Local changes can have unpredicatble results (think of the butterfly causing a storm). Until we understand it better, we shouldn't use a weather changing system either as a safeguard or a weapon. Not a safeguard because we don't know whether we will harm others by using it, and not as a weapon because it might backire horribly.
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.
"Population control is about trying to reduce the number of births."
I find one thing aggravating about this. When people make this statement, they often neglect to mention that this applies only in countries where the birth rate is way out of control (e.g. Kenya which used to have avrg. 8 kids/woman). In other, developed countries (e.g. Europe, N. America) there is no harm in having 2-3 children/couple to maintain a sustainable population.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that population control is only necessary for 3rd world countries. Many environmentalists are very concerned about overpopulation in developed countries. Why? Simply because a single person in a developed country uses way more natural resources than a single person in a 3rd world country. Overpopulation is a problem for EVERYONE, not just those unfortunate enough to live in China or India.
Personally, I agree with you that allowing everyone 2-3 kids/couple to sustain the population is fine. What I'm less pleased about is couples that have more than this, regardless of what country they live in.
GMD
watch this
Eugenics is about as useful as ebonics, though I think the latter wins out.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
I wonder how things would have worked out if Og & Zog decided that they didn't know enough about fire to even experiment with it, etc.
Seriously, we should experiment with everything. Any knowledge ultimately leads to better things, and we will learn to control any technology out there. I'm actually optimistic as to global warming; cleaner technologies will save the day, IMO. We know, or will know, the problems new techs will introduce, and we'll adapt.
Of course, if the H-bomb had really started a chain reaction across the globe I'd be singing a different tune.
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
Famine is not really a product of a prolonged drought. It's the product of a disorganised society, typically one where there is no effective government, or the government is a dictatorship that doesn't give a damn about the population that supports it.
An organised society doesn't succumb to anything but a really major drought. The problem in most places isn't growing the food, but rather one of distribution; warlords and criminal gangs steal the food instead of letting it go the market. This is the major reason that most international aid efforts fail.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
technical progression in our wiring, you cannot stop us scientist types doing it.
They say the same thing about lemmings which is why i don't find your words very reassuring.
Temperatures tend to drop at that time of the year anyways.
I can't believe no one has said this already:
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. - Mark Twain
I read the article too fast! Damn.
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
It would also make a pretty, shiny new weapon in the War Against Terrorism/Drugs/Everything/Everyone. Wanna get rid of those pesky coca plants? Strangle rainfall to regions of Columbia and other growing areas. Wanna impose some "sanctions" with "teeth"? How about burying North Korean in snow?
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
Ahah, you spotted the point that I left out. In addition to being controlled, experiments have to be repeatable. I can repeat the experiment with the flies and cyanide gas (to a limit, they aren't exactly the same flies). But it's impossible to repeat an atmospheric experiment.
People like to come up with bad definitions of what "science" is, and yours is no better than most I've seen. It has too many false negatives.
Nobody has produced a black hole in a lab, but that doesn't mean that black holes cannot exist. "It has to be repeatable" effectively rules out geology, astronomy, paleontology, and meteorology as "sciences". In fact most of the astronomical and historical sciences fail to meet your narrow definition. Hypotheses from all of these fields can be validated by collecting whatever evidence is available, even if the data doesn't come from a repeatable tabletop experiment.
There is no proof global warming even exists, so proving whether this technology would counter it's effects is impossible.
"Strangle rainfall to regions of Columbia and other growing areas."
Yeah lets strangle the water supply to the rainforests of the world. I'd give us about 5 years before we went extinct.
huh...umm...I think you mean the greenhouse effect casueing global warming has not been prooven....global warming has been prooven. look at the Nasa data, look at the EPA, look at any national and international environmnetal organization that deals with the climate and they will have proof of global warming.
do not confuse global warming (something that is natural for thge earth) with the greenhouse effect (a casue for global warming which indicates human co2 polution as the source)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
as if we don't have enough water-related injustices/provocations/conflicts in the Middle East, here's another way to stir it up :(
VKh
Remember how much trouble Garion got in with Belgarath for moving that one cloud away from Aunt Pol's farm? Yeah. I don't want an angry Belgarath showing up at MY house either.
I was working a while ago with some folks from the national weather service, and they mentioned that cities grossly affect weather patterns. As they retain heat better than unpopulated areas (ie fields, natural grasslands).
The specific instance that he pointed out was that he has witnessed storm systems in the southeast US, moving from the gulf of mexico towards Georgia, and have them go around Atlanta, b/c of all the heat it retains.
-HockeyPuck
Once we can predict the weather with high accuracy, we will change it... ipso-facto. Once we can make the connection between a butterfly in India causing snow in New England, we will be able to put another butterfly in france to make more snow.
Everyone's always talking about the weather, and no-one's ever doing anything about it.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
And is that a bad thing? Using water as an example, man creates irrigation channels, dams, and even diverts entire rivers to allow for more people to have better lives.
Granted, even though these can be big projects, the basics are pretty primitive, and we can now safely estimate what will happen if we put a dam of size x and such-and-such a location. Weather is very complex, and there's plenty of other issues such as the water-stealing conflicts mentioned in other posts (the Midwest states using up the rain that was meant for the East Coast, for example).
But hey, let's try it out. Try small experiments in remote locations and go from there. And if we can't accuratly measure the effects (which we probably won't... who knows how much rainfall the East Coast would get if the experiments are performed vs. if they weren't performed?) then we can still keep what we've learned. And hell, if diverting a killer hailstorm away from D.C. means less rainfall for me in Annapolis for a day, I won't complain :) Nothing says we can't use this to not save lives at the expense of 5" less rainfall somewhere else...
Not that humans ever really needed an excuse to slaughter one another.
Consider this situation, a country implements a program to increase rainfall. A side effect is less rain in a neighboring country, resulting in massive famine, or it could cause a low lying country to suffer heavy flooding. Either way, diplomatic channels go into action, one country demanding the other country to stop causing devastating weather side-effects, the other country refusing to listen because they are tired of not being able to feed their own people. Wars have been fought for far less signicant reasons.
Now consider the actual war. Aiming a few tornados at the enemy capital might get their attention. We're in for some interesting times.
Just as a gun can be used for good or bad, feeding your family or murdering your neighbor, weather control will also be used for both. When weather control is possible, it will happen. There is no question about that. Intelligent people will recognize this fact and try to find ways of reducing possibility of evil uses.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The Christian Science religion espouses that everything of this mortal coil is merely an illusion, and founded by a woman from Boston who declared herself free of cancer - and died of it shortly after this of cancer. One would be best advised to take this with a grain of salt.
This sig no verb.
It seems that only wealthy countries will be able to afford to use this technology if it ever becomes available. As someone already pointed out, there's only a finite amount of rain, etc. I imagine that poor countries that are already starvation-prone would suffer because of this technology. What, did you expect human nature to change over night?
As an aside, since when did we start getting science news from the Christian Science Monitor?
Common sense has never stopped us before. The only real question is how much damage we'll do before we are able to perfect the technique.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
i didn't read the article, nor did i read the /. blurb. in fact, i only read the title. the fact remains that this is a bunch of shit.
die bitch die.
and it is bad.
On one level, we consciously do it... we cloud seed and force some areas to rain. What happens? Other areas become increasingly dry and barren for planting crops. Yay.
On another level, we affect the weather passively with things like pollution. Ever been to Europe? The statues are said to start looking "melted" from the acid rain.
Let's f' things up some more!
--------
Free your mind.
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.
Next we'll be cloning snowflakes! What's the world coming to?
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.
I agree that there are legal and moral issues involved if we try to "steal somebody else's rain," but I don't think anyone would mind if we got rid of hurricanes. The destruction they cause is obvious, but I cannot think of anything useful that hurricanes bring. One Florida company, Dyn-O-Mat, is in the process of developing a product that can get rid of clouds, storms, and possibly even hurricanes (there is an article at Discover Magazine about it). The idea is simple, yet elegant: baby diapers are filled with stuff that absorbs several times its weight in liquid. Let's make it into a powder, put it into a storm/hurricane, and it will suck up all the rain in the storm. It then falls down into the ocean, and is neutralized by the saltwater. Poof! No more storm. :-)
Their goal is to prevent hurricanes, which, incredible as it may sound, seems likely in the next decade (assuming their product isn't toxic, etc). I'm surprised no one has mentioned this company yet, since they seem to be the most prominent weather-control project in the news lately. I think that this product, which is called Dyn-O-Storm, has much more potential than seeding clouds with dry ice (whose effectiveness, after decades of testing, is still inconclusive). The test of Dyn-O-Storm in the article says that it made a cloud completely disappear from radar within minutes. Admittedly, this is only a cloud, not even a storm. However, I think it is a very impressive step. They will try to test it on a hurricane sometime in the near future, weather permitting.
Does anyone know how the testing of Dyn-O-Storm is coming? It would be nice to hear when they actually try it on the hurricane.
"Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing." - Douglas Adams
It's the people who make the most money off of the activities that threaten our long-term climate that have the most to lose from changes. As an example, Canada's federal government is moving to ratify the Kyoto agreement (after a decade of shuffling our feet). The loudest complainers about this are the oil industry and the Premier of Alberta (Canada'a largest oil-producing province). The problem here is that they control a large amount of money, and a goodly number of jobs. When the medical officer of a regional health authority spoke in favour of Kyoto, he was fired. The uproar over this obvious case of censorship was enough to get him his job offered back to him, but by that time the message was out: Supporting Kyoto could put your career in jeopardy.
It's clear that Oil Company and Alberta government research funding, is going to flow towards those scientists who are willing to critize Kyoto and away from those who might. The silence is deafening.
There's a second reason for the favour of Intervention vs non-destruction: If the government is spending $10M to change the path of a hurricane, about 5% of that ($500K) is likely to end up as profit in the hands of the owners/shareholders of the company that provides the process. There's no obvious profit path for stopping the (over)use of petrolium products.
Trust me, there are people (scientists and politicians) who would love to put forward alternative approaches, but they have a bitch of a time finding someone willing to put forward the resources needed to get their message out and their research done.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
...but in moderation. Sure, we might have the technology soon to change any climate into anything we want, supress natural disasters, but doing so will effect the climate globaly in ways we do not have the ability to predict. While we diverted one hurricane, the result might cause severe drout in some areas, or even spawn hurricanes that are exponentially stronger... we just don't have the knowledge necessary to control our weather effectively...
Yes, some added moisture here and there or weakening severe thunderstorms might be somewhat "safe", but when you mess with forces on a much greater scale, the new result could be much worse than the natural one...
Just my thoughts...
We shouldn't change the weather untill we know what will be the total results of doing so.
(Score:0, Interesting)
...about cloning. Based on what I've seen here, the answer is conditional.
If controlling the weather will piss of religious people, then yes, we should do it. If not, then the usual prudence with regard to new science applies.
I recon they should build a pipeline to the middle of the sahara desert and pump sea water there... build a lake/whatnot and get some consistent rain in the desert. As long as this happens, maybe it would be possible to open up some farm land and feed a few million.
The biggest problem I forsee is the knock-on effect with different weather systems. Irregular weather would throw out weather models and possibly disrupt whatever systems depend on at least 3 day weather forcasts.
-Tim
My favourite conspiracy theory of all time is that the fatal Lynmouth floods of 1952 were caused by RAF cloud-seeding experiments. This is well worth a read.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
The weather is the first example learned by a mathematician that studies the Chaos theory: a butterfly's wing flap in China may result in a thunderstorm in US.
So, how are they gonna control it ? a local weather change may result in undesirable massive changes in nearby areas.
The scope for litigation would be enormous -- weather would now be the responsibility of local government.
Schemes to control weather in the UK have generally failed. I feel that the scale of experimatation needed to get it right will stop us from ever fine-tuning the weather and knowing the consequences.
No, perhaps we should continue to let people die from lack of water, or weather-related natural disasters. After all, if we tried to save them we'd have swarms of religious leaders protesting that we are tampering with god/nature/their egos.
Christian Science. That has always struck me as being a bit of an oxymoron.
Stick Men
I live in California. The Bay Area, specifically. Believe me, sirs and madams, you do NOT want to live without weather.
Now please excuse me while I go hit my head against a wall.
Property is theft.
There are plenty of hurricanes and other storms that spend their entire "lives" far from any human population. (IE way out in the middle of the ocean). If humans ever get to the point of attempting storm mitigation, I'm sure we'd start with those first.
Once the technology is available, my snowmobile may have a chance to be used as something other than a lawn ornament!
unsigned int question = 0x2B | ~(0x2B)
IMO
This planet has a rather stable weather system and weather patterns. Granted, in the short term, things can be very chaotic and seem somewhat haphazard.
However, if you zoom out to hundreds or thousands or even maybe millions of years you have this fine balance. Were we to go and cause some extra rain here, or less tornadoes there, sure it will help us in the very short term. Farmers might have better yields, lives might be saved from hurricanes and such, floods prevented.
The problem is, nature has this weird way of balancing out, as I mentioned above. So after a couple years of drought, you might get a couple years of heavier rains. Mix this in with us eliminating droughts and then we basically have to micromanage (hello WC3) every single weather system on the planet to keep things in check.
Along with that, we are inevitable going to totally fsck something up and hundreds if not thousands of species of plants and animals will be on the verge of extinction. We will have ruined habitats on a scale much much larger than what we are allready doing with deforestation, pollution, etc.
Now, I am no meteorologist, nor do I even have a college degree. However, I think a lot of this is common sense and is not something we should tinker with until the day comes when we can forecast the weather precisely for hundreds of years in advance (which is unlikely to happen).
just my 2 cents.
from a show i watched from discovery channel, the purpose of today's devastating weather phenomenon such as hurricane and typhoon is to distribute the heat around the earth. suppressing this may cause undesirable effects.
but it would also be beneficial to avoid these calamities (especially in my tropical country) to avoid flooding and increase food output.
just a thought...
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
It's really great to want to have a full understanding of the function of the atmosphere before modifying it, but there are others that are not so patient. I can absolutely promise that If the western world dosent take the lead in this or any other emerging powerful technology (genetics, nanotech, quatum computing, etc) there are plenty of others that will have no such qualms.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Weather modification is a dangerous game. Especially with hurricanes. Hurricanes allow the dissapation of stored heat in the ocean. If we artificially disrupt storms, the heat dissapation wil not be able to occur. This will cause other climate changes and will also lead to stronger and more dangerous storms down the road. Weather modification is not a zero sum science. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Imagine if in hurricane season, two possible storms are disrupted in the Gulf of Mexico. Both of these storms could be minor hurricanes with minor damagae at landfall. Instead, they are dissipated early. Heat that these storms would have dissapeted remain and intensify in the GOM. Now a system, comes along and rapidly strengthens in the area where the prior storms should have dissipated the heat. This storm grows to Cat4 and makes landfall with major damage. Storm three would not have happened if storms one and two were allowed to happen. Weather modification is not a good idea.
Odd, after seeing the later posting about 'Science from SciFi', this subject has me thinking about Frank Herbert's "Dune" series. After they transformed the complete desert planet into a green paradise, they had to blow it up and start from scratch - converting a green world into a desert! Lesson (IMHO): Altering the weather is a bad idea.
I also have to think of that concept of a butterfly's wings in China effecting the weather in the US. There's just too many things we don't understand. Science all too often tends to examine things in lab conditions - in a closed environment. But closed environments do not happen in nature. By increasing rainfall in Kansas, do we cause a drought in Austrailia? I don't care how many people & computers you have analyzing weather patterns, you cannot truely predict cause and effect on a global scale (hey, isn't that in Dune, too?).
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
I saw an article about how the ice ages were studied. Thanks to ice core drilling, we know the general weather back through 250,000 years. Because of a bug tree ring database, we have a more accurate reading for local areas back some 16,000 years (with some gaps). One thing they noticed is that just before a major ice age, the global temperature spikes sharply just before it plummets downwards and stays there. Now, this could be a lot of things, but some are starting to wonder if the Earth has some sort of Gaia effect, a self-regulating thermostat, via atmosphere and weather.
A "simplified until possibly incorrect" example would be when the earth heats up, the ice caps melt, and more heat is raidated out into space via water reflection, making the Earth cooler, making ice caps, which then reflect more heat, but trap a lot of water, exposing more land, which absorbs heat, and so we go around again. I am sure there are a lot of other debates that would shatter my example as "uneducated to the point of nausea," but I wanted to give everyone an idea what I mean by "self-regulating."
So back to us. Well, we are a hardy bunch, and we have our own self-regulation. First, we chop down trees and burn them, releasing heat-trapping gasses. We also plant crops, which reduce diversity, and increase the chance of global-sized plagues on our food sources. The ozone layer might also be thinning, and pollution is choking us in the growing urban sprawl. So... after a while, we go to far. We chop down one too many trees, or one too many cars puffs out the critical puff of CO2. Crops die. People die. Civilization collpases. The whole societal infrastructure is reduced to pre-Roman levels. Well, that means less people to pollute, chop down trees, and so on. Nature heals itself, the empty niches we made by wiping out 90% of the animals are filled by animals who specialize, the Earth goes on, or as Vonnegut said, "And so it goes..." Civilization now will be a legend (like Atlantis), supported only by oily ruins, mined for their scrap until they, too, are gone. We'll probably have two or three of those cycles before we finally learn.
"Tell my grandfather, of this oracle you used to conlsut called Slashdot? It is true angry Gods banished you, sending trolls to attack the commons with a plague called Spam? Or is Lord Cowboy Neal the IV drunk on fermented cabbage again?"
_________________________________________________
"They said it couldn't be done. So we stopped. It was cheaper that way." - Punk Walrus
If you click the link you listed and explore the idiotic accusations of mass population mind control you quickly discover just what quacks these people are. They believe that the government can modify the moods of crowds of people with some electromagnetic waves in Alaska.
People are complex bowls of chemicals! Any single simple "treatment" like this wouldn't do shit to mood unless it just gave everybody a gigantic headache, in which case the only mood-altering they could do was to piss everybody off!
If they could alter moods so easily, why is there ever civil unrest like marches, riots, etc.?
Someone will do it when it becomes technologically possible, no matter how many people say we shouldn't. Clone is a good example.
Firstly, I said this "may" happen. I never said "..another place will FOR CERTAIN be hit harder.." But you are right that I am certainly no expert (or even knowledgable) in the field. Does anyone else have something more concrete on this issue?
What's your GCNSEQNO?