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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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
And then we will get a M$ distro of linux!
Of course, the M$ programmers will be complaining about the unusually cold weather.
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.
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?
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.
I was about to comment the same thing...
h tml
There are many plants that require fires to enable their seeds to germinate. I'm thinking of all the fires recently in California. There's a certain bush there that needs small brush fires.
here's just one link found through google:
http://www.werc.usgs.gov/fire/shrubland.
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.
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.
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
Would be like a world without tigers. Safer, maybe, but less interesting.
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.
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.
A more extreme case of this is Australia. There are whole ecosystems built around fire.
With the introduction of other plants, there is a interesting cycle occuring. New plants insert themselves into Aussie forests, slowly taking over. Fire comes along. Aussie plants recover orders of magnitude faster and take back what they lost. Introduced plants slowly move back in.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
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.
Rank comments and posts against each other at We-Rank.com
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
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
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!
so after i have lighting strike your nukes after they leave the silo, i'll get to electricute you, or keep you from getting water.
I'll take weather control, thankyouverymuch
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Ther isn't any regularity in a chaotic system-- that's what makes it chaotic. Despite all the pie-in-the-sky predictions of weather control via "a nudge here or there", we do not, nor will we ever, have a means of acurately modeling (and thereby predicting) the weather. The problem with modeling chaotic systems is sensitivity to intitial conditions. What this means is that you can never have accurate enough starting data to seed the system. To paraphrase from James Gleick, even if you had an array of sensors one inch apart monitoring the atmosphere and oceans in all three dimensions, the unrecorded variations hidden by the one inch of empty space in between will cause a model to vary exponentially as time passes. Essentially, the only way you could accurately model the earth's weather is by copying the actual earth. Any other model will contain simplifications, averages, and assumptions that do not match reality and subsequently will cause the simulation to diverge from reality. Cloud seeding? Sure. Stopping a hurricane before it starts? Not a chance in hell.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If the system is chaotic, as weather is, the most minute differences in our actions will have totally different results. In a simulation of a chaotic waterwheel I ran changing the flow rate from 0.01 to 0.010001 had a dramatic effect after very few iterations. We simply cannot predict the effect of an action on weather with any sort of reliability.
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
We do not know the consequences of our actions. That is why there has been a ban on human cloning.
No, the ban on human cloning has to do with appeasement of the right wing, people mistaking their own scientific illiteracy for something having to do with morality, and a medieval desire to control technological advancement that persists to this day. We never know the consequences of our actions. The Wright brothers certainly didn't forsee the 9/11 attacks- should they have stopped work on the airplane?
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.
This strikes me as being much less than persuasive. Don't you think you're being a little alarmist? Wouldn't a tornado flying through New York incite public outrage and demand a massive reform of the budding weather modification industry? Wouldn't the government have already placed controls on the industry already to prevent this from happening in the first place? Can you even provide any credible explanation as to how this could even conceivably occur in any realistic sense? Worrying about forseeable consequences is one thing. Demanding a halt to technological progress because of a bad dream you had is another.
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!
I don't like SUVs either (their headlights are always right in my rear view mirror) but how does our unintentional modification of the weather constitute an argument against intentionally modifying the weather? Maybe we can undo some of our unintentional modifications with intentional ones.
Also, modifying the weather would be like playing God, and for that we might be punished in ways I do not want to imagine.
Oh please, spare me from magical thinking! Sorry, you can't have a vaccine, because saving you would be "playing God"! Sorry, you'll have to stay in your wheelchair, because allowing nonreproductive cloning would be "playing God"! All throughout human history, technological progress has been slowed and delayed by superstitious people who worry that others are "playing God".
I'd hate for another world flood...
There never was a world flood, only overrated local floods.
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
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.
Storm is not the most powerful of the X-Men, after all -- though close.
I guess I was absent the day they taught us to cite comic books as evidence of scientific veracity.
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.
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?
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.
Decisive, however, should be the 30-minute ICBM delivery anywhere in the globe; problematic only if you have no fixed base of operations (but even Al Queda has places it cares about).
Your attempts to intercept will be overwhelmed by superior numbers and $1.95 countermeasures. And just try to stop my SLBM's! And stealth bombers! And Ryder trucks! Ha ha ha!
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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...
Storm is not the most powerful of the X-Men, after all
Yeah, but she got the biggest boobies and that PHAT ASS!
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.
It sounds like a nice theory, but Hurricanes and the like release a lot of energy. I remember reading (sorry don't nhave a reference) that storms are like a "safety valve" for the atmosphere - a means of releasing energy that would otherwise accumulate.
Could we, by suppressing regular hurricanes, inadvertently cause a catastrophic super storm that would wipe out low lying pacific islands and level countries?
As an analogy, Here in Sydney there used to be regular controlled burning of the surrounding bushland (which penetrates deeply into some suburbs) When the green lobby and others succesfully prevented controlled burning in urban bushland for a time, the result was the catastrophic 1994 fires.
Now the controlled burning has resumed and, while bushfires still happen (like last December) they generally don't do as much damage as they otherwise might
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
It could be, like, a COINCIDENCE. It's not
like you had 100 air-traffic stoppages in that
period and they consistently yielded lower
temperatures than without those (and try
to factor in different levels of pollution -
how do you measure that? In different parts
of the world? Blablabla)
Considered harmful.
Christian Science. That has always struck me as being a bit of an oxymoron.
Stick Men
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.
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.
Someone will do it when it becomes technologically possible, no matter how many people say we shouldn't. Clone is a good example.