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Geoengineering a Snow-Free Winter Fails In Moscow
dinoyum writes "Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov's promise of a winter without snow in the capital city has fallen short. While cloud seeding is not a new concept for Russia, often used on major holidays, geoengineering snow has never been done to that magnitude. Carrying off the $6 million procedure required jets to spray silver iodide into coming clouds, ensuring that all precipitation fell before it reached the capital. However a combination of disrupted radar, wind control, and faulty weathermen have been blamed by Luzhkov for his failed attempt at playing with mother nature. For now, Russia can go back to enjoying snow."
I didn't think they came in any other variety.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Given what it costs to deal with snow in a major city each year, $6 million sounds like money very well spent. Now if only someone would get the dome cities idea back on the table...
Winter geoengineers YOU!
That would be like Paris without dogshit.
Russia is reverting to its industry-over-humans ways. Sure road cleaning might cost a bit, but who would to spend 5 months with subfreezing temperatures but no snow (which would accidentally raise temperatures a bit). No snowmen, no snowballs, no sledding, no respite from pollution by covering up the accumulated gunk with white? And in spring city landscaping will suffer from lack of moisture in soil.
seems weird they would be messing with cold weather precipitation cycles while the rest of the world is up in arms about the effects of global warming...
Groan. And time for... yet another idiot confusing weather and climate.
Is this used successfully anywhere, regularly?
I remember China making mention of doing this for the 2008 games, but as far as I can see, the only policies that really did make a difference in the weather was closing factories, and banning cars from the road to reduce the choking air pollution...
The article in Time says Moscow usually spends about $12M on removal, twice the $6M cost of seeding for this exercise.
In Kapitalist russia YOU control snow,
In Communist Russia Snow controls YOU!
yet again a failed promise made by a politician, does it ever CHANGE?
One morning with nothing better to do, I watched from my hotel window as a crew removed snow from the Moscow street below. Men with shovels scooped the snow into a truck, no other machines were used. The truck disappeared to dump the snow into the river. The snow has so much salt in it that nothing, absolutely nothing downstream survives. It's a huge source of pollution. It took the truck about two hours to dump the snow and return. During this time the men lean against their shovels and smoked. They did not employ a second truck which led me to assume that in Russia a truck is worth more than six men.
So there is a good reason to stop snow accumulation in Moscow (reducing pollution) but unemployment would spike.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
To save folks time, I will quote directly from the wikipedia article: "The amount of precipitation due to seeding is difficult to quantify. Cloud seeding may also suppress precipitation." The article contains plenty of examples of places where cloud seeding is used, but no data that would back up the "works" claim.
It saved their asses from Napoleon and Hitler, and this is the thanks it gets!
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Baltic fleet? Seems rather inconvenient.
I once looked it up, and 15 cargo ships produce as much greenhouse gas as all the cars in the world combined.
As much as I despise the phrase ... lolwut?
Just think about that for a second. Use your sense of natural intuition, your common sense, your sense of proportions and orders of magnitude. Does that statement seem even remotely plausible. That 15 ships emit the same volume of GHGs as a billion cars?
For the record, what you are thinking of is this: http://www.greencarreports.com/blog/1020063_pollution-perspective-one-giant-cargo-ship-emits-as-much-as-50-million-cars ...which is talking about the volume of ~pollution~ (e.g. sulfur, particulates, other 'dirty' stuff etc), not greenhouse gas emissions (most GHGs aren't dirty and cannot really be called pollutants, as they occur naturally in decent concentrations anyway). When we are talking about pollution (rather than GHG emissions), modern cars are in fact very clean indeed due to the tough emissions standards in most countries in the last several decades.
Having said that shipping is still a substantial slice of the greenhouse gas pie (the above article attributes 3-4% influence to total anthropogenic GHGs). But it's nowhere near the huge difference between cars and ships as you make out.