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Swiss Researchers Try to Make it Rain With Lasers
formaggio writes "Last year a team of researchers at Switzerland's University of Geneva had come up with an interesting way of making it rain– by shooting lasers high up into the sky. At the time it seemed like science fiction, but now they are one step closer after the team successfully finished tests around Lake Geneva. From the article: 'Records from 133 hours of firings revealed that intense pulses of laser light created nitric acid particles in the air that behaved like atmospheric glue, binding water molecules together into droplets and preventing them from re-evaporating. Within seconds, these grew into stable drops a few thousandths of a millimeter in diameter: too small to fall as rain, but large enough to encourage the scientists to press on with the work.'"
While they weren't able to make rain fall they did make 34 pigeons, 12 sparrows, 334 bees and 1 hanglider fall from the sky...
As long as you aren't doing it in any flight paths, you are probably not going to cause any immediate damage...
The real giggles, with the eventual success of any of these cloud-seeding projects, will be political(probably with a side of Aral-sea style ecological fuck-uppery in places where people don't care very much):
As with rivers that flow across political boundaries(a source of endless contention over water rights, complaints by team downstream that team upstream is taking too much water out and/or dumping too much shit in, etc.), air currents carrying enough water vapor to be even theoretically 'seed-able' are a finite resource. Rain that falls in one location won't be available to fall in another one. Historically, there hasn't been all that much fighting(either the legal flavor, or the literal flavor) about it, because rainfall was pretty much just a function of geography, climate, and luck.
Should it become possible to 'pump' a cloud with some comparatively inexpensive apparatus(whether it be this laser widget or some other thing), reliable air currents flowing from regions of evaporation will become a new flavor of 'river', suddenly subject to rivalrous use, and the rivalries that stem from it. Happy times!
The age of lasers seeding torrents in the Cloud.
Yes, then that way the dust that blows across the Atlantic from the Sahara to fertilize the Amazon can stop, and whilst Africa becomes a luscious new area of growth the whole of the Amazon can just die off.
Really, fucking around with things that can have such a massive, potentially unknown effect elsewhere isn't a smart idea at all because you can just end up making things worse.
Other parts of the world depend on the Sahara being like the Sahara is, so if you change the Sahara, you change those other parts of the world. In boosting food supplies in Africa you damage the food supplies in say South America, and create a problem there instead.
Wrong.
Your version of the story is not getting much press because it's not true.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Compounds like nitric acid act as nucleation sites for rain already. It'd be no more acidic than natural precipitation.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
> Other parts of the world depend on the Sahara ...
Yep. I've got hurricanes on the mind lately, so here's just one example that might not immediately occur to more normal people (I'm definitely abnormal): sometimes, you'll have a storm brewing in the Atlantic, but intensity will be inhibited by dry Saharan air mixing into the core. If you remove that dry air, we might have stronger hurricanes.
Of course, then someone will decide to blow lasers or set off nukes in the storm to compensate. What could POSSIBLY go wrong then? :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.