Slashdot Mirror
UAE To Build Artificial Mountain To Improve Rainfall (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The United Arab Emirates is in the early stages of developing an artificial mountain that would force air upwards and create clouds that could produce additional rainfall. While the Middle East and Africa continues to get hotter, researchers are further motivated and more desperate for solutions to maximize rainfall. "Building a mountain is not a simple thing," said NCAR scientist and lead researcher Roelof Bruintjes. "We are still busy finalizing assimilation, so we are doing a spread of all kinds of heights, widths and locations [as we simultaneously] look at the local climatology." The specific location has yet to be decided on as the team is still testing out different sites across the UAE. "If [the project] is too expensive for [the government], logically the project won't go through, but this gives them an idea of what kind of alternatives there are for the long-term future." Bruintjes said. "If it goes through, the second phase would be to go to an engineering company and decide whether it is possible or not."
Hey, we're talking about the UAE here . . . unfeasible expensive building projects don't need to make sense . . . in the "Talking Heads" sense of the phrase.
The answer to the material question is really quite simple, actually. Just use trash. Make the mountain an above ground landfill. The world is awash in trash, that nobody wants . . . hell, the rest of the world will pay the UAE to stash their trash in an environmentally friendly climate changing mountain in the UAE.
Old cars, useless electronic gadgets . . . bring it on, and pile it up! The baking hot sun will fry it enough so that it won't stink.
A win--win for the whole world.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
UAE creates man made mountain to grab rainfall. Every other country "close" will blame them for any change in rainfall and at least some of that is going to be legitimate. Impact from this is going to be felt far and wide, so anywhere between India, Italy, and Russia are potentially impacted. It is not far fetched that a country that used to be able to feed itself suddenly has a starving populace because they no longer get any rain.
Every country in the World threatens war over weather modification, and there are numerous countries that have long sought to master weather control for the purpose of war. UAE's intent may not be to harm neighbors but that's not always how things work out.
If the UAE was building desalination plants to irrigate with, it would be a very different story.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.