WTF is wrong with the mods these days? For crying out loud...
Ok now, listen. Use some Christian Humility and consider the notion that perhaps you're the one who's missing something. Ever since Archimedes, Leonardo, Newton, and Einstein, scientists and techies have been using pictures to understand and communicate ideas and further their thinking. Whether they do it on parchment or on a computer is irrelevent. Your "problem" does not exist : pictures and imagination go hand in hand.
I think you are confusing mysticism with an altogether different brand of thinking.
Even if salt-water farming were done on a very large scale, I very much doubt it would have any impact on global weather: the planet is already two-thirds covered with water. Where the global weather-machine is concerned, oceanic evaporation is the main factor. Even a fully-developped salt-water farming industry could only have a negligible impact on the global water-vapour budget, as is currently the case for the vast amounts of farm land under conventional irrigation.
The impact on local weather could be significant, depending on the size of the areas under exploitation and the "natural" climate of the zone. You could possibly see an increase in cloud cover in some areas, but you're not going to start seeing rainstorms in the desert from the evaporation; deserts are what they are because they sit under areas of atmospheric subsidence in the global circulation. This would make it very difficult for thunderstorm-type convection to build up, even with an increased moisture input.
So I, too, see this as a very interesting ray of hope. If there are downsides to it, they're not weather-related.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF is wrong with the mods these days? For crying out loud...
Ok now, listen. Use some Christian Humility and consider the notion that perhaps you're the one who's missing something. Ever since Archimedes, Leonardo, Newton, and Einstein, scientists and techies have been using pictures to understand and communicate ideas and further their thinking. Whether they do it on parchment or on a computer is irrelevent. Your "problem" does not exist : pictures and imagination go hand in hand.
I think you are confusing mysticism with an altogether different brand of thinking.
Even if salt-water farming were done on a very large scale, I very much doubt it would have any impact on global weather: the planet is already two-thirds covered with water. Where the global weather-machine is concerned, oceanic evaporation is the main factor. Even a fully-developped salt-water farming industry could only have a negligible impact on the global water-vapour budget, as is currently the case for the vast amounts of farm land under conventional irrigation.
The impact on local weather could be significant, depending on the size of the areas under exploitation and the "natural" climate of the zone. You could possibly see an increase in cloud cover in some areas, but you're not going to start seeing rainstorms in the desert from the evaporation; deserts are what they are because they sit under areas of atmospheric subsidence in the global circulation. This would make it very difficult for thunderstorm-type convection to build up, even with an increased moisture input.
So I, too, see this as a very interesting ray of hope. If there are downsides to it, they're not weather-related.
--Help curb the spread of Foot-In-Mouth Disease