Can we affect the weather?

Can we affect the weather?

For climate or weather to be managed, modified, or changed by humans is on a par with children's story books about monsters, goblins and gods, who can do whatever they dream up just because they decide to. Thinking we are that powerful is how vain we have become and what clever-dicks we humans think we are. Whilst we cannot change our drinking habits, nor our teenagers, nor prevent crime in south Auckland nor provide for our poor, yet some think we can hold power over climate and weather. Duh.

It is like imagining that a flea can change the weather. We now have pseudo-sciences called climate science, geoengineering and weather modification. For the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China had 30 airplanes, 4,000 rocket launchers, and 7,000 anti-aircraft guns to stop rain. Each system shot chemicals into threatening clouds to shrink rain drops before they dropped. It was important for national pride to prevent bad weather over just those 16 days.

But it rained often, although rain is rare in northern China. Marina Erakovic had to wait another day for her Olympics tennis debut after a storm. Rain delayed tennis matches and rowing events and made marshes out of fields for team sport events. The New Zealand field hockey team abandoned their white uniforms when rain created "see-through" and there were agonizing rain delays for the cycling and the marathon.

If anyone could modify the weather for their most important event in centuries, one would think the Chinese would have achieved it a long time before now. After all, it would have helped them win battles in ancient times if they had weather modification at their disposal as well as cannons, catapult machines and even (some say, kite-like flying devices), and it is a fairly obvious technology to have dreamed of. And although the Chinese invented clocks, gunpowder, paper and, some say, pyramids, there is no carry-through of weather modifying that has been a common staple of global warfare. The Chinese are a very clever and diverse culture and there are undoubtedly scammers and dishonest scientists trying to win government funding just like in other cultures. And when it comes to weather it is easy to dupe the public. People generally do not want to accept the immense forces that are involved.

First to create a weather system of any significance you need a playing field a few thousand miles long. One squall line can cover a distance of 250 miles. A single small fluffy cloud may hold 100 to 1000 tons of moisture. To begin with you'll need a blowtorch of 6000degC, to evaporate enough moisture from the sea to cause a load of rain. The evaporation rate has to be 5 thousand million gallons per hour, so no small heating device could manage it. This water, millions of tons, must move or it will remain over the sea. To bring that rain over the land to where you want it requires a rotating gravitation system which will also swerve the winds - necessary to keep them straight over the curved earth.

Then you will need a cold mass of air as large as the Tasman Sea to create a boundary that forces itself up against a similar size air mass of different temperature to produce a 'front', which will then be able to condense out. That cold can only come from the upper reaches of the atmosphere where air is cooler. It must be carried downwards by an atmospheric tide, that answers to the cyclic rules for all tidal systems, which have their own dynamics. From that front will then come the potential for rain and thunderstorms.

So how do these conditions get to be arranged in unison, so as to create a weather event that is going to be useful for those people and their cities and farms, at least 12kms below? Well, we have all the natural processing of the three of those conditions already. The blowtorch is called the sun, the rotation is earth's axial orbit and the cold air-tide capable of bringing down the rain is a function of the moon. And the natural patterns are not easily stopped. A normal summer thunderstorm can have the energy of a dozen Hiroshima bombs. 45,000 of them are brewing around the earth every day. A hurricane releases as much energy as that every second. Lightning is happening somewhere every 2 seconds. Weather can blow down houses.

Any sending of a few planes aloft loaded with pellet guns hoping to create weather will only waste a lot of pellets. Before your private weather pattern can be swiveled into position and switched on you would need to find some way to halt all the other weather patterns that are current and about to be unleashed and that have been a long time establishing themselves by natural forces such as perigees, equinoxes and solar ionizings, to say nothing of the roiling from the huge acquired momentum of wave action interfacing with surface air currents. These natural events have been thousands of years in the making and interacting.

Global warming nonsense preaches that exhaust from a vehicle, so lukewarm that it won't even burn your hand, is able to modify weather by introducing a thermal change to the atmosphere. But it is physically impossible for a lukewarm emission to travel upwards to 8-12 miles (where most weather is generated) without its heat being stripped off it along the way, so it physically cannot warm up an air layer sitting at -50 to -60degC; which is about the temperature of Antarctica. Yet the global warmers say a huge thing like the moon, between a quarter and a third the size of earth, from only 10 earth circumferences away, has zero effect on our atmosphere. So just to be clear: a molecule of CO2 or methane, yes. The moon: no. How does that make any sense?

One earthquake is an energy-release ripple that can start 300-500kms down in the bowels of the earth, then move at 20,000mph through solid granite with the force of 50 Hiroshima bombs and shift a city the size of Christchurch over by a meter in a minute or put a country the size of Japan on a new lean of 12 meters. Compare that it took many months and millions of dollars for human engineers to move the small Birdcage Hotel in Auckland by even a few yards. Therefore let us never lose sight of the size of the forces of nature. The earth intercepts only a tiny fraction of the vast amount of energy the sun radiates into space, about one two-thousand-millionth. This fraction pours onto the earth about 23 billion horsepower - more energy every minute than all mankind uses, in all forms, in one year. If the sun's heat reduced by 13%, the earth would be encased in ice a mile thick. Then the moon brings its tidal force to bear on the land, the oceans and the interfacing air that sets and patterns the timing of weather events.

That is where weather comes from and will always do so, no matter how many chemical pellets we fire into clouds and how much in taxes we are penalized for emissions. It makes no difference whether or not we walk to work or drive, recycle aluminum cans, plant extra trees and ban plastic bags, or whether or not man is even here at all. The weather patterns, which generate in the ocean deep and cross from ocean to ocean, are totally beyond the control and influence of Man. If there was just one human who had control over weather, imagine how selfish that ability would be. At any one time there are equal people wishing for rain (farmers) as sunshine (tourists and housewives hanging out washing); wind (yachties) and calm (balloonists); and hot temperatures (wine growers and beach-goers) versus cooler air (marathon runners and trampers. Who would get to decide which weather would be unleashed?

Finally, let us not forget a certain Danish king who some imagined could control the tide. The real story seems to be that some of Canute's followers believed him to be invincible and superhuman, so in order to bring them back to reality he sat in a chair in the sea and showed that he could not stop the incoming tide. There are some who claim they can influence weather by thinking about it. Whilst it is fanciful and intriguing to think of the power of conscious thought, closer to the truth may be that an inkling of forward or developing conditions may be realised on a subconscious level and the mind may then decide to wish for that. When it indeed eventuates as 'predicted' there may be self congratulation.

If one could really influence/control weather then a scientific experiment would need to be organized, whereby the person was handed at least 10 future eventualities for specific locations, unbeknownst beforehand, and instructed to bring those conditions about, then to compare to what eventuates. There would have to be unusual ones, like snow in February on Rangitoto, and a dust storm in Antarctica. These would all be arranged to happen on the same day. I doubt that any of these so-called geoengineers or cloud-seeders would agree to take part. It is a fairly obvious test of the validity of weather modification but such an experiment has never been done. They just keep accepting the massive amounts of govt funds (er,,taxpayer funding) for research but never come up with anything concrete or reliable. 

In plain English, it's a scam.