Excluding systems which put water into the air, Atmospheric water is a zero sum game AFAIK so if this causes rain to fall where the Chinese want it, somebody else misses out.
Freshwater from high mountains in the India/China region is a hot topic. They're running out of glaciers.
It worth to mention that the southern part of China has a different climate than the north. It is very normal that during summer, there is flood in South but drought in North. The situation may different from year to year but the trend is very clear. That is also why there is South–North Water Transfer Project[1]
Came here to ask if this was a zero sum game (verbatim, actually). So, thanks for this.
Given how much human conflict has erupted over access to rivers and other water sources, I can't imagine it will go well if a lot of countries start to do this at scale...
It's also fascinating how we muck-up water management in seemingly contradictory ways. I live in a temperate climate with a good amount of rainfall, but my town is already jockeying with its neighbors for the last remaining access points on the local water reservoir. Meanwhile, every time we get a heavy downpour, local creeks overflow due to excessive runoff from parking lots and what not and end up flooding all kinds of places (the local mall floods pretty much once every year or two, it seems). Fascinating how we can have not enough fresh water and too much fresh water all at the same time.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of this immediately after reading the article.
You mentioned another point that's worth investigating with this technology - some places see excessive rainfall to the point where it disrupts populated areas.
Perhaps in the long-term we can learn if there are specific areas these systems tend to draw from and determine how weather patterns contribute to that. Eventually, we may be able to use these systems in a way that takes just the right amount of excessive rainfall from areas where it's becoming a nuisance and evenly distributing them to areas where water is scarce.
One could hope that countries experimenting with this across the globe would be willing to find ways to make that happen, although that could create huge dependency chains that quickly fall apart as soon as one country backs out suddenly.
The "stolen" rainfall doesn't have to be spatial, necessarily; it could be temporal as well. It might provide a way to control seasonal floods caused by excessive rainfall during a short period.
Wouldn't higher temperatures and lower humidity due to water vapor extraction lead to an increase the evaporation from the oceans to maintain the balance?
Not saying that wouldn't have other effects, just wondering if atmospheric water is really a zero sum game.
Based on this [0], it looks like the weather systems head out over the pacific after passing China, so should have ample time to refuel?
It's not a 0 sum game so much as an equilibrium expression.
They're just putting their thumb on one side of the scale. Where the extra evaporation comes from and how it affects global climates is too tricky to predict but that's not going to stop them so we'll just have to live through it.
I don't think that is necessarily true. Whatever rain falls evaporates again. If you increase the amount of rain in one place then evaporation also increases. You have increased the capacity of the water cycle at least in a local area. Also most of earth is ocean so increasing rain on land does not necessarily take from other land.
I'm not the best at reading meteorological maps but, if I understand this jet stream forecast right, it looks like it's Beijing and South Korea that are going to miss out.
Under the guidelines of the Clean Water Act by the
EPA, silver iodide is considered a hazardous
substance, a priority pollutant, and as a toxic
pollutant.(10) Some industries have learned this all
too well. ... If the toxicity manifests in pollution
and illnesses, the effects may not be reversible ...
Interesting. Cloud seeding using Silver Iodide is still in use in Canada, as part of the Alberta Hail Suppression Project[0]. These little differences between Canada and the US always surprise me.
Regardless of the merits or demerits of this particular scheme, I admire the spirit. With a fraction of such confidence we could revive the Neanderthals, build an asteroid defence system, clean up the oceans, on and on. Instead we're not trying much. We feel ashamed... because... why?
While clearly true, I think we'd have to rephrase that as "all cultures" - here in the US people are sleeping on the sidewalk outside my office. In the PRC, they're willing to gamble on geoengineering which could poison people (just not people in power). I can't think of any current society that really values every member - but we can keep working towards that goal...
>I think we'd have to rephrase that as "all cultures"
Absolutely agree, but here we have the freedom to protest the government itself, and do so openly for as long as we need to to make a change. They literally have a dictator for life that just came into power weeks ago.
Yeah I'd 's/China/Humans/'. I'm referring to the fact that (mostly) everyone emits CO2 with cars, without caring about longer term impacts on global climate, sea rise, increase of hurricane frequency and intensity, etc.
> (mostly) everyone emits CO2 with cars, without caring about longer term impacts on global climate, sea rise, increase of hurricane frequency and intensity, etc.
I don't think that's accurate. Most? countries regulate CO2. European countries do, for example.
According to this graph, car seems to be dominant in europe too. [2014] Of course Europe is doing better and I'd like to see more trains in Canada and the US.
To me, all this rain-making news out of China seems like either propaganda or some Chinese government bureau justifying its existence by inflating how much this cloud-seeding technology can actually do. But that's just my feeling from an hour of searching around and skimming articles -- I'd love to hear how I'm wrong!
The potential environmental impact of loads of silver iodide on human and other animal life is of concern. But it is China, so they probably don't care about that aspect.
Not only China, but which large country cares about larger environmental impact? Looking at the weapons the big countries are still building (man made floods, tornadoes etc) I don't think it's fair to target China alone.
Merkel said a lot of things, and yet they already dropped their climate goals for 2020 and they can't seem to get rid of their coal dependency. Words mean nothing without the action to back them up.
Such irony. The losers of WWII now care about the fate of the planet more than the "winners". I say "winners" because no one really wins a war. We all lose.
Huh, what does this have to do with the outcome of a war? That would imply that someone can win a war by caring about the planet. Also, caring about climate change does not necessarily have a strong correlation with views on war.
Apart of that, generations have passed since then. The majority of people alive now were born after the war, so shift in mindset is not too surprising.
Thats funny, I have never met anyone from any political system, short of nhilism, who doesen't care about climate change. The argument, whivh you seem to be intentionally reframing, is about the cause of said change. Don't make HN political, particularlly with petty, misleading quips like that.
No, I am not reframing. I'm sorry for your limited experience, but I have met far too many conservatives that all but spell it out. I used to be one and traveled in those circles. Look at people's actions. Conservatives in Congress and the WH cut the EPA, they cut Climate Science budgets, and not only do they offer all-out denial, they often just flat out state that a warmer planet would be or could be a good thing. So if that doesn't qualify as "not caring" about climate change, then we aren't seeing the same thing. Obviously, not everyone on the right is a fire-breathing climate denialist, but the OP was about correlation between views on war and views on climate change and IMHO there is strong one.
Anecdote doesn't make data, otherwise my personal experience of never having once met a conservative that doesn't care about clean air and water would cancel out your experience.
Straw men and ad hominem don't make up for actual data.
I am not certain what model you use for reasoning, but if person A says "I never saw X" and person B says "I saw X on occasions Y, Z, and W", then they don't "cancel each other out," unless someone is lying. Literally the entire rest of my comment was not about what I thought I saw, but what people have actually done. E.g. I mentioned what conservatives in Congress have actually done (e.g. latest https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...) and suddenly we are arguing about anecdotes and I'm accused of offering strawmen. Uh, no.
I think access to water resources has always been part, if not the bulk, of modern China's Tibet play. And now they're starting to tap into those resources. I wonder what the effects will be once they start pumping / rain-making at an even more massive scale.
Well yeah. It's a territory next to India, which is short on water, has a huge population and the atomic bomb. So it was always about who would get it first without getting busted.
Really? Because most of the moisture originated from the oceans in the first place. Are you saying that after genesis, it travels for some time over land before being deposited back in an ocean?
I don’t think so.
I’m not an expert but I know that mountains contribute to the cloud formation and also the temperatures gradient between the land and the sea may contribute.
So I would think that you can’t just take the percentage of land mass to predict the percentage of precipitations.
That sounds kind of shortsighted reasoning.
I know that in Scotland most of the weather comes from the West, hits the mountains and falls as rain. Its dryer on the east coast (though it still rains plenty).
In the US, prevailing weather moves from west to east.
Moist air from the Pacific is immediately pushed up by the Rockies and rains out. Almost the entire US West is in the rain shadow, and very dry. Weather patterns pushing north from the Gulf of Mexico and passing over the Great Lakes restore normal rainfall roughly between the Mississippi River and the Appalachians. Since those are very old and weathered mountains, there is a very slight rain shadow to their east, and proximity to the coast evens it out shortly thereafter. Most of the deserts in the US Southwest only get rain from the monsoon thunderstorms from Gulf of California and Gulf of Mexico, because otherwise they're "behind" the mountains all the time.
Obviously, the oceans themselves don't have mountains that cast rain shadows. But they have warm and cold currents. Cold currents have a sort of shadow, because they evaporate less moisture into passing air masses. The warm/cold current split is why San Diego is dry while San Francisco is wet.
Scotland's winds blow over the Norwegian branch of the North Atlantic warm current, rain out over the highlands, and rain out a tiny bit less on the lowlands. The patterns are entirely predictable from orography and oceanic currents. All of Britain is warmer and wetter from the current, and Scotland is where all the mountains are.
Both effects come together at the Atacama Desert, because it's in the orographic rain shadow from the Andes and has a dry coast from a cold ocean current.
Even if the entire planet was covered in ocean, there would still be uneven rainfall patterns, as the circulation currents would be influenced by underwater ridges and seamounts, wind patterns, and seasons.
This should be regulated internationally by the UN. This solution is like turning on the AC when it's hot out. It won't make it less hot outside and you will need more and more electricity to power the AC as the world heats up from increased CO2 levels.
This technology releases significant amounts of CO2 and as the Earth's temperature rises from increased greenhouse gas concentrations, solutions such as these will show diminishing returns because the technology they are built upon only worsens the underlying problem by producing significant amounts of the gas causing the problem in the first place.
Disappointing approach to solving climate change and mitigating it's impacts.
What's more, local weather is always existing in a global context. When they'll modify the meteorology at the scale of their country, it may very well impact the climate of the entire planet. Water must come from somewhere. Air current will be impacted. And temperature deltas.
I guess the the previous poster is implicitly proposing an international treaty on the atmosphere (edit: maybe creating a new UN specialist agency). Of course, there are already a number of other treaties in this area and while some of them have worked reasonably well (like the treaties to protect the ozone layer by eliminating use of CFCs), others have been fraught with difficulty.
There are already international treaties on water rights, even with dispute resolution mechanisms in some cases, so maybe these mechanisms could be extended somehow to water rights in atmospheric water. (Not that this is by any means easy in the case of surface water.)
I've always thought Australia should build a giant canal from the Great Australia Bite up through central Australia. Perhaps forming a permanent inland sea. The sea water evaporating would fall as rain (not sure where, though...).
A question for this article is who would have gotten that rain had it not been seeded.
I think the big problem is motivation: we have heaps of arable land, and people are increasingly concentrated in cities.
EDIT thanks for the headsup, there's quite a bit online about it. I had this idea pre-internet, but haven't had the idea of googling it. IANA millennial, AMA (but I won't know).
The Qattara Depression in Egypt should probably get dug to the sea first. It's significantly deeper, which would allow you to generate significant amounts of hydroelectric power by flooding the depression.
Judging by the Suez Canal or the Salton Sea it doesn't have good long term effects. Eventually it dries out and the salt left behind gets flung around surrounding areas, contaminating water supplies and ruining crops.
You're right. As a fan of conspiracy theory drama, I love it when I make this discovery (how something went from conspiracy theory to non-conspiracy theory). I had actually read about this before it had its own Wikipedia page and people thought I was crazy if I chose to speak about it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye
Those who have a deep desire to be in control will try almost anything.
As far as actual conspiracy theories go, I don't see why some people have such a hard time imagining that powerful, control-hungry people could form groups and work together to feed their desires. I guess they just can't relate because that's not how they think or they just don't want to think about it because it makes them uncomfortable.
>The chambers burn solid fuel to produce silver iodide
seems a little off - most fuel doesn't contain silver or iodine. I expect what happens is the put silver iodide on the fuel and then they heat produced causes it to rise up in the manner of a hot air balloon.
Incidentally silver iodide seems to cost $300-$500 / kg but you don't need very much of it
Wikipedia has "Approximately 50,000 kg are used for cloud seeding annually, each seeding experiment consuming 10–50 grams."
Unfortunately there is little evidence that cloud seeding is actually able to increase the overall precipitation in most cases [0 - response to NRC report on cloud seeding].
There are spectacular results when glaciating individual clouds [1] and there is some evidence of glaciogenic cloud seeding (the kind done with silver iodide) working in mountainous regions where supercooled clouds are common [2 - paywalled unfortunately]. However, much of the Tibetan plateau has high amounts of dust, which means that the clouds already form ice at relatively warm temperatures [3]. In this case, silver iodide might not be expected to have a large effect on precipitation formation.
It is also very difficult to detect a change in precipitation, as it varies strongly in both space and time, requiring long averaging periods to detect a change. This will be an very useful experiment if it goes forward, but I suspect that concerns over rain-stealing are rather overblown, as are hopes that it could significantly enhance rainfall in arid regions.
They mention the US, CN and then SU, now RU, had engaged in weather research for offensive purposes --but at least some of that has turned to defensive measures now, given pop growth and climate change.
“Based on the images captured by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), it was revealed that 1.6 percent of the total land surface of China became heavily forested in a span of only ten years from 2000 to 2010.”
So trees don't change the 0 sum aspect behind cloud seeding: if the rain falls in one place, it can't rain in some other place. The primary reason why plants (read: anything photosynthetic) have a role to play in where it rains is the same principle behind cloud seeding. Plants, when they don't have sufficient nutrients to run photosynthesis and make new plant material, release unused photosynthesis as short chained hydrocarbons, usually ethane and some derivatives. Idea here is that it gives them a place to land the electrons from photosynthesis without tearing themselves apart when nutrients aren't readily available. These short chained hydrocarbons go on to play the same role as the silver compound used by China; they form the 'seeds' for droplet formation.
Neither method does anything to address the fact that there is only so much water in the atmosphere (although that is changing with a changing climate).
In other news, in San Francisco, the NIMBYs won an agitation to prevent a 4 school building from being constructed.
I am kidding..maybe.
In all honestly, I think the time for US to create large scale construction projects that serve humanity (at the expense of environment) are over. We are lucky that the interstates got build in 1950s, that the NYC Subway was formed in late 19th century etc. Today, the regulations and outrage is so strong that none of these would have been possible.
It is good to see other countries such as China being on the cutting edge to see what is possible.
I see your point, but I think we have done enough at the expense of the environment. A little more forethought in that area is welcome at least.
Some wild ambitious construction in favour of the environment and humanity would be excellent. But we seem suddenly frugal when that comes up.
It's of course more nuanced than I am about to make it seem, but that world governments are not chomping at the bit to install as much solar as possible is telling. The price is right, but the incumbents are hard to motivate, and for some reason generation of one of our most important, most volatile and most polluting resources is a private market concern.
Not an engineer but, if your infrastructure is that old first of all I'd focus on maintenance, rather than having dick measuring contests with countries that have questionable attitudes towards pollution, safety and nature.
The condition of the roads and infrastructure in a large part of the US is very, very bad when compared to countries like the Netherlands. It’s like the US is a superpower with third world infrastructure.
Maintenance of old infrastructure in large projects is difficult and budget for this purpose is hard to justify, while building new things gets harder due to (self imposed) new regulations and higher costs (outsourcing might be cheaper, but always has some risks...).
While I agree with you 101% I think that politics play a huge factor on this: no administration wants to do its homeworks, only for the next one to profit from the shiny new infrastructure.
I believe this is a stronger factor in countries that have a maximum amount of mandates per administration.
As someone who has traveled to many third world countries in SE Asia and South America I can confidently say that the US does not have third world infrastructure. Most claims of this are frequently done by somebody pushing some kind of narrative
I agree it’s a bit hyperbolic, but as I said, the US definately has very bad infrastructure in a large part while the other parts have good or very good infrastructure. On average experts rate it with a “D”
Not only old but also not enough. In areas that population have grown a lot in the past few decades, it makes a lot of sense to build new infrastructure to keep up with the demand
Absolutely, +1. And that bridge collapse in Miami. God bless those poor souls but that bridge cost 14 million dollars!!! Yes! 740 feet of concrete at the expense of $14MM, now moved to garbage yard. Then add the most expensive mile in history (New York suway - one, cool, billion, dollars, for, one mile) and no wonder our infrastructure is in such poor state ;(
NIMBY is one of the worst and most elitarian movements that exist out there and the opposition to Nuclear Power by environmentalist is not only ironic but it's hurting both the environment and making people poorer than they needed to be.
Please don't do internet tropes here. They're bad for discussion quality. On HN the idea is to (a) have a substantive point to make and (b) make it thoughtfully.
MIT figured out fusion this month, water shortages are on the verge of being solved since water is not scarce, just dirty/salty - it's an energy problem.
I think the recent 200GW solar power deal between Saudi Arabia and SoftBank has more potential to solve desalination problems than Fusion (at least over the medium term).
The cost per watt of solar comes from the expenses associated with making solar panels, averaged over their lifetime.
The cost per watt of fusion will come from the expenses associated with making fusion plants, averaged over their lifetime; additionally you need something to fuel the fusion reaction.
I doubt that fusion is going to be cheaper than solar anytime soon, given that solar has the advantage of an established manufacturing process, while fusion is still in the research phase.
For the purported usage (desalination) distribution is not an issue. But obviously fusion generated electricity won't be free, though marginal cost of production may approach that (if it ever becomes a reality).
But for AC, you have both distribution and variable demand. Not sure how easy fusion plants will be able to react to demand. If they're like nuclear plants, you'll need a sizeable amount of peaker capacity as well (not that solar wouldn't need that).
Well, if transmission charges factor in losses during transmission, then the generation cost would influence some part of the transmission cost. If generation was an order of magnitude cheaper, then presumably the amount of power lost between the generator and the end user would cost a negligible amount, whereas I would assume it's currently a good chunk of your distribution costs.
Fusion reactors are mechanically simple and safe and can be made in tiny form factors, including engines. They are predicting container-sized "plants" that can power hundreds of thousands of homes. Fusion will heavily decentralize the grid (partially because of transmission costs).
Nothing is totally free of course, but fusion can do for energy what the internet did for distribution, which we can round to having made it free.
If your reactors are nearly free or last a very long time, which, given they use all kinds of super advanced stuff and have parts that are bombarded by Neutrons, I doubt.
Really as I though such an achievement would have gathered a lot of press attention. It could literally "save the planet". All I saw in the news was Kardashians.
This is total conspiracy theory stuff and I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion but has anyone else in London found it really strange on how on the day of the Brexit referendum - we had these sudden overnight thunderstorms which resulted in many roads being flooded, polling stations being inaccessible and huge delays / suspensions of the Tube? Just a coincidence and bad luck?
The next morning it all cleared away and it was a beautiful sunny day to the point where even Nigel Farage had to make a comment / joke about it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLCb1cGROAw].
If localized rain-making on a massive scale like this is possible, I wonder if it was used to manipulate the referendum by whoever might be interested in that.
I reckon there are far cheaper ways to influence the vote than that. Like sticking a big whopping lie on the side of a bus and parading it around as truth, then admitting it's a lie 30 minutes after the results
> The issues were caused after the South East was struck by a massive thunderstorm, which saw a month's worth of rain fall in an hour, in the early hours of EU referendum day.
I've lived in London for a while, it was definitely not your usual bit of rain.
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Freshwater from high mountains in the India/China region is a hot topic. They're running out of glaciers.