China Is Building a Rain-Making System Three Times as Big as Spain
scmp.com
scmp.com
Freshwater from high mountains in the India/China region is a hot topic. They're running out of glaciers.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tr...
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.
Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.
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.
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?
[0] http://wasatchweatherweenies.blogspot.com/2012/02/jet-stream...
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.
http://www.weatherstreet.com/international/asia-10-day-forec...
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 ...So.... this doesn't seem like the best idea.
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/3514775/alberta-severe-weather-su...
Communist party of china has a pretty bad history of large unintended consequences from their actions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Effects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Policy_and...
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.
I don't think that's accurate. Most? countries regulate CO2. European countries do, for example.
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
Unfortunately humans learn best from negative consequences, rather than from historical observation. Most bad things have already been tried before.
China has stopped of pollution already, after ruining the manufacturing base in richer countries.
In 2008, according to the Beijing Weather Modification Office, China used rockets to make sure the Olympic opening ceremony was rain-free: https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/how-beijing-use...
In 2013, China was producing "55 billion tons of artificial rain a year" according to the China Meteorological Administration: https://qz.com/138141/china-creates-55-billion-tons-of-artif...
Last year, the CMA spent millions on airplanes and rockets to affect rainfall: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/206...
That said, it's unclear whether cloud seeding actually works: https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i22/Does-cloud-seeding-reall.... An experiment in the US, the Wyoming Weather Modification Pilot Program, gave somewhat positive but inconclusive results on the order of a 5 to 15 percent increase in precipitation amount: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/we-may-never-know-how-w...
And, sure enough, in 2011, China's rainmaking tech wasn't enough to fix the Yangtze delta drought: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/01/china-dr...
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!
It's easier to organize a very public and sophisticated rain dance than it is to properly manage water resources at scale.
I just looked it up again and the program has been on hold since 2016.
Name any "initiative" and I'll find you at least 10 articles on it
Germany and Japan come to mind.
You can't compare the situation in China/India and the Europe.
And you certainly can't compare the US and germany. They have the cleanest, most eco-friendly culture I have seen Europe, or the US.
They recycle everything. They have very strict laws on cars. Dropping anything on the floor is regarded as completely uncivil.
No matter if they don't succeed perfectly in their energy transition right now, they are trying hard, and seem to will to continue until they do it.
Hard problem do not get solve easily.
On the other hand, the US backed down on most political commitment to the planet.
Now they are using renewables to replace it instead of replacing fossils which does very little for actual greenhouse emissions. [1]
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
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.
I think the right side of the American political spectrum pretty much disproves this one.
Straw men and ad hominem don't make up for actual data.
More on water resources in Tibet: http://www.tibetnature.net/en/introduction-water-resources/
Is some other country going to have a drought because of this?
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 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.
It's very concerning.
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.)
A question for this article is who would have gotten that rain had it not been seeded.
There has been discussion about flooding it with sea water for years but it seems impractical.
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).
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.
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-$500 / kg but you don't need very much of it
Wikipedia has "Approximately 50,000 kg are used for cloud seeding annually, each seeding experiment consuming 10–50 grams."
There are spectacular results when glaciating individual clouds [1] and there is some evidence of glaciogenic cloud seeding (the kind done with silver iodide) working in mountainous regions where supercooled clouds are common [2 - paywalled unfortunately]. However, much of the Tibetan plateau has high amounts of dust, which means that the clouds already form ice at relatively warm temperatures [3]. In this case, silver iodide might not be expected to have a large effect on precipitation formation.
It is also very difficult to detect a change in precipitation, as it varies strongly in both space and time, requiring long averaging periods to detect a change. This will be an very useful experiment if it goes forward, but I suspect that concerns over rain-stealing are rather overblown, as are hopes that it could significantly enhance rainfall in arid regions.
[0] - https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-86-5-647
[1] - https://www.ge.com/reports/snow-men-cometh-kurt-vonnegut-ice...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Modification_Con...
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/20305/20160321/china...
“Based on the images captured by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), it was revealed that 1.6 percent of the total land surface of China became heavily forested in a span of only ten years from 2000 to 2010.”
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1854/2016...
“China is investing immense resources for planting trees, totalling more than US$ 100 billion in the past decade alone”
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).
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-tree-pla...
Oh dear... Wonder what will be burned there?
> ...releasing only vapours and carbon dioxide, which makes them suitable for use even in environmentally protected areas.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm
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.
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.
I don't know, sounds very familiar :)
I believe this is a stronger factor in countries that have a maximum amount of mandates per administration.
Even Democrats are starting to see that now.
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.
Let's pretend a fusion plant is completely free to build, maintain, operate, and decommission.
50% of the cost of electricity is from transmission and distribution. Those costs aren't going anywhere.
So at most, you'll get a 50% savings. But you're not getting that either, because that fusion plant definitely wont be free.
ianaEE
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.
* http://uk.businessinsider.com/polls-open-britain-eu-referend...
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/22...
* https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/uk-weather-commuters-u...
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've lived in London for a while, it was definitely not your usual bit of rain.