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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

> The enhanced rain is created using drone technology that unleashes electrical charges into clouds in order for them to clump together and form precipitation...Applying electrical shocks to clouds is preferred as it doesn’t require the use of chemicals.

Sounds pretty innocuous. I'm looking forward to reading comments about how this is dangerous and could cause unintended consequences. Only thing I can think of is perhaps that could reduce rainfall in neighboring areas which would have received the rain.

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> Only thing I can think of is perhaps that could reduce rainfall in neighboring areas which would have received the rain.

…which seems significant, no? If you fast forward to a water deprived future (uh, present?) and give nation states the ability to take water that would have fallen on neighbouring countries and take it for themselves… I don’t see how that ends well.

Don’t get me wrong, the technology is fascinating and on purely technological terms it’s a great development. But yes, it could lead to some strange outcomes.

The Tragedy of the Commons takes to the skies.

Monty Python's Flying Surcharge

Clouds can also just evaporate if the temperature is hot enough, like in a desert. Regardless I think it's better to use this kind of method for cloud-seeding then the pumping chemicals into the air, which seems to be the common method.

If a cloud "evaporates", the water is still in the air and will condense into clouds and rain at some point somewhere else. It can't just disappear.

It's not like this is a new concept. Geopolitical considerations come into play all the time with shared waterbodies. Canada and the U.S. have treaties governing the Great Lakes, Egypt threatens war with Ethiopia over the dam on the Blue Nile, etc.

Indeed

https://columbiainsight.org/how-and-why-to-fix-the-u-s-canad...

This already happens with dams which is arguably more devastating than rain cloud seeding.

Great point - also not to mention footgunning enormous bodies of water even within a nation http://www.columbia.edu/~tmt2120/introduction.htm

Sounds like the next iteration of downstream countries getting mad at upstream countries building dams on rivers.

E.G. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-50328647

Like many things, it's about quantity.

Nobody would mind if there was one place on Earth which we would pollute in an extreme way. The problem is when we are polluting all over the place.

Now imagine if every major city started doing weather engineering.

It's unlikely that we would be able to have a giant effect, there is only so much energy we can put out, but local consequences could be pretty drastic. OTOH, local consequences will kind of fall in the same country.

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