Cloud seeding catching on amid Rocky Mountain drought
hjnews.com
hjnews.com
1) Give you the water you were going to get anyway, only you get it a bit earlier, and assuming there are no other wider ripple effects of doing this (a huge assumption to make) then you're just going to wait even longer in between the seeded clouds and the next batch that weather patterns would serve up. So now you're even worse off when the seeded cloud water is used up and the interval to the next bit is extended [1]
Or
2) You're taking water from clouds that would normally have dropped it elsewhere, which just shifts the problem by depriving some other region of the water it relies on. [1]
Or
3) lots of other possibilities I'm not smart enough to think up because weather and climate systems are complicated and the laws around water rights are complicated and I have no domain expertise in either. Though I suppose that's the issue right there: If even I can see swiss cheese holes in the problems with this plan then it's bound to end poorly for someone.
[1] I mean, I'm guessing there's only so much moisture in the air and that taking some out prematurely isn't likely to shift the overall system in a way that makes up for that gap. And even if it did it's still unlikely to preserve the system in a way that keeps the water flowing to where it would have gone without macroscopic human intervention.
The majority of rain falls over the ocean, so it may not be taking it from somewhere that needs more water.
Curiously the water that rains on the East Coast is a sort of rolling storm of rain/evaporation/wind/rain-but-further-east. A recycling of the same bolus of water over and over again. Been going on for millions of years.
We have a problem: we're farming lettuce in Arizona. It feels a lot safer to just stop doing that then try to fix the issues with work arounds that might cause bigger issues.
That's an interesting idea. Countries have gone to war over water rights. One country builds a dam to hog all the water, and the neighboring country gets angry enough to blow up this dam. Would seeding clouds take away rain that could have dropped on another country that equally needs the rain?
What are you referring to?
Or, the world is complicated and progress is complicated and we just keep on keeping on because probably they will work out.
Both of these are faith based positions, it seems. But I like the latter. The precautionary principle is way too risky for my taste.
The world is complicated, and the answer to that is humility and conservative consideration of specific circumstances, not throwing up your hands and figuring it'll all work out. You can't average human life & wellbeing together like that.
Shifting where the rain fall doesn't mean it causes the problem elsewhere. It may cause no problems to have less rain in that location, or that location may have problems with too much rain so you are actually solving two issues at once.
> As part of Public Law 92-205 (1972), all non-Federal weather modification activities must be reported to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, via the NOAA Weather Program Office. Below is a list of these reports and is updated on a quarterly basis.
https://library.noaa.gov/Collections/Digital-Collections/Wea...
This appears to be the permit for the activates in the article. (PDF): https://library.oarcloud.noaa.gov/noaa_documents.lib/OAR/OWA...
While I was looking I found this permit, which is interesting:
https://library.oarcloud.noaa.gov/noaa_documents.lib/OAR/OWA...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/01/0...
https://makesunsets.com/blogs/news/make-sunsets-monthly-so-h...
> "Iseman is the founder and CEO of Make Sunsets — a two-person firm that plans several more test flights this month. His start-up has triggered the worst fears of researchers who have struggled for decades to establish ground rules for solar geoengineering. The technology has almost always been seen as a last resort to counter runaway warming. Make Sunsets is not only promising to deploy this break-the-glass approach now — but to sell it for profit.
Iseman, 39, acknowledges that he is, in many ways, a geoengineering novice. A former director of hardware for the start-up incubator Y Combinator, he got interested in the subject by reading Neal Stephenson’s novel “Termination Shock.”"
Edit: Great responses, I learned a lot, thanks!
The answer is, at agricultural scales, absolutely not. What I think is interesting though is that your comment on "hydrological warfare/competition" is extremely relevant. Geo-engineering is almost always a hack with "no free lunch" impacts. For cloud seeding specifically, there is only ever so much water vapor available in the atmosphere and the efficacy of seeding depends on the dynamics/microphysics at play in the region of interest. If there is a lack of the specific aerosols necessary for condensation and precipitation, cloud seeding has shown to be effective to the tune of 5-15% increase in precip in certain regions. Water vapor doesn't like to hang out available in the atmosphere in large quantities so squeezing it out by forcing precipitation via "seeding" isn't really a reasonable concept. But to the degree that you do succeed, you are extracting water vapor that would have been transported by the atmosphere to other neighboring regions.
While there is little evidence that cloud seeding can be done at-scale, in a world where someone comes up with a novel+clever idea this would mean that the impacts on precipitation in other regions would be significant. Again, no free lunch. It's not a stretch to imagine turning that into a competitive advantage or using it as a warfare tactic.
If there were large bands of moisture just waiting to fall out of the sky we would be living in a very different climate. Aerosols are far too common on earth. In fact, the Arctic is one of the only places seeding makes a lot of sense with supercooled water and a distinct lack of aerosols in the clean environment. But in my research I have yet to come across much agriculture up there much less agrarian societies ;)
But if it is used to grow wheat in Colorado (because the obligations to lower-basin states need to be met regardless and the increased moisture allows more diversions across the continental divide), then it probably ends up evaporating anyway or else in the Platte River. It wouldn't be stealing moisture from Nebraska, they might actually benefit from it.
Geo-engineering might not have a free lunch, but it also isn't a zero-sum game.
I had expected that it was not economically viable for agriculture, but the article has one source claiming it is actually quite affordable, given current water prices in the west.
A large portion of the article tries to give both sides a voice.
[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/feb-29-coronavirus-containme... [1]: https://letstalkscience.ca/educational-resources/stem-in-con...
Other questions I found out were difficult were if we can create clouds, and if we can create water, both artificially, and the resounding answer on the nets was NO, or we can but it is extremely dangerous, and not practical. But we must persist, and try again.
edit: a cool article on history, and risks with cloud seeding -https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/dodging-silver-bullets-how-c...
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/15/us-west-... (the first link in the article is the study, it's quite ugly so I used the article instead, but the study is worth reading)
J.K. but still...
For which Olympics? 1972? Here's an ABC nightly news feature story about cloud seeding, including a demo, from over a decade ago.