Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

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It seems like there are long term problems with this approach that will just cause bigger issues because seeding the clouds will either

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.

>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.

The majority of rain falls over the ocean, so it may not be taking it from somewhere that needs more water.

The world is pretty complex - are we sure that causing less rainfall over oceans wouldn't have some weird knock on effect for the environment? Does fresh water falling on ocean surfaces contribute to the known stratification of salinity that allows some animals/plants/whatever to be able to survive in the top layer of water?

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.

I know this isnt a great counterpoint for doing more geoengineering but; we are already massively terraforming the planet from the micro to the mesoscale. Its caused untold chaos for the biosphere already. In a very real way geoengineering is the only solution. Even reducing emissions is just us toggling in the CO2 knob.

I agree that we are already massively terraforming the planet, and that there is some terraforming we should stop and dinner we should do more of.

Sure, but in this case what they're taking is from clouds that are over land. I have a vague memory that western US weather patterns blow in from the pacific and drop it further east over the US, so an ocean drop may not be the destiny for this particular water. But I absolutely cannot assert this with any confidence without falling into the dunning-krueger hole. Although I do know just enough about water rights to know that doing this could get messy.

The Rocky Mountains squeeze most of that water out. Here in the midwest, we get Gulf hot wet air swirling up, and cold Canadian air swirling down, and Wham! we get thunderstorms where they meet!

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.

But taking water in the Rockies will have comparatively little effect on rainfall in the oceans vs immediate surrounding geographies.

Man, kids today with their precautionary principle. Also, this whole idea that “the thinking that got us into this mess can’t get us out.”

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 issue is there's not a unified "we" here and progress is localized. If my region can end a recession by increasing rain & agricultural yields we'll certainly do it. If it causes a famine in an adjacent region that was already deeply impoverished, that's net progress isn't it?

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.

> 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

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?

> Countries have gone to war over water rights

What are you referring to?

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.

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.

One possibility is that the resulting drier air over a body of water downwind will cause the water to evaporate more quickly, therefore charging the atmosphere with moisture again more quickly, and effectively increasing the total bandwidth of the water cycle.

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