Can We Affect the Weather?

Ken Ring

For climate or weather to be managed, modified, or in any way changed by humans is on a par with children's story books about monsters, goblins and gods who can do whatever they dream up just because they decide to.

Thinking we are that powerful is how vain we have become and what clever-dicks we think we are.

Whilst we cannot change our drinking habits, nor our teenagers, we cannot prevent crime in south Auckland nor provide for our poor, yet some think we can hold power over weather.

It is like imagining that a flea can change the weather.

We now have pseudo-sciences called 'climate science', 'aerial geo-engineering' and 'weather modification'. For the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it was imperative for national pride to prevent bad weather over just those 16 days.

China deployed 30 airplanes, 4,000 rocket launchers, and 7,000 anti-aircraft guns to stop rain. Each system shot chemicals into threatening clouds to shrink rain drops before they dropped.

Sadly it rained often, although rain is rare in northern China.

Marina Erakovic had to wait another day for her Olympics tennis debut after a storm. Rain delayed tennis matches and rowing events and made marshes out of fields for team sport events.

The New Zealand field hockey team abandoned their white uniforms when rain created "see-through" and there were agonizing rain delays for the cycling and the marathon.

If anyone could modify the weather for their most talked-about event in centuries, the Chinese would have found a way. They failed. When it comes to weather perhaps people do not want to accept the immense forces that are involved.

First you need a playing field a few thousand miles long. One squall line can be 250 miles long.

A single small fluffy cloud may hold 100 to 1000 tons of moisture. You'll need a blowtorch 6000degC, to evaporate enough moisture from the sea to cause rain.

The evaporation rate is only a mere 5 thousand million gallons per hour. This water, millions of tons, must move or remain over the sea.

To bring rain over land requires a rotating gravitation which will also swerve the winds - necessary to keep them straight over the curved earth.

Then you will need a cold mass of air as large as the Tasman Sea to create a boundary that forces itself up against a similar size air mass of different temperature to produce a front.

Cold air drops from the upper reaches of the atmosphere, enabling warmer air to rise. Amounts and rates are determined by a 'tide' that itself has a generating force. From that front comes rain and thunderstorms.

Sending a few planes aloft loaded with pellet guns will only waste planes and pellets.

Before your private weather pattern can be swivelled into position and switched on you would need to find some way to halt all the weather patterns that are currently unleashing that have been a long time developing by natural forces such as perigees, equinoxes and solar ionisings and roiling from huge momentums of wave action interfacing with surface air currents.

These natural patterns are not easily stopped. A normal summer thunderstorm can have the energy of a dozen Hiroshima bombs.

45,000 of them are brewing around the earth every day. A hurricane releases as much energy as that every second. Lightning is happening somewhere every 2 seconds. Weather can blow down houses.

Global warming nonsense preaches that exhaust from a vehicle, so lukewarm that it won't even burn your hand, is able to modify weather by introducing a thermal change to the atmosphere.

But it is physically impossible for a heavier-than-air lukewarm CO2 molecule to travel upwards 8-12 miles (to where most weather is generated) to warm up an air layer sitting at -50 to -60degC; about the temperature of Antarctica. Things heavier than air don't rise. Things that rise lose heat.

One earthquake is an energy-release ripple that can start 300kms down in the bowels of the earth, then move at 20,000mph through solid granite with the force of 50 Hiroshima bombs and shift a city the size of Christchurch over by about a metre in a minute.

Can we duplicate that? Compare that it took many months and millions of dollars for human engineers to move a small hotel in Auckland called The Birdcage even a few yards.

We should never lose sight of the size of the forces of nature. The earth intercepts only a tiny fraction of the vast amount of energy the sun radiates into space, about one two-thousand-millionth.

This fraction pours onto the earth about 23 billion horsepower - more energy every minute than all mankind uses, in all forms, in one year. If the sun's heat reduced by 13%, the earth would be encased in ice a mile thick.

Then the moon brings its tidal force to bear on the land, the oceans and the interfacing air that sets and patterns the timing of weather events.

That is where weather comes from and will always do so, no matter how many chemical pellets we fire into clouds and how much in carbon taxes we are forced to pay.

It makes no difference whether or not we walk to work or drive, recycle or destroy aluminium cans, plant or burn trees, or whether man is even here at all.

For more writing from Ken Ring, visit www.predictweather.com