Mike, it's probably a pipe dream, but what do you think of a Manhattan Project for cloud seeding ?
With so much arid land on this rock, the benefits would be tremendous. Not to get political, but just 10% of what Trump wants for the wall would probably do it.
Carl,
It's a terrific idea. Cloud seeding HAS worked under certain conditions to increase rains downstream. Cloud seeding just dumps tons of condensensation nuclei in the clouds so moisture will condense out on them and grow big enough to fall out as rain.
The huge problem is that you need some very important criteria to be met before even having a chance for it to work.
1. You need a lot of moisture in the air to begin with. If the air is fairly dry to start with, you aren't going to coax any water vapor to condense out no matter what you do. The environment has to be one where the air mass is close enough to being saturated with "suspended" water in its vapor form, that adding more condensation nuclei will allow more of it to condense out in to liquid water.
2. The other thing is that you need a trigger or weather dynamic that assists in the process. A cold front lifting and cooling the air for instance. You could increase rains in scat afternoon thunderstorms that develop with daytime heating lifting the air...........but the environment is going to already be somewhat favorable.
So where this can pay off is when you have borderline favorable conditions to favorable conditions.
And thats the huge problem. Droughts develop because conditions are NOT favorable for rain over a long period of time. Very often an upper level ridge is present that suppresses rains. When that is the case, there will be no rain no matter what you do.
Or weather systems coming thru don't have much moisture or what we call precipitable water in the air. In that case, there is not going to be more rain from that system no matter what you do.
Interestingly, the best thing that we could do to increase rains is to increase CO2. Not only does a warmer atmosphere hold much more moisture but it has increased precipitation in most places. One of the biggest real problems that are actually happening with global warming(and real climate change) is excessive rain events have increased by around 5%.
Hurricane Harvey probably produced an extra 2 inches of rain because of this(so climate change caused 51 inches of rains in the wettest location vs what might have been just 49 inches).
The other thing that increasing CO2 does is that it causes plants to be much more water efficient and drought tolerant.
And last but not least is that the increasing CO2 is fertilizing plants and causing the planet to green up.......even deserts are greening up.
We could spend a billion dollars on cloud seeding and it would have very limited benefits and not help the driest areas that much..................and those miniscule benefits for fighting drought would be less than 1% of the benefits to fighting drought that increasing CO2 has.
Of course the added warmth from the added CO2 will cause an increase in evaporation and drying but global drought has decreased slightly the past 40 years, so in a lot of those locations, the added precipitation is greater than the increased evaporation from the soils.
Here are some data sources that support the science of those statements. I'll stick them on pages below this post:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-co2.html
The fertilisation effect occurs where elevated CO2 enables a leaf during photosynthesis, the process by which green plants convert sunlight into sugar, to extract more carbon from the air or lose less water to the air, or both.
If elevated CO2 causes the water use of individual leaves to drop, plants in arid environments will respond by increasing their total numbers of leaves. These changes in leaf cover can be detected by satellite, particularly in deserts and savannas where the cover is less complete than in wet locations, according to Dr Donohue.
Global drought since 1982........a slight decrease.
and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding
https://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/photosynthesis-and-co2-enrichment/
Look at the graph below and how much more water efficient corn and beans become when you dial up the amount of CO2 in the air.
This is shown below for C4 (corn) and C3 (soybean).
I'd like to see a grant of a million dollars given to each brick and mortar University and College Science Department for studies in climate control. Subjects like co2, fronts, troughs, photosynthesis and what ever. A waste of money? Maybe a tenth of what Trump wants for the wall.
Your idea is magnificent Carl but distributing money/grants for studying climate change has led to some huge problems because when it comes to humans........when there is money or politics involved, it often gets really messed up.........even when the humans are scientists.
There has been billions spent on the problem of climate change and global warming already.........yes billions. Those applying for the grants to study climate change, have to show justification for being funded.
When applying, for funding one would need to provide some convincing reasoning for why you should be funded. Turns out that the government is very willing to pay scientists to study a problem but not as generous to dole out money to study a NON problem.
So, although the climate has always changed naturally for millions of years, studying climate change today( which has become synonomous with man made climate change-as if natural climate change was suspended) that poses problems to humans or life or the planet is the best/easiest way to get funded.........because your findings may yield information which is useful in understanding and fighting man man climate change.
Here is a presentation that puts it into perspective.............though its misleading(intentionally) and I think exaggerated in the opposite direction, the guy makes a valid point about government funding for climate change/global warming.
The saddest thing about spending all that money is that much of it has caused most people to become dumber about climate science in many ways. The field of climate science as presented by the mainstream media is junk science.
Carl,
You actually suggested money go towards studying ways to alter the future climate, which is a bit different in some ways then the research to study how we've already changed the climate.
I guess that we can sort of assume that the research is doing that now...........in concluding that our only hope is to cut CO2 emissions in order to keep from changing the climate even more than we have already.
The assumption is that our climate is worse than it was 150 years ago.........when its actually better for most life.
If we dialed back the CO2 and global temperature to where they were 150 years ago, within a few years, over a billion people would starve to death because the climate and CO2 of 1850 would only support crops that are 75% as big as the ones we harvest today.
Yeah, I know that we are supposed to believe that we have been wrecking the climate for decades but the reality is that we rescued the planet from dangerously low levels of CO2.
At 280 parts per million circa 1850, a drop of 125 ppm instead of the increase of 125 and plants would have shut and most of us would not be here.
If CO2 had not increased and the weather warmed up, probably a couple billion of us would not be here.
Outside of changing our CO2 emissions, what else can humans do to change the weather?
There have been alot of studies done on ways to weaken hurricanes. A separate thred would be appropriate for that discusion. Also with regards to global warming, there are actually 2 geo engineering ideas that could work. They would be very expensive and might turn out to do more damage than good but they could work:
https://www.businessinsider.com/geoengineering-technology-could-cool-the-planet-2017-7
Mike, my ultimate objective with the grants would be climate change to increase rainfall.
First I called it cloud seeding. Then I called it climate change. I hope I finally made myself clear.
OK, thanks for clearing that up.
I know that you are probably referring to increasing rainfall in areas that have a drought and specifically targeting just those dry areas that need it the most. I'm afraid that no amount of money spend is going to discover something that we don't know which will enable us to do that.
Those areas need a moisture source in the atmosphere. It would make more sense to transport liquid water in to those dry areas than to somehow get a bunch of it into the atmosphere for it to be acted on by a natural weather system(which we will never be able to create artificially).
Cloud seeding is our best bet but only works if the moisture and weather conditions are favorable to begin with......which is usually not the case in a drought.
However, you can increase rains a bit on those occassions when the conditions are favorable.
The interesting thing about global climate model projections for warming. Only a small part of the warming is based on the physics of the greenhouse effect from increasing CO2. The majority of the warming is based on the increase in water vapor from positive feedback. The increase in water vapor in the global atmosphere from the increase in CO2 triples the amount of warming in the global climate models.
The take away point on that relates to this discussion on what we can do to increase rains. We have been doing it for the past 100 years by increasing CO2 emissions.
When the atmosphere warms, it holds alot more moisture. This is why excessive rains have increased in the past several decades. Warmer oceans evaporate more moisture into the atmosphere, increasing the precipitable water available for rain(and snow) making.
Of course the land/soil dries out faster with warmer temperatures and but the rock solid fact is that our planet is massively greening up and global drought is less than it was 40 years ago and if we erased all the junk science /fake climate news enbedded in everybodys heads and only wanted to solve 1 problem...........how do we cause it to rain more?
Forget any other factor or element. Just, how do we cause it to rain more?
The answer would be to warm the planet so that the amosphere can hold more moisture.
Right how, at 1 degree C(1.6 F) warmer than 150 years ago, the atmosphere holds around 5% more moisture than it did.
If I gave you 2 sponges and one was 5% bigger than the other, then you saturated both of them, when you squeezed both with the same amount of pressure(like a weather system does to atmospheric moisture) the bigger one is going to yield around 5% more water.
The warmer atmosphere today, with its additional water vapor is yielding more rains
We have only been told about the bad things related to global warming.........and there are some. So when I explain the actual science, which includes a lot of good things(planet greening up for instance) for some people its probably like it was for those that heard from Galileo, that the sun didn't revolve around the earth.......its the other way around.
Funny thing about the nicknames/derogatory terms that people who want to discredit people like me have bestowed upon us............ Deniers for instance to suggest that we are like the Holocaust deniers. I'm all about showing all the authentic data from every source that exists.
The funniest one is that Obama came up with his own catchy sounding nickname to castigate people like myself "flat earthers" he called us.
Whoooops, I just stepped into the land of politics. Sorry about that.
Anyways, I appreciate your open mindedness and I don't know everything about climate change/global warming and usually get carried away telling the side that isn't told.
However, I am also an environmentalist..........so the perception that having this belief equates to not caring about the planet or life on it is dead wrong.
Just the opposite. We need to discard with the crapola about the beneficial gas, CO2 and focus on solving REAL problems in a united fashion, whether they be environmental or otherwise.