Pagan sacrifices.
Burning forests.
Detonating bombs.
Shooting at clouds.
Those are just a few ways folks
have tried to prove Mark Twain wrong over time. He’s the one who
famously remarked that everyone complains about the weather, but
no one does anything about it.
In fact, entire nations have
tried to do plenty.
According to the Texas Weather
Modification Association (TWMA), “The first hint of the
potential of human activity to alter the behavior of clouds came
just after the Civil War, when civil engineer Edward Powers made
the observation that rainstorms often occurred where major
battles between Union and Confederate troops were waged. The
immense smoke, dust, and other particulate matter put into the
air during conflict seemed to invigorate clouds to rain more.”
During World War II, innovative
G.I.s figured out that if they could build fires big enough,
close enough to runways, they could burn off fog so planes could
land.
Back in the 1960’s the U.S.
seeded clouds over the Ho Chi Minh trail in an effort to extend
the monsoon season and slow the enemy during the Vietnam war.
The subsequent furor, when the nation and the world learned
about Operation Popeye, spawned the mid-1970’s United Nations
Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile
Use of Environmental Modification Techniques.
So there.
Since and in between, individuals
and nations have worked hard at modifying the weather for
civilian purposes, too.
China made the loudest ruckus
recently with its guarantee of a rain-free opening Olympics
ceremony in Beijing, thanks to that nation’s formidable
investment in weather modification apparatus and know-how. The
opening festivities were indeed dry. Then again, drought there
has also made for one of lousiest projected Chinese corn crops
in recent memory.
Speaking of which, according to
TWMA, “Weather Modification has been tried since 1891 in Texas;
the first attempt was by patent attorney Robert Dyrenforth, who
was given a $2,000 grant by the U.S. Congress to do a series of
rain making experiments near Midland. Severe droughts have
driven the need for weather modification since its beginning,
and the current attempt is no exception.” TWMA has eight state
chapters. You want to go seeding clouds in Texas; you also need
a license, by the way.
According to a paper a few years
back from the Committee on the Status and Future Directions in
U.S Weather Modification Research and Operations at the National
Research Council (NRC), “Operational weather modification
programs, which primarily involve cloud seeding activities aimed
at enhancing precipitation or mitigating hail fall, exist in
more than 24 countries, and there were at least 66 operational
programs being conducted in 10 states across the United States
in 2001. No federal funding currently is supporting any of these
operational activities in the United States. Despite the large
number of operational activities, less than a handful of weather
modification research programs are being conducted worldwide.
After reaching a peak of $20 million per year in the late 1970s,
support for weather modification research in the United States
has dropped to less than $500,000 per year.”
Budget cuts are taking a bite out
of some of those operational activities, too, especially when no
one can really prove that weather modification works dependably
if at all. At best, it seems one of those sciences that comes up
short of exact.
Consider cloud seeding. In simple
terms, you drop silver iodide or dry ice into clouds, providing
more stuff for moisture to attach to and hopefully fall from the
sky. Aside from other essentials, cloud seeding requires, well,
clouds, which are often scarce during droughts when weather
modification would be most useful.
In the aforementioned NRC paper:
“The committee concludes that there still is no convincing
scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather
modification efforts. In some instances there are strong
indications of induced changes, but this evidence has not been
subjected to tests of significance and reproducibility…”
That’s why the caterwauling over
presumed global warming is such a logical puzzlement. If man
can’t change the weather, and if the climate is just the
amalgamation of weather over a specific period of time, it would
seem he can’t do much to change the climate, either.
That’s before considering the fact that since roughly the turn
of the new century the global temperature has flat-lined or
declined steeply, depending on which temperature data you look
at.
At least Al Gore and his Flat
Earth brethren can take solace in the fact that they’re last in
a long line of climatological doomsayers. If you’re old enough
you might remember when the eco-craze kicked off in the early
1970’s. At that time, it was global cooling that had everyone in
an uproar. It was all that darned hair spray and other consumer
aerosols went the pseudo-logic, punching holes in the ozone,
allowing too much heat to escape, ushering in a new ice age.
That scare borrowed from
legitimate concerns a few years earlier about the nuclear winter
that might ensue if some Cold War nut case started pushing
buttons.
All told, there’s no telling how
many times in history one climate disaster or another was
supposed to be just around the corner.
Each time, where science and
physical efforts fail, it seems like folks with a bone to pick
can always fill the gap with legislation. This time around, it’s
all of the Green House Gas regulations, trading away lots for
nothing in return. Incidentally, it’s at least slightly odd that
ponzi schemes are illegal but cap and trade is not.
A dozen years ago or so, when the
global warming debate was reaching full cry, and the
pretentiously named Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
was becoming the darling of eco-maniacs, I chatted with an Ivy
League meteorologist embroiled in the debate. Turned out he was
a world renowned expert and part of the panel. He was a dark
horse on the committee, though, who wasn’t buying into the
Chicken Little theories of imminent doom. He related his
frustrations with the politics at play within the panel, helped
me understand which data was credible and not.
“So, with all of the research,
what do we know about global warming?” I asked. He told me, “We
know that global temperatures have increased at times in history
and we know that global temperatures have declined at other
times in history.”
That’s it.
Period.
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