I was asked some questions last week about weather modification. Can we do it? Is it happening? Has it been weaponized? Is this why we are seeing all this extreme weather?
In this day and age, when conspiracy theories seem to spring up and run rampant, the timing of these questions could not be better.
Before diving in, here is my thinking on conspiracy theories. We are all experts on something. As we become experts, our learning path usually goes something like this:
- I know a little bit.
- I know lots and I am brilliant, what’s so hard about this?
- Shoot, I just realized I actually do not know nearly as much as I thought. This is way more complicated than expected.
- I really have to spend time and dig into this topic.
- Maybe I am finally becoming an expert, though I will continue to question many things.
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The problem I see today is that, with the internet and all this information at everyone’s fingertips, most people only make it to step two. They read a few articles, have an ‘ah-ha!’ moment, and then the only ones you hear from are those who can shout the loudest or who have a knack for speaking well. OK, enough of that.
When it comes to understanding our current ability to control the weather, I cannot help but use a quote from U.S. meteorologist Horace Byers. Even though it is an old quote, I feel he hit the proverbial nail on the head.
Byers stated: “Weather modification is based on sound physical principles that cannot be applied precisely in the open atmosphere because several processes are interacting together in a manner difficult to predict.”
Moreover, attempts to change the weather “are superimposed upon natural processes acting, perhaps indistinguishably, to the same or opposite effect… Therefore, it should not be surprising that the history of weather modification is one of painfully slow progress.”
If you had to summarize this statement, along with our current understanding of how to modify the weather, you would have to conclude that, if we can’t predict how the weather will behave, how the heck can we figure out how to modify it the way we want?
That is the crux of the matter. When you get down to it, cloud seeding does affect the weather, and from my fundamental understanding of HAARP, a U.S. ionospheric research program and a favourite topic among conspiracy theorists, there is a chance that it, too, could have an effect on the weather.
The problem is, while these things can influence the weather, we do not understand our complex atmosphere well enough to be able to control what might happen.
Potential variables
The basis of this lies in chaos theory. You know, the idea that if you put a drop of water on your arm and watch it roll off and then do it again, the second drop will probably not follow the same path as the first drop.
The other classic example is the butterfly effect: the idea that the air current a butterfly makes with a beat of its wings could, for example, cause the air to rise and result in a thunderstorm.
In both cases, we are not able to measure all the possible variables in enough detail to predict the possible outcome. The example of the water drop is simple, with only a few variables such as your heart rate, number of hairs on your arm, the angles of the hairs, the size and temperature of the water drop.
Even so, we and our computers have a difficult time trying to predict how each drop of water will behave.
If we go to our second example, which deals with our atmosphere and the weather, the number of variables does not necessarily become extremely large, but the amount of detail we need grows to an extreme amount. That makes the results of our actions nearly impossible to predict, especially when we are looking days or weeks in advance.
You see, since we cannot measure enough detail, small errors in our measurements can become larger and larger the further ahead we try to forecast.
I’m referring only to everyday weather, not the idea of influencing the climate as a whole. Websites will state, for example, that if we dump soot or ash over the polar region, the decrease in albedo will cause the snow to melt faster, allowing the ground and air to warm up more, resulting in a warmer planet.
The problem with this again goes back to chaos theory. The atmosphere behaves chaotically. A milkshake in a blender is an apt analogy. Turn the blender on and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to follow the path of individual ice particles (our detail in the atmosphere, our day-to-day weather). However, if you look at the milkshake as a whole, you would see a definite pattern to the overall motion of the milkshake (our climate).
Now, if we change something, such as the speed of the blender (energy), everything in the blender suddenly changes, the pattern within the chaos disappears and we have absolute chaos, at least for a short time.
Then a new pattern emerges, albeit a different pattern than before. The particles of ice in the blender (our day-to-day weather) are still buzzing around, but now the general pattern of the flow (our climate) has changed.
We will continue this discussion in September. Until then, keep the questions coming.
