Should we embark on extensive weather and climate modification?

Purists will of course resist such plans. Why tamper with nature? they'll say. The fact is that we have always attempted to modify nature and create safer more comfortable environments.

We need extensive weather modification to save lives. And to protect property.

Every year around the planet a couple of hundred thousand people lose their lives due to extremes of heat and cold—monsoons—floods —storms—hurricanes—tornadoes—blizzards—typhoons—tidal waves —avalanches—hailstorms—lightning . . .

Countless people are indirect victims of nasty weather: dessicated land that leaves people without food. Heavy snowfall or rainfall or cold spells that ruin crops.

We are still at the mercy of nature.

Modern technology is helping us enhance the accuracy of weather forecasts. This in itself saves many lives every year.

We have also had modest success at modifying the weather: we have increased rainfall—dispersed fog—reduced the size of hailstorms-augmented or created snow. Efforts are also under way to tame poten­tially devastating storms and hurricanes.

A Soviet weather expert who in 1986 helped divert snowfall from Moscow to outlying fields predicted that one day weather controllers will be able to "create sunny days on command."

Extensive weather and climate modification is a complex long-range project that can succeed only through international cooperation. We need supercomputers and other ultraintelligent systems that can speed-process billions of bits of information on recent and current global weather conditions and produce high-resolution simulations of climate change and its impact on all areas of life.

The task is awesome. But then today's global weather service would have seemed awesome to the world of thirty years ago.

Early in the twenty-first century we will choreograph weather con­ditions over a given region with the ease with which we currently control the temperature in a vast shopping mall or a giant domed stadium.

"Next week we have a five-day holiday and the Department of Cli­mate Regulation has promised five days of blue skies and sunshine."

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 799