Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey, welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast that
Speaker 1: looks at the future and says I only wanted to
Speaker 1: see you laughing in the laser lightning. I'm Joe McCormick,
Speaker 1: and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum and our other host, Jonquin Strickland,
Speaker 1: is out today. He is on a lovely vacation, I
Speaker 1: believe in an old tiny barrel boat. Yeah, he's circumnavigating
Speaker 1: the globe in a an old timey wooden bathtub. Oh
Speaker 1: woulden bathtub, not barrel boat. Completely my mistake. I apologize,
Speaker 1: but we have in his absence, welcomed our wonderful coworker
Speaker 1: Julie Douglas and to speak with us. Hello, how are
Speaker 1: you doing today, Julie, I'm doing well. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I feel like I got a little something in my step.
Speaker 1: I think it's all this weather control talk. So this
Speaker 1: is going to be part two of a two part series.
Speaker 1: We did part one last time with Julie talking about
Speaker 1: some of the history leading up to the present of
Speaker 1: weather control, and today we're going to focus on some
Speaker 1: potential future technologies for weather control. So if you haven't
Speaker 1: heard part one yet, you should go back download that
Speaker 1: listen to that one first. That was the podcast that
Speaker 1: was released directly before this one. Ah yeah, because we
Speaker 1: we've been through some of the concepts of why weather
Speaker 1: is is such a problem, to to suss out why
Speaker 1: controlling it is difficult, and what kind of projects people
Speaker 1: have been working on up through today to try to
Speaker 1: do that kind of stuff. Also, you will miss out
Speaker 1: on a story about Buddhist monks fleeing from the rain,
Speaker 1: Kurt Vonnegut's brother, and some other choice bits. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: but if you're here and you're like, no, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to do that, don't You're not going to tell
Speaker 1: me what to do. I'm gonna listen to this part
Speaker 1: this one first. Maybe we should do a sup for
Speaker 1: quick rundown on what we covered last time, just to
Speaker 1: bring you up to speed. So, so we did talk about, uh,
Speaker 1: the proposed strata shield. It was a solution, a geoengineering
Speaker 1: solution for combat and global warming. It's essentially a hose
Speaker 1: that goes up into the sky held up by balloons
Speaker 1: where you can pump some particles into the atmosphere that
Speaker 1: will reflect back some of the Sun's light and cool
Speaker 1: the earth. But it has been also pointed out that
Speaker 1: if we were to invent something like this, a side
Speaker 1: effect would be that it could be used for weather warfare,
Speaker 1: Ain't that right, Julie, Yeah, it's kind of like part
Speaker 1: of that. Yeah. Then we also talked about essentially some
Speaker 1: of the main problems with with the human relationship with
Speaker 1: weather and human weather modification efforts in the past, like
Speaker 1: why it's so difficult to control the weather. A couple
Speaker 1: of the principles we touched on where that weather it
Speaker 1: involves vast amounts of energy, way more energy than we realize.
Speaker 1: Even though it seems like it would hurt more to
Speaker 1: get hit by a truck than blown by the wind,
Speaker 1: there's a lot more wind than truck. Wiser words I
Speaker 1: have never spoken. I'll never forget it long and those
Speaker 1: will stick with me for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing being, of course, the mathematical
Speaker 1: complexity and chaos of weather, how small variations and perturbations
Speaker 1: can become magnified over time that makes weather systems inherently
Speaker 1: unstable and difficult to predict. Yeah. Then we we talked
Speaker 1: about a few of the attempts that have been made
Speaker 1: to control weather through hail cannons, which is, as far
Speaker 1: as we can tell, pretty much just garbage. Uh. Scientists
Speaker 1: don't seem to think there's any evidence they work. But
Speaker 1: one that's where the jury is maybe still out a
Speaker 1: little bit would be cloud seating. Yeah. In cloud seating
Speaker 1: is something that has been used for decades and so,
Speaker 1: I mean the idea behind it is that it does
Speaker 1: have an effect on the weather. Perhaps it does create rain,
Speaker 1: but to what extent we just don't know yet. That
Speaker 1: being said, there are many countries that are invested in
Speaker 1: weather management systems lie cloud seating. And then we talked
Speaker 1: about how how predictive modeling. If we can figure out
Speaker 1: how to accurately predict the weather, we can at the
Speaker 1: very least get people to safety and get them full
Speaker 1: of fried chicken when when a storm is coming. Yes, man,
Speaker 1: you keep out doing yourself for them. Wise words. And
Speaker 1: that's that's about where we wrapped, uh. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: so let's let's go into the the potential future of
Speaker 1: weather control. One thing that I think you're going to
Speaker 1: notice is that in this discussion there are going to
Speaker 1: be a lot of maybees, which is not all that
Speaker 1: unfamiliar if you're a fan of forward thinking and discussions
Speaker 1: about future technology. I mean, if there were no maybes
Speaker 1: left lingering, it wouldn't be future technology, would be present technology. True,
Speaker 1: But I think, especially in weather control, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of uncertainty about exactly what can be done, and so
Speaker 1: you're gonna hear that crop up a few times, and
Speaker 1: maybe we can talk a little bit in the end
Speaker 1: about why that is. But but I do want to
Speaker 1: talk about some of the coolest proposals we have come
Speaker 1: across for using technology to manipulate or protect ourselves from
Speaker 1: the weather. Now, one that you mutter about at our
Speaker 1: office windows basically every day. This is actually a very
Speaker 1: intricate intervention for you, Joe is lasers. You're constantly just
Speaker 1: face pressed against the glass talking to clouds about lasers.
Speaker 1: Do want noise? Oh? You should see the world from
Speaker 1: my perspective. I mean, when other people open their mouths,
Speaker 1: words don't come out. I just hear pup you like
Speaker 1: Morse codes. This explains a lot, actually, But know that
Speaker 1: there are real proposals on one thing I do want
Speaker 1: to talk about that I think was really cool, and
Speaker 1: we'll see how applicable or not this might be to
Speaker 1: real weather control. But but is experiments about summoning clouds
Speaker 1: with lasers. So like, what if the problem is I
Speaker 1: don't have any rain clouds and I want rain clouds?
Speaker 1: Could do it? Yeah, you could do it with lasers,
Speaker 1: that's the proposal. So so I came across an interesting
Speaker 1: May two thousand ten article and New Scientists about this,
Speaker 1: and what it mentioned is that researchers in Europe have
Speaker 1: found a way to use lasers to trigger the condensation
Speaker 1: of water in the atmosphere. In other words, they can
Speaker 1: cause the formation of rain clouds under lab conditions, and
Speaker 1: they claim under natural conditions, all via lasers. So here's
Speaker 1: how your experiment goes. You start with a container of
Speaker 1: very cold, very humid air. So this is gonna be
Speaker 1: water saturated air, like negative twenty four degrees celsius, sort
Speaker 1: of the conditions of of the atmosphere when it might
Speaker 1: start raining. Sure you want you you wanted to be
Speaker 1: very cold and very humid. Uh so these are sort
Speaker 1: of ideal conditions for the cloud to form. And then
Speaker 1: you fire short pulses of this extremely high energy infrared
Speaker 1: laser into the container and along the path of the
Speaker 1: laser you can see the formation of clouds. Now, why
Speaker 1: does that happen? Well, the explanation given is by one
Speaker 1: of the researchers involved, and that's Jerome Casparian from the
Speaker 1: University of Geneva. Explains quote that the laser pulses generate
Speaker 1: clouds by stripping electrons from atoms in the air, which
Speaker 1: encouraged the formation of hydroxyl radicals. Those convert sulfur and
Speaker 1: nitrogen dioxides in the air into particles that act as
Speaker 1: seeds to grow water droplets. So actually this has a
Speaker 1: little bit in common with the cloud seating we talked about,
Speaker 1: so just a different method. Yeah, if if what you
Speaker 1: do in cloud seating is you fly over or through
Speaker 1: a cloud, uh, and you disperse little particles into the cloud,
Speaker 1: for example silver iodide, or you fire silver iodide particles
Speaker 1: into a cloud with the rocket. What you're hoping will
Speaker 1: happen is that water will coalesce around these tiny particles.
Speaker 1: The particles will act as nuclei for rain drops or snowflakes.
Speaker 1: And here you're sort of doing the same thing, but
Speaker 1: instead of shooting particles into the cloud, you're creating these
Speaker 1: little particle seeds in the air. Yeah, you're manipulating the
Speaker 1: particles that are already there and changing them so that
Speaker 1: they will become these seed capable. Yeah, and so they
Speaker 1: found that in these in the experiment, after they fired
Speaker 1: lasers into the chamber, the volume of condensed water droplets
Speaker 1: had increased by fift in the chamber. And so that
Speaker 1: that's good under lab conditions. But the big question is
Speaker 1: is this going to work in wild skies? Right? Because
Speaker 1: the chamber is very easy to create those conditions and
Speaker 1: control them, right. So the author of the article spoke
Speaker 1: to one scientist who is skeptical that it would work
Speaker 1: in wild skies. But to counter that, Casparian claimed that
Speaker 1: the team had tried out the experiment sixty meters over
Speaker 1: the skies of Berlin and they said it worked. According
Speaker 1: to Casparian, weather lidar showed quote, the density and size
Speaker 1: of water droplets spiked when the laser was fired, and
Speaker 1: this was over the open air. Where do you file
Speaker 1: paperwork to get permission to shoot a high frequency, high
Speaker 1: power laser into the air over a city? Berlin? May
Speaker 1: I modify your weather? I wonder what cities are the
Speaker 1: most lenient about weather modification, Like, which are the ones
Speaker 1: where it's it's a pretty easy process. I actually wouldn't
Speaker 1: think that Berlin would be for that. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I think that many places would not be for that, right,
Speaker 1: I mean that that city has many people in it.
Speaker 1: The government's pretty solid. Uh. But of course they're not
Speaker 1: claiming that this is going to form like a volcano
Speaker 1: in the sky that you know. It's just like it's
Speaker 1: what they're saying is it's a rain cloud. I guess
Speaker 1: you could be worried, like, well, what exactly could happen
Speaker 1: if something goes wrong? This is an extremely high energy laser.
Speaker 1: Oh and the laser had a name. It's it's a
Speaker 1: great name too. It was called the terramobile, which is
Speaker 1: from its terra watt power and its mobility. So you
Speaker 1: can wheel the terramobile through the streets of Berlin at night.
Speaker 1: So uh a, that's great. I want to name many
Speaker 1: things the terramobile be uh that that was. Are there
Speaker 1: any updates on our cloud laser since then? Yeah, it
Speaker 1: looks like this general line of research is ongoing. So
Speaker 1: in I found that there was a University of Central
Speaker 1: Florida press release about research in the University's Optics and
Speaker 1: Photonics department about how to optimize known methods of laser
Speaker 1: cloud formation, and their suggestion was you add a buddy beam,
Speaker 1: So instead of just having one laser beam, you sort
Speaker 1: of dress the original beam in a surrounding, lower intensity
Speaker 1: laser beam that would extend its range higher and farther
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere. So I'll always approve of the buddy system. Um. Yes,
Speaker 1: and it's a good system even for lasers. But it
Speaker 1: looks like this line of research is ongoing and and
Speaker 1: this is not the only weather related laser research going on. No,
Speaker 1: I want to get into even slightly more bond Villany territory.
Speaker 1: So in March, new research published in a I P
Speaker 1: Advances show that you can probably in principle, use lasers
Speaker 1: to attract and direct strikes of lightning. This one is
Speaker 1: fascinating to how you like that? This is like straight
Speaker 1: up thar stuff. So yeah, normally what does lightning do?
Speaker 1: How does lightning choose where it goes from place to place?
Speaker 1: It finds the tallest object that it can strike. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the path of least resistance between two objects, and
Speaker 1: that usually means the shortest path. It's the nearest object,
Speaker 1: which when it's coming down from the sky is going
Speaker 1: to be the tallest thing. So there are extremely powerful
Speaker 1: lasers that can ionize air along their path. So that
Speaker 1: means that the air molecules that are caught in the
Speaker 1: gaze of this cruel laser beam are ripped of their
Speaker 1: electrons and become free floating charged particles. They've become ions
Speaker 1: and you can use this principle to create pathways of
Speaker 1: ionized air called filaments that electricity likes to follow. And
Speaker 1: so a group led by Andre Mssirowitz has done work
Speaker 1: on getting high voltage discharge, which is similar to lightning,
Speaker 1: to follow these kinds of filaments, and in they published
Speaker 1: findings showing that they were able to get this discharge
Speaker 1: under lab conditions to ignore its straight line from A
Speaker 1: to B approach and instead follow the laser ionized filaments
Speaker 1: to their destination. So you can essentially plot a course
Speaker 1: for electricity to take through the air by using these, uh,
Speaker 1: these lasers, so you could reroute the lightning from unsuspecting golfers.
Speaker 1: That's true. This technology mainly applies to golfers. I thought
Speaker 1: so from the off association it was funded by. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I mean this is very interesting because in theory. What
Speaker 1: it means is that if you have a powerful enough
Speaker 1: laser and you design just the right types of pulses
Speaker 1: of laser light, this principle could be exploited to use
Speaker 1: lasers to guide lightning wherever you wanted to go. And
Speaker 1: that could mean away from my house, or it could
Speaker 1: mean onto Jeffrey. So in a sense, it could be
Speaker 1: used for warfare as well. I think I think any
Speaker 1: time that you start talking about controlling the weather, you
Speaker 1: have the potential for for warfare. Although directing lightning strikes
Speaker 1: is yeah, well it sounds way worse than rain. I
Speaker 1: on one hand, I think that's true. It sounds worse,
Speaker 1: but it's weird. It's weird keeping levels of violence in perspective,
Speaker 1: because lightning might strike one person and kill them in
Speaker 1: a very spectacular and shocking way. But if you can
Speaker 1: cause enough rain that an area of floods, you might
Speaker 1: be able to kill hundreds of people. Yeah. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think you mentioned that in in Vietnam when when
Speaker 1: they were conducting the experiments, some of the flooding that
Speaker 1: may or may not have been caused by cloud seating
Speaker 1: did result in depths there. Yeah. Yeah, there was a
Speaker 1: certain bridge that during the Vietnam War that they were
Speaker 1: just trying to bomb over and over again, but they
Speaker 1: cloud seated the area and lo and behold they you know,
Speaker 1: they created so much rain that began to flood and
Speaker 1: it destroyed the bridge and flooded the value and people
Speaker 1: died as a result. Okay, what about another avenue of
Speaker 1: what weather control that I know I've heard something about
Speaker 1: on them internet forums, and that would be high power
Speaker 1: radio transmitters. Yeah. We we said, we said in our
Speaker 1: first episode on this topic that we've never really covered
Speaker 1: weather control on this show before, or on on this
Speaker 1: podcast before specifically, but we did once talk about a
Speaker 1: technology that does not control the weather as far as
Speaker 1: we can reasonably discern, and that's HARP, the High Frequency
Speaker 1: Active Auroral Research Program. I'm stationed in Alaska. UH. One
Speaker 1: of the devices involved in HARP can send specific types
Speaker 1: of radio waves into the ionosphere for a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of different research and potential communication purposes. And fringe theories
Speaker 1: based in what seemed to be misinformed interpretations of not
Speaker 1: only the technology at hand, but also like the electromagnetic
Speaker 1: spectrum um. These fringe theories suggest that the facility could
Speaker 1: be used to change and or control the weather. And Okay,
Speaker 1: in some applications, harp would heat and or excite small,
Speaker 1: controlled portions of the ionosphere for short periods of time.
Speaker 1: And this can move chunks of air soup around a bit, because,
Speaker 1: as we have talked about many times on the show,
Speaker 1: air is not thin. It is soup. It's a thin soup.
Speaker 1: But at any rate, uh uh So, as far as
Speaker 1: we can tell, though, in the ways that HARP has
Speaker 1: been used, and even in the ways in which it
Speaker 1: could potentially be used, if someone was trying to do this,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't make an appreciable difference to either local or
Speaker 1: global weather. Yeah. And I think the grain of truth
Speaker 1: in this, which is I think you sort of mentioned it,
Speaker 1: is that some parts of the radio frequency spectrum can
Speaker 1: cause heating, like, for example, the way microwaves can cause
Speaker 1: heating of water molecules. Oh sure, And and harp would
Speaker 1: heat portions of the atmosphere a little bit, uh of
Speaker 1: of the ionosphere specifically. I mean. The thing is is
Speaker 1: that the amount of radiation being applied to the ionosphere
Speaker 1: every second of every day by the Sun and everything
Speaker 1: else outside of the Earth is tremendous, and so these small,
Speaker 1: short disturbances or periods of excitement, you know, sure they
Speaker 1: could have an effect. And we talked before about how
Speaker 1: the number of variables involved in in weather are what
Speaker 1: make it so tricky to figure out. So it's something
Speaker 1: that you would want to watch, but but it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not a super weapon. Uh and and it's being
Speaker 1: used to to strike down airplanes or anything like that.
Speaker 1: If you want to turn tune into the full episode
Speaker 1: that we did. Uh, it's called What Does HARP Do?
Speaker 1: And it published in February UM. At that time, HARP
Speaker 1: had been shut down due to budget cuts and its
Speaker 1: future was was very uncertain. That there's an update there.
Speaker 1: Its ownership is currently being transferred from the Air Force
Speaker 1: to the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks,
Speaker 1: which is going to operate HARP on a paper use basis.
Speaker 1: Oh great, so they're going to rent it out to
Speaker 1: whatever supervillain wants it that week, right, But I mean okay, So,
Speaker 1: so we'll have to start taking data from from those
Speaker 1: experiments into account the same way that we do for
Speaker 1: for any technology and for for any bit of human
Speaker 1: civilization in general. Because because of course the cities that
Speaker 1: we build. The stuff that we do has an effect
Speaker 1: on local weather. Uh. Yeah, And of course I wouldn't
Speaker 1: put it out of the question that that experiments in
Speaker 1: bombarding the ionosphere or any of the uf up there
Speaker 1: with different radio frequencies couldn't turn up knowledge that could
Speaker 1: potentially be used in, for example, microwave control of cyclones,
Speaker 1: which is something that we'll talk about in a bit.
Speaker 1: Oh sure, sure it might turn out that that some
Speaker 1: of this could nudge weather systems in one way or another,
Speaker 1: especially if we built like a whole lot of these
Speaker 1: things in very key places around the world. Uh. For
Speaker 1: right now, it's nothing that certainly that anyone needs to
Speaker 1: be worrying about. Um and and it's uncertain whether it
Speaker 1: will ever come to fruition. So what you're saying is
Speaker 1: there's still more wind than truck. There's still more wind
Speaker 1: than truck. Okay, Well, I want to talk about one
Speaker 1: of the funniest weather control proposals I've come across. Uh
Speaker 1: and this, this I think falls more into the category
Speaker 1: of geoengineering rather than direct weather control. So these are
Speaker 1: two things we should sort of recognize or at different
Speaker 1: ends of a spectrum, you might say, whereas something like
Speaker 1: cloud seating is designed to effect have a temporal effect
Speaker 1: a temporarily limb. It did effect on a specific weather pattern,
Speaker 1: like make that cloud rain now, whereas these other projects,
Speaker 1: like geoengineering projects, want to fundamentally change the climate in
Speaker 1: a particular ecoregion or something like that. And this particular
Speaker 1: proposition ties into a joke I've made on this very
Speaker 1: podcast before that we should protect ourselves from hurricanes by
Speaker 1: doing what we do best in the United States and
Speaker 1: building a wall along the southeastern coast of the United
Speaker 1: States stretching up to the top of the atmosphere. I
Speaker 1: mean that do it, wouldn't it? But you're you're surely
Speaker 1: not just bringing this up in ingest again. You're you're
Speaker 1: unfortunately bringing it up because this has been an actual proposal. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: strangely enough, something kind of like this has been proposed
Speaker 1: in uh in the scientific literature, not to protect Florida
Speaker 1: from a hurricane, but to protect Tornado Alley from the
Speaker 1: next spade of killer twisters. So in a Temple University
Speaker 1: physicist named Ronia da suggested in a paper for International
Speaker 1: Journal of Modern Physics be that you could build a
Speaker 1: series of three gigantic walls to stop tornadoes in the
Speaker 1: in the United States, in the tornado Alley in the
Speaker 1: Midwest and the southern central United States. So how how
Speaker 1: would that work? Because I mean, obviously it's not what
Speaker 1: you're thinking. It's not that you put up a wall
Speaker 1: around the city so that the tornado can't get in.
Speaker 1: It's hard to envision just because I think about this,
Speaker 1: these vast planes, right, which I understand that the vast
Speaker 1: planes are, you know, part and parcel of the reason
Speaker 1: why there are so many tornadoes. Yeah. So dal claims
Speaker 1: that the problem, the reason these tornadoes form is that
Speaker 1: the Midwest region between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachian
Speaker 1: Mountains is very flat, and that in this flat landscape,
Speaker 1: warm southern air currents from the Gulf of Mexico rush
Speaker 1: up and meet cold northern air currents coming down from
Speaker 1: the north, and they form these vortexes that turned into tornadoes.
Speaker 1: And uh Too points out that in the northern China
Speaker 1: plane and the Eastern China plane, they're there's sort of
Speaker 1: similar areas in China. They experience mixing of air currents,
Speaker 1: but they have far fewer extreme tornadoes and and he
Speaker 1: claims that this is because there are three small mountain
Speaker 1: chains running from east to west, which act as buffers
Speaker 1: for the north south winds and prevent the formation of
Speaker 1: these vortexes that become tornadoes. Tornado Alley doesn't really have
Speaker 1: any mountain ranges like this, but Too argues that if
Speaker 1: we built a series of three gigantic east west walls,
Speaker 1: each about three hundred meters highs so would be about
Speaker 1: a thousand feet and fifty meters wide about a hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty five ft, we could simulate China's mountain ranges
Speaker 1: and attenuate the circumstances that lead to the formation of tornadoes.
Speaker 1: What do y'all think? Uh? And I sore. First, I
Speaker 1: don't know, have you ever driven through there? I would
Speaker 1: sort of welcome you could put up some really great
Speaker 1: art on those walls. It would it would spice up
Speaker 1: a lot of of coast to coast driving experiences. You know. Actually,
Speaker 1: the potential for graffiti is tremendous. Yeah, Um, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just think about the natural shapes of
Speaker 1: mountain ranges and the way that the air flows through,
Speaker 1: and it seems to me like this, in my mind,
Speaker 1: this is like one big, homogeneous hunk of concrete or
Speaker 1: I don't know what material, and you'd have, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to replicate sort of the natural formations that
Speaker 1: mountains have. Yeah, I don't know if that's a factor
Speaker 1: influencing it or not. But many experts, actually, I shouldn't
Speaker 1: even say many experts, All experts I could find who
Speaker 1: had commented on this proposal have expressed serious skepticism about it.
Speaker 1: I mean, just the cost alone. I mean, and I
Speaker 1: don't want to downplay that, the cost that these damaging
Speaker 1: tornadoes have on on livestyle, sucking crops and people's lives
Speaker 1: and all of that, and and I'm sure it's tremendous.
Speaker 1: I I find it difficult to believe that anyone would
Speaker 1: greed light this project. Well, yeah, the obvious questions about
Speaker 1: the cost. Aside that the experts think that this is
Speaker 1: that this has been widely characterized as completely nuts. I
Speaker 1: don't want to be uh to be unfair to tell,
Speaker 1: like you, I'm not I'm myself not an expert, not
Speaker 1: a meteorologist who could comment on this, But all the
Speaker 1: experts I've read were just like, no, that won't work.
Speaker 1: For example, Professor Joshua Werman of the Center for Severe
Speaker 1: Weather Research. He gave some comments to BBC News about this,
Speaker 1: and he said, for example, the model has a very
Speaker 1: oversimplified view of how tornadoes are formed. So so TAW
Speaker 1: takes into account the rushing warm air from the Gulf
Speaker 1: and then the cold air rushing down to meet it,
Speaker 1: and they sort of converge and create these vortex is.
Speaker 1: But the truth, like pretty much everything about weather events,
Speaker 1: as we've established, as much more complex and complicated than that.
Speaker 1: There are other factors that determine how tornadoes are formed.
Speaker 1: For example, ground based structures of the size might be
Speaker 1: able to partially decelerate low lying air currents, but they
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to affect the dynamics of high altitude
Speaker 1: air masses. Worman also claims that taos proposed walls would
Speaker 1: not be big enough and as big as they sound,
Speaker 1: wouldn't be big enough, but he says they deemed to
Speaker 1: be more on the scale of the Alps, so like
Speaker 1: two thousand to three thousand meters high. Uh. But he
Speaker 1: notes that if you did that, that would essentially be
Speaker 1: a that would be a true geo engineering project where
Speaker 1: that would result in extreme climate change for the surrounding
Speaker 1: area you You would be altering what the climate in
Speaker 1: this region is. Like, yeah, I mean, and and that's
Speaker 1: the that's the fertile basin of the United States. That's
Speaker 1: where we grow stuff, right, And I was thinking too,
Speaker 1: even with with mountain ranges, these natural barriers, you have
Speaker 1: ecosystems present on those and these walls, presumably there would
Speaker 1: be able to create or maybe you could. That would
Speaker 1: be the second phase two of the engineering project. Thou
Speaker 1: years in the future, the mountain lion has been replaced
Speaker 1: by the wall lion. Yes, the steps of the wall,
Speaker 1: the wall lin, right, I mean, it just gets more
Speaker 1: and more fantastical the more you try to rationalize and
Speaker 1: figure out how it would work. And it makes me
Speaker 1: think again of Redness's Book of Thunder and Lightning, and
Speaker 1: she talks about this microclimate that's been created in Mecca
Speaker 1: um and and and Saudi Arabia has been trying to
Speaker 1: figure out engineering wise, like here's this this walled area
Speaker 1: that is creating its own microclimate because the sun is
Speaker 1: beating down and there is no windflow, and so they're
Speaker 1: trying to figure out, like, how do you create weather
Speaker 1: in this one very specific area. Imagine that on a
Speaker 1: grand scale of lanes and I I know dually you've
Speaker 1: done a little bit of research into the effect of
Speaker 1: urban heat islands, Yeah, which is it's interesting because we
Speaker 1: know that heat islands can um can kind of put
Speaker 1: some of the atmospheric conditions into overdrive, particularly on a
Speaker 1: hot day, right and trapped pollution for instance. But what
Speaker 1: we didn't know until recently is that some of that
Speaker 1: pollution is actually settling and then sort of burping up
Speaker 1: even more pollution. Pollution doesn't doesn't just hang out on
Speaker 1: our buildings forever. Um, it can, especially in warm conditions,
Speaker 1: it can belch back out more pollution into the atmosphere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's it's you know, it's still interacting with other conditions.
Speaker 1: And so I guess the point is it's the secondhand
Speaker 1: smoke of atmospheric pollution. Yes, it is. It is. It's
Speaker 1: just like sitting out there belch and smoke again on
Speaker 1: you know, and and those and those conditions do lead
Speaker 1: to weather changes in the immediate area because because the
Speaker 1: air above your city is going to affect your weather there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the point is like, once you alter one thing, yeah, again,
Speaker 1: it's that cascading effect that why is it? Why is
Speaker 1: it so hard to control the weather to get it
Speaker 1: to do the good stuff we want reliably, but it's
Speaker 1: so easy to mess up the weather by accident. Because
Speaker 1: everything that humans do is terrible everything that's not the
Speaker 1: spirit of this podcast. No, Okay, that's that's the short answer.
Speaker 1: The long answers is that if we're if we're not
Speaker 1: being uh kind and considerate to stuff, including ourselves, everything
Speaker 1: we do is terrible. And many people are continually doing
Speaker 1: kind and considerate things to to the planet and to
Speaker 1: ourselves and etcetera. And we have seen people change these
Speaker 1: kind of conditions by planting more trees and doing more stuff,
Speaker 1: and there's there's lots of city engineering. Okay, well, let's
Speaker 1: let's look at one more proposal for for future ways
Speaker 1: of controlling weather, and that would be sort of related
Speaker 1: to what we talked about with HARP, which would be
Speaker 1: UH space based microwave control of extreme weather patterns like
Speaker 1: hurricanes and tornadoes. And the connection it has to HARP,
Speaker 1: at which I didn't realize until I started looking into it,
Speaker 1: was that this concept was proposed by the same guy
Speaker 1: whose patents for potential weather controlling devices partially started the
Speaker 1: development of HARP. UH. Those patents are the reason why
Speaker 1: there's so many fringe theories about HARP, even though the
Speaker 1: Department of Defense's feasibility studies stated that the proposed design
Speaker 1: would not be powerful enough and would not be located
Speaker 1: in an ideal enough location to change weather patterns. Um.
Speaker 1: But but this guy who proposed this stuff is Bernard Eastland,
Speaker 1: and he is a physicist, and in the early two
Speaker 1: thousands he began suggesting a system that would send microwaves
Speaker 1: from satellites into cold, moisture, heavy down drafts of air
Speaker 1: in in thunderstorms that looked like they could be forming
Speaker 1: tornadoes and that heat the area and thereby change the
Speaker 1: motion of the air in the thunderstorm, hopefully preventing that
Speaker 1: the formation of a tornado. He calls the concept the
Speaker 1: Thunderstorm Solar Power Satellite, and technologically it's based in this
Speaker 1: research that NASA was doing into using satellites to collect
Speaker 1: solar energy and then beaming that energy to Earth using
Speaker 1: microwave transmission orbital solar That's one of the most interesting
Speaker 1: proposals for solar energy I've come across. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a ludicrously massive project, or it would be in order
Speaker 1: to be of a scale that it would be useful,
Speaker 1: like like you're talking like sixty geosynchronous satellites. Um. But
Speaker 1: but so so it's it's using that technology. Um. I
Speaker 1: don't think that things ever going to happen personally. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: one thing that it has in common with orbital solar
Speaker 1: is the idea of transmitting very powerful microwaves down to
Speaker 1: the surface of the Earth from more of it, which
Speaker 1: is uh, you know when you think about being a
Speaker 1: resident of the surface of the Earth, you know, you
Speaker 1: think that they hope they get their aim, right uh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And and part of the whole the whole point of
Speaker 1: the NASA project is to make sure that the microwaves
Speaker 1: are not so focused that they would heat anything up
Speaker 1: to to specifically uh, disperse them in a way that
Speaker 1: would make them still useful but not bernie. Um. And
Speaker 1: but then again, wouldn't they would have to be able
Speaker 1: to heat to this This is one of the issues
Speaker 1: with the technology, right um. And and so so it
Speaker 1: gets back into that potentially, like you can you can
Speaker 1: see someone twirling and evil scientists twirling their mustache so
Speaker 1: easily when you start talking about creating satellites that that
Speaker 1: heat up stuff on earth. Well, I think that's a
Speaker 1: great transition to a question I might want to end with,
Speaker 1: which is um. I don't know why this is such
Speaker 1: a particularly difficult topic in a couple of ways, one
Speaker 1: of them being that it just seems jam packed with
Speaker 1: pseudoscience and sort of iffy leads, even more than most
Speaker 1: of the areas of science we talk about. With these
Speaker 1: kind of crazy sounding proposals that you kind of get
Speaker 1: the sense that I don't think that would work, or
Speaker 1: if it did, it might have really unpleasant side effects. Um.
Speaker 1: And then there there's also such potential for bad usage
Speaker 1: of these types of technologies, Like it would be a
Speaker 1: wonderful thing to control the weather reliably for good without
Speaker 1: having unintended consequences, Like if you have an area that's
Speaker 1: having a drought, if you're having a drought in California
Speaker 1: again or something, you could, you know, call use cloud
Speaker 1: seeding to make it rain. And I think California actually
Speaker 1: has done stuff to try to control the weather, right
Speaker 1: they have? Yeah, I mean actually private companies have Cores
Speaker 1: Beer has employed people to cloud seed. Wow. Um, how
Speaker 1: effective did they think it was? I don't know. I
Speaker 1: just know that Ben Livingston, who um, who ran some
Speaker 1: of the flights during Vietnam War, actually ended up doing
Speaker 1: that as a career afterward and looking for private companies.
Speaker 1: So there's a huge interest in it because again, I
Speaker 1: think there's this idea that you could play thor with
Speaker 1: with the world, play god. And yes, I think that
Speaker 1: it's fascinating for that reason. It's also a bit unsettling
Speaker 1: to people, because I think that we have this idea
Speaker 1: that we have this wild, natural world and to be
Speaker 1: able to uh just harness it for for our own
Speaker 1: reasons feels a little bit like, oh, are we really
Speaker 1: have we really turned that point? I mean we are
Speaker 1: in the anthroposyne? Are we are we at that time
Speaker 1: in history where technologically we should could do this and
Speaker 1: are we uh ethically mature enough to handle that kind
Speaker 1: of power? Yes, yes, I say we are. No, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure either. I mean I think that's a big
Speaker 1: question we. I mean, we've seen a problem with our
Speaker 1: unintentional geoengineering. Right, so we've been geoengineering the planet unintentionally
Speaker 1: through add adding carbon to the atmosphere and causing climate change.
Speaker 1: It's too late now to ask, well, you know, are
Speaker 1: we are we ethically ready to have the map the
Speaker 1: ability to massively burn carbon and put that into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: You know, we just have it and we're doing it. Um.
Speaker 1: So Yeah, it kind of makes you wonder the same
Speaker 1: thing about doing intentional geoengineering and weather control, anything that
Speaker 1: can have massive effects on people who are not getting
Speaker 1: to make this decision for themselves. Yeah. I mean you
Speaker 1: could argue that there's actually a moral imperative to do it,
Speaker 1: to to actually geo engineer. Now we are in a
Speaker 1: place where, um our future is sort of riding on
Speaker 1: our ability to mitigate some the worst effects of global warming. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we are seeing an an uptick and it's and
Speaker 1: it's going to increase people people. Uh, every scientist who
Speaker 1: has looked into it says we are going to be
Speaker 1: seeing more more storms and more devastating storms in the
Speaker 1: future because because of the effective of climate change in
Speaker 1: global warming. Yeah, and that's a whole other area that
Speaker 1: we could get into. That the fact that our our
Speaker 1: weather patterns are stronger and have changed, and there is
Speaker 1: a good reason behind that. And uh, there're certainly scads
Speaker 1: of studies that will tell you that this that this
Speaker 1: is the new normal extreme weather patterns. Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: that that we're experiencing an uptick in this because of
Speaker 1: human effects. Yeah, absolutely that that an uptick might have
Speaker 1: been on its way anyway, but this one in particular
Speaker 1: has been affected by human stuff. Which yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't I don't mean to, I don't mean to sound
Speaker 1: all doom and gloom about this because I don't think
Speaker 1: it is and I or I hope it's not at
Speaker 1: any rate. And I think that the research that these
Speaker 1: lovely humans who we have kind of been tearing down
Speaker 1: a little bit in this podcast just because you know,
Speaker 1: these are all uh solutions to such an enormous problem
Speaker 1: um that it's it's hard to come up with something
Speaker 1: viable that can also get funded, that that we can
Speaker 1: be sure will work. But but it's it's an interesting
Speaker 1: thing to look into, and we certainly hope that more
Speaker 1: people will look into it in the future. Well, I
Speaker 1: can say one thing we have talked about in this
Speaker 1: two part that I can certainly feel good about in
Speaker 1: terms of human scientific progress is weather modeling. Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: That that's our that's our one really serious, definite wind
Speaker 1: that we can feel good about and we don't have
Speaker 1: to be so worried about the ethical effects of it.
Speaker 1: I think it's or the ethical concerns of it. I think, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's good to know what the weather is going to
Speaker 1: be in the future. We've gotten better at it and
Speaker 1: we're continuing to get better at it. Okay, well, I
Speaker 1: think that's going to be it for today talking about
Speaker 1: the future of weather modification. But thank you so much
Speaker 1: for joining us the audience, and thank you so much
Speaker 1: for joining us, Julie. It's been so much fun having
Speaker 1: you on, Julie. Can you tell our listeners are wonderful,
Speaker 1: are wonderful friends out there about your new show? I can,
Speaker 1: And thank you again for having me today. It's been
Speaker 1: great to hang out with you guys. The show is
Speaker 1: called The Stuff of Life comes out every Wednesday. Um.
Speaker 1: The first episode is about the power of Fear and
Speaker 1: Joe is on that episode. This second episode is Glass
Speaker 1: of Phobia the Fear of public speaking, and Lauren is
Speaker 1: on that one. And uh. You can check it out
Speaker 1: on podcasts providers like iTunes or really wherever you you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. Yes, thank you for being here. Uh.
Speaker 1: You can also get in touch with you on social media. Heck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: The Stuff of Life show on Twitter. And Facebook excellent.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get ahold of us on
Speaker 1: social media, our handle tends to be f w Thinking.
Speaker 1: We're on Google Plus, on Twitter, at Facebook. If you
Speaker 1: would like to send us an email, you can email
Speaker 1: fw thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. We hope
Speaker 1: to hear from you about any questions you have for
Speaker 1: us as Julie, anything about what a modification, any topics
Speaker 1: you would like to hear in the future, and either
Speaker 1: way we will talk to you again really soon. For
Speaker 1: more on this topic in the future of technology, visit
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