New WMO Report on Weather Mod Plus Geoengineering

[Josh Horton]

This may interest some of you - a recent (brief) WMO report on weather modification including some discussion of GE.

http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/arep/wwrp/new/documents/Doc_3_6_weather_mod_2013_Final_tn.pdf

Josh

[Fred Zimmerman]

It's worth noting that while the report accurately describes that there are a wide variety of activities intended to modify weather (as distinguished from "weather modification activiites") in China, the US, and the world, nothing in this report challenges or requires revisiting the conclusion that numerous independent academy-level review boards have drawn every decade or so over the last sixty years, namely, that the efficacy of activities intended to modify weather cannot be statistically demonstrated.

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Fred Zimmerman

Geoengineering IT!   

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[Jim Lee]

I just have to say, "I told you so"

• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/geoengineering/GfMt-0jXzDY/amVJ-V1vXQEJ
  
• https://groups.google.com/d/msg/geoengineering/JFmkKOWe_wY/dbiJemslrqoJ

"It was also stated that if we still do not understand (Weather Modification) at small scales (after 60 years), understanding what the impacts of Geoengineering would be at large/global scale, should be seen as a major challenge. [1]"

~ Jim Lee

http://climateviewer.com/geoengineering-weather-control.html

[Doug MacMartin]

Of course.  By the exact same logic, no-one understood combustion enough to build an internal combustion engine until quantum mechanics was worked out. 

 

Sorry, I don’t see any connection at all between the ability to understand small scale (in space and time) and the average of that behaviour over large scales.  Statistical mechanics is a great example where the large scale is quite predictable without requiring understanding of small scales.  While I do agree with the conclusion that understanding the impacts is a challenge, I don’t think that the appeal to the failure of weather modification is relevant.

 

d

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[George Collins]

  > Of course.  By the exact same logic, no-one understood combustion enough to build an internal combustion engine until quantum mechanics was worked out. 

I worry that this exaggerates in at least two ways.

  > I don’t see any connection at all between the ability to understand small scale (in space and time) and the average of that behaviour over large scales.

1. The "small scale" discussed in the report is tens of orders of magnitude closer to "large scale" than in your example. The world's smallest internal combustion engine (circa 2001) [*1] was about the size of a penny, which (at 19.05mm) is around 1.18*10^33 times greater than Planck length; the area of the atmosphere is only about 31.8 million (3.18*10^7) times greater than the patch of sky over the WMO's home town of Geneva (and only about 12,000 times greater than the sky over Switzerland.) Might not the logic change if the scale difference is 37 septillion (~37,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) times less extreme?

  > Statistical mechanics is a great example where the large scale is quite predictable without requiring understanding of small scales.

2. Then you have the question of whether city-scale atmosphere averages into global atmosphere the way that quantum particles average into solid objects, or statistically modeled particles average into idealized gases. My understanding (not having studied quantum mechanics formally in some years) is that quantum effects at mesoscale have to be carefully teased out because, inter alia, the small-scale effects typically average themselves away [Fermi-Dirac/binomial distribution of spins, etc *2]. But one look at a Hadley cell makes it clear that global atmosphere isn't a flat mean of local atmosphere. I'm not even sure that statistical mechanics works that well for you here--isn't turbulence theory a core area of research at both small and large scales?

And there are other problems (an engine, as a black box, is highly bounded with near-perfect observation of inputs and outputs, so control without low-level understanding is more plausible; in the atmospheric case, we're literally underneath the box and observing bits of it from above and below).

Anyway, not sure the WMO's point is that easy to dismiss...

*1 http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2001/04/02_engin.html

*2 http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0407/0407081.pdf

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From: macm...@cds.caltech.edu
To: rez...@gmail.com
CC: geoengi...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [geo] Re: New WMO Report on Weather Mod Plus Geoengineering
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 07:38:24 -0700