Weather Control
Recently, I came across a release from Harvard University that’s titled “Engineered weathering process could mitigate global warming”. I was pretty interested, so I read on.
The Basics
I won’t get into all the details, since you can read for yourself, but it’s “simple” to understand, at least in a broad concept (I have no idea how it’s actually done). Long story short, the title is a little misleading, because this is not a way to control weather, but rather to manipulate our environment to slow/reverse global warming. How?
Burn, baby, burn.
It involves a topic that has been discusses many times: the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In this case, they claim to be able to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and permanently transfer it to the ocean (a pool of water in a lab?), by some complicated process. Apparently, this happens naturally, and they are only replicating this process on a faster time-table.
The Benefits
The benefits of such a process, were it to be implemented, should be pretty obvious. A slowdown of global warming (”if it exists!”), or even a reversal, would be highly lauded around the world… especially by greedy corporations, and China, who have a large footprint, yet don’t care to do anything about it unless forced.
Hello, Exxon.
The Negatives
In other research projects / thought-experiments on such processes, there have been a few “problems” with such a process [Note: I won't link to any specific one, but if you Google it, you'll find many valid results]. The biggest one? It should be the most obvious… the effect on oceanic life.
It’s common knowledge that fish take oxygen out of the water to breathe, right? What happens when you add an over-abundance of CO2 to the same water? Many scientists claim you’ll end up hurting, if not killing, many fish and other ocean-based creatures, as well as making shrimp questionable to eat (because of poisoning).
The Answer?
I’m not sure there really is an answer to this, as to whether or not humanity should inflict it’s problems on other life-forms of the same planet, but I do know this: out of global warming “control” / “reversal”, it’s quite possible that we will see complete weather control, ala “Weather” in Frank Herbert’s Dune books.
Not really what I had in mind…
Why? If you can control the amount of CO2 in the air, it then follows that you can directly control the temperature. (If you didn’t follow that: global warming is occurring because we are trapping excess heat within our atmosphere due to gases. If you remove those gases, less heat is trapped.) This, at least to me, would seem to be the first step in weather control.
Now if only we could figure out how to make hurricanes disappear…
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