Traditionally, cloud seeding has involved dropping a vapor into the clouds (usually silver iodide) that's designed to bond with the water, making it heavier and creating rain or snow. But this ground-based generator is designed to spray upwards into the clouds. According to the Associated Press, many people believe the U.S. is falling behind in the cloud-seeding arms race:

Government agencies and utilities from California to North Dakota spend an estimated $15 million a year on cloud seeding, and the number of projects has jumped by nearly a third in the last decade.

But spending in the United States is far lower than in many other countries. China spends an estimated $100 million a year on cloud-seeding efforts that include using anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers to blast the sky with silver iodide.

"What's going on in the U.S. is tiny," said Arlen Huggins, an associate research scientist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev. "There's more being done outside the U.S. than here."

Other countries conducting cloud-seeding research include Australia, France, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Venezuela.

But the National Research Council reported in 2003 that there's no evidence this technique actually works. At the same time, scientists involved in the report say more study and research are needed, and utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric have been doing cloud-seeding for years, saying they've seen an increase in precipitation as a result. (PG&E uses snowmelt in turbine-power plants.)

Another question: whether silver iodide, the chemical used to make water heavier, is safe. Residents of one area where PG&E wants to install seven 20-feet-tall generators are raising questions — but the charmingly named Weather Modification Association insists it's perfectly safe. I love the fact that there's an interest group called the Weather Modification Association.

So with clean water growing scarcer and more precious, are we going to lose the weather-control race before we even know it's happening? And is water laced with silver iodide still considered "clean water"?

Image by AP. [Associated Press]

Balog was just written up in the Wall Street Journal for his Extreme Ice Survey, which involves a mix of mountaineering and nature photography to capture the effects of global warming. Balog explains:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for "Extreme Ice Survey"?

A: The New Yorker asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying. That idea gestated in my mind for a year and eventually turned into the "Extreme Ice Survey" in 2006.

Q: How do images of glaciers collapsing bring the idea of climate change home?

A: There were a lot of repeat photos that showed glaciers retreating over a hundred years. That's pretty abstract. I wanted to show a shorter term time lapse that would make people think, "My god, little Emily was in first grade in April and she's in second grade in October. I remember this. It's happening in my life."

The EIS photos are arresting and heartbreaking — they show the icebergs breaking off from the glaciers and going out to sea, and in one case you can actually see an iceberg on a beach where surf and sand meet the deaths of the icecaps. There are some utterly lovely pictures of "meltwater" floating on top of the ice, as well as some disgusting images showing the silt-befouled water encroaching on the ice, over the past few years.

But meanwhile, Balog's site also has a section called "Techno Sapiens" which celebrates the cyborgs in our midst, including gorgeous looking artificial limbs and wearable computers. Back in 1996, Balog talked to Fortune Magazine about it:

On the following pages, photographer James Balog documents what he calls Techno sapiens: fusions of humans and machines that can be found today in American research labs and hospitals, and even on the streets. Add up the images, says Balog, and it's not hard to envision a race of flesh-and-technology beings with electric hands, legs of steel that run a two-minute mile, and perceptual powers unknown in nature. "Imagine you are a traveler from another galaxy," Balog says. "You land in North America today and look around carefully, with fresh eyes. This is what you might see."

It's an interesting contrast, but maybe not a contradiction: He worries what we're doing to the planet, but he's also celebrated the way we're transforming ourselves.

There are tons more photos at the links. [Extreme Ice Survey and James Balog Photography]

Icebergs 200 feet tall, formerly part of the Greenland Ice Sheet, float into the North Atlantic Ocean, raising sea levels as they melt.

Jökulsárlón, Iceland. Decaying ice and icebergs on the surface of the Jökulsárlón in southeast Iceland. The ice drains off the great icecap called the Vatnajökull.

Columbia Glacier, Alaska. Columbia Glacier calves icebergs into Columbia Bay west of Valdez, Alaska. The ice shown in the bergs was deposited in snowstorms 300 to 500 years ago.

Columbia Glacier, Alaska. Contrasts between clean glacial melt water and water laden with eroded silt color these lakes on the surface of the East Fork of Columbia Glacier. Black stripes are erosional debris called "moraines."

Svínafellsjökull Glacier, Iceland. An EIS team member provides scale in a massive landscape of crevasses on the Svínafellsjökull Glacier in Iceland.

Greenland Ice Sheet, Greenland. On the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet east of Kangerlussuaq, a meltwater stream known by the French word "moulin" (in English it means "mill," as in windmill).

Icebergs calved from Whiteout Glacier, Alaska.

River water and seawater polish the surface of a berg in Iceland.

Meltwater on surface of Columbia Glacier, Columbia Bay, Alaska.

Decaying ice and icebergs on the surface of the Jökulsárlón in southeast Iceland. The ice drains off the great icecap called the Vatnajokull.

Meltwater on surface of Columbia Glacier, Columbia Bay, Alaska.

Kenny's Arm

Breathing Observation Bubble

Wearable computer

British movie The Age Of Stupid, which opens worldwide in September, takes place in 2050, when environmental catastrophes have overtaken the Earth. One of the poor benighted residents of that future dystopia watches footage of people from 2008 arguing about the environment, and wonders how we could have been such idiots. Here's some more gorgeous future disaster art, including a factory farming complex that could be an evil laboratory from a space-horror film:

[Age Of Stupid via Civilianism]

Many forests packed with trees are now submerged in lakes, mostly due to humans rerouting water for dams and setting up reservoirs. Though they've been underwater for decades in some cases, their trees still make for good lumber. And since the trees are already dead, it's an environmentally-friendly way to get a lot of wood without cutting into living forests on dry land.

Triton Logging is a company that specializes in lumber processing, and they've got a giant underwater saw robot that can clearcut submerged trees - by remote control, from a desktop computer. Wired did an interesting article about Triton a couple of years ago, and now they're in the news again at Environmental Graffiti, where Linda McCormick wonders why Triton's Sawfish robot hasn't caught on, despite there being possibly 300 million submerged trees. (Some might even be thousands of years old.)

Tree chopping image by Kevin Hand, via Wired.

According to the UK Guardian, a local Bulgarian group called For the Nature is organizing protests against what architect Norman Foster is calling the Black Sea Gardens. Says the Guardian's Kate Connolly:

[The protesters] say it will destroy the Black Sea coast's last remaining virgin stretches of beach and will have a devastating effect on the rich biodiversity of an area which has environmental protection status under the EU's Natura 2000 programme, which aims to protect endangered species and habitats.

But the Bulgarian government's failure to enact regulations outlawing extensive developments in such areas has allowed coastal constructions to go ahead almost unhindered. Now there is hardly a stretch of the country's 220-mile coastline untouched by overdeveloped resorts. Locals are often restricted from accessing beaches whose entrances are flanked by security guards.

Why doesn't Norman Foster work on making the existing resorts in Bulgaria carbon-neutral instead? Image via Bulgaria4UK.

Bulgarian Eco Town the Biggest Mistake of Norman Foster's Career [via Guardian]

Sure, some conservatives have been condemning Wall-E as green agit-prop. But they're missing the real point, says the American Conservative:

In the film, it becomes clear that mass consumerism is not just the product of big business, but of big business wedded with big government. In fact, the two are indistinguishable in WALL-E’s future. The government unilaterally provided it’s citizens with everything they needed, and this lack of variety led to Earth’s downfall... Staples of small-town conservative life such as the small farm, the “atomic family,” and old-fashioned and wholesome entertainment like “Hello, Dolly” are looked upon by the suddenly awakened humans as beautiful and desirable. By steering conservative families away from WALL-E, these commentators are doing their readers a great disservice.

A side note: Is Hello Dolly really a prized conservative narrative? Being that it stars Barbara "Stalin" Streisand?

Meanwhile, BeliefNet's Rod Dreher hails Wall-E as a film for "crunchy cons." (According to Dreher's book, "crunchy cons" are conservatives who live in harmony with nature, including organic farming, turning off the television and cooking their own food.) He sees the movie as a sort of reverse "Garden of Eden" story, where Eve tempts the humans with an "apple" to get them to defy their false god and return to the garden they've left. Says Dreher:

In another twist on the Genesis story, "Wall-E" contends that what makes us human is labor. In the film's most meaningful iconic image, the Tree of Life on the new earth grows out of an old work boot. You'll recall that when Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, Adam was cursed for his sin by being condemned to draw his sustenance from the very Earth from which he was drawn. God says to Adam, "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return." (Gen. 3:19) In "Wall-E," humanity discovers that it can only complete its own given nature through labor — first agricultural labor, then the labor of building cities.

DailyKos blogger oilpolicy points to some of these right-wing fans of the movie, and then chimes in by calling it a disappointment to progressives, because it lets the overconsuming humans off the hook too easily:

Wall-E is so ignorant of the basics of sustainability and [its] original sin, overpopulation, that it actually has humans, who have somehow learned how to live sustainably on a ship for 700 years, return to overpopulate the earth again in a happy ending! The rest of us had paid good money to see Wall-E and Eve, the new robotic life forms, get their shot at happiness on earth sans humans.

It's totally true. I paid for my Wall-E ticket hoping all the humans would die in the end. And then maybe Wall-E and Eve would do that Flight Of The Conchords song.

Reed Johnson at the L.A. Times chimes in:

In serious science fiction, humans who've degenerated into some sort of new mutation force us to confront the darkest sides of our nature. Think of the cannibalistic Morlocks and the feckless, sheeplike Eloi of Wells' "The Time Machine," one of sci-fi's master narratives. By contrast, the Pillsbury doughboys and girls in "Wall-E" are a bit dim but otherwise sweet, polite, essentially harmless, kinda cute... Apart from the spaceship captain, who rebels against a bullying computer, the humans in "Wall-E" really don't do much to earn their shot at redemption. The movie doesn't make the case that mankind, having fouled its nest, deserves a second chance.

(And yes, Reed is accusing Wall-E of not being a hard core enough science fiction narrative, because none of the supposedly "adult" scifi movies this year are even bothering to tackle the issues Wall-E raises. And since Wall-E is raising those issues, Reed wants it to deal with them in a manner worthy of 2001 and Silent Running. (Personally, I felt Wall-E was a much more serious movie than 2001, but that's just me.)

So will progressives abandon Wall-E en masse because it has an unrealistically happy ending? (Unless you really believe the humans come back to Earth to die. Dreher pins his hopes on those cute ending credits, with the Peter Gabriel song.) Will conservatives embrace the little bot as their new mascot?

You can get in for free if you can prove you walked or bicycled to the club. Otherwise it's 10 pounds. According to Environmental Graffiti:

Based at Bar Surya in Pentonville Road, the club is owned by property millionaire and head of new climate change organization Club4Climate, Andrew Charalambous. The Greek-Cypriot businessman is trying to reach out to young people in an effort to save the world . . . Apparently everyone [who goes to the club] needs to sign a pledge promising to work towards curbing climate change. Is it just me or does that sound annoying?

It does sound annoying, especially if they want your e-mail or address so they can spam you. Hopefully the weird pledge thing won't get off the ground, but these dance floors will become more popular. I want one for my flat right now.

Eco-Nightclub [via Environmental Graffiti]

As a biologist who studies whole organisms and populations, I find that more and more of biology (in terms of funding, positions and emphasis) is going to the sub-organismal level. We now have lots of cell biologists, geneticists, neurologists, biochemists, biomechanics, bioengineers and so on, but not a lot of behaviorists, population ecologists, biodemographers and others who study the emergent properties that arise at the higher levels of organization. What role, if any, do you foresee for understanding of these higher level biological phenomena in the future sci-fi-ish stuff?

As far as emerging biotechnology goes, science fiction grapples more frequently (if not always very seriously) with issues of organismal or ecological impact than the scientific establishment. There are good reasons for this. Ecological ruminations are a tradition for the authors, and the scientists have - until quite recently - been limited by technical considerations. As a scientist, I hope the title Planetary Ecologist will go on someone's tax return someday.

A Sandworm of Arrakis, from Frank Herbert's Dune.

Some would say that Frank Herbert's Dune was the beginning of ecological science fiction, but its roots go much deeper than that. Every time an author has imagined an alien world and then tried to fill it with beings capable of surviving on it, that author is grappling with issues of ecology, and every time an author has decided how those aliens would act, they were engaging in a bit of recreational behaviorism. Herbert elevated the tone and raised the bar, no doubt, but there is a long-standing tradition of biological and behavioral what-if in SF. The rise of environmentalism coupled with another favorite SF theme - dystopianism - brought us the environmental disaster subgenre, from the ridiculous The Day After Tomorrow to more thoughtful treatments like David Brin's Earth or the works of Kim Stanley Robinson.

Mars (with a little terraforming and a lot of luck).

While there are (of course) ecologists in the scientific community, there are very few thus far that bridge the gap between research at the molecular level and ecologies larger than a tissue culture dish. This is not to imply that ecologists are ignorant of molecular biology; the field has generated far too many useful tools for that. The bioengineers and cell biologists who are designing new organisms at the molecular level, on the other hand, are not always well versed in the basics of ecology and evolution. They are necessarily focused on what one scientist has called the molecular sociology of the cell.

Up until quite recently it would have been ludicrous to expect a molecular biologist to consider the higher-level environmental interactions of, for example, a particular gene, because he or she was still trying to figure out (at a molecular level) what the damn gene did to the cell itself. Take a peek at the inner life of a cell (if you haven't seen if before). A single cell is a giant bag of confusion. Trying to sort out web of interactions between the thousands of molecules present in hundreds of compartments using the technology at hand has been compared to figuring out the rules for a game of football using only pictures of the field (that only show certain players) at various times. This is why many researchers like to work with single cells instead of a cell in its natural environment, whatever that is - the cell alone is complicated enough. Experimental limitations or therapeutic concerns often require an intimate knowledge of a single organism's physiology, effectively tying a researcher to a single animal. Heinlein said, "Specialization is for insects". I would add grad students to the list.

Take E. coli as an example. We've had its genome sequenced for over a decade. Type its name into Google Scholar and you'll find over 1.5 million hits. Yet programming this bacteria - synthetic biology - is still a difficult and time-consuming process. When The University of Texas at Austin's entered their light-sensitive pigment-producing bacteria biofilm in the intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) contest, they realized that their achievement barely scratched the surface - that the "program" they'd written into the bacteria was relatively simple compared to the programming it already used to survive. In recognition of this fact, they produced perhaps my favorite "Hello world" program ever.

10 GOTO e. coli 20 Hack it genetically to turn it into a light-sensitive film

It's also important to note that almost all of the engineered cells and organisms made today are never meant to be released in the environment (and wouldn't be likely to survive in it if they did). Those that aren't created purely for research purposes are typically meant to live in small, artificial, and easily replaceable ecologies, like bioreactors in a pharmaceutical company or fermenters in a winery.

Either the bacteria are doing what they've been programmed to or we have a serious Cthulhu problem.

Genetically modified foods are a special case, but as a special case they've already received the most attention by ecologists. GM organisms that are designed to move outside of the lab enter the purview of the ecologists.

While disciplines like bioinformatics combine computational and molecular biology with evolutionary studies, increasingly complicated bioengineered organisms designed for the wild will require the ability to effectively model the ecologies they were designed for. In brief, once we're good enough at figuring out how to make a cell jump or play dead, the next frontier of design will be figuring out when we want a cell to jump or play dead, considering its surroundings. Top image via Electro-Plankton.

Do you have questions you've always wanted to ask a biogeek? You can email me at tdj@io9.com.

Entrepreneur Terry Kenny has taken a big step toward building the same sort of cycle using the energy released when huge diesel-powered tractor-trailer trucks come lumbering into the Port of Oakland to pick up and drop off shipping containers. His system uses massive pressure plates built into the road that compress hydraulic fluid that is used to turn a generator. It generates enough power each day to power around 1,750 homes.

Daily truck traffic through the Port of Oakland is around 2,500. What if the same device was installed on an interstate, where hundreds of thousands of cars pass by each day? What if all of those cars were themselves electric, instead of gas or diesel? They may never power themselves entirely (that would be tantamount to perpetual motion) but an electricity cycle like that is possible.

Similar, smaller devices are already popping up to harvest human power, too. Clothing and sneakers could soon recharge your phone or iPod while you walk. Even medical devices implanted inside you can feast on the chemical energy stored in your body. Our natural 98.6 degree thermal energy might even be an good source of juice for the electronics of the future.

It all sounds a little like a precursor to The Matrix, true, but building this kind of energy scavenging into our civilization is vital. It could vastly improve energy efficiency around the world, and maybe — just maybe — help us to support our exploding global population without destroying the planet in the process. It could even be a big part of exploring other planets.

So maybe we need to admit it — the evil Matrix AI actually had pretty good idea going.

Source: TreeHugger

Cascio writes:

The fact of the matter is that, no matter how much greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere or how many toxins we dump into the soil and oceans, given enough time the Earth will recover.

But human civilization is far more fragile.

Human civilization could not withstand and recover from the same kinds of assaults the planet itself has shrugged off in eons past. We remain entirely dependent upon myriad Earth services and systems, from topsoil and clean water to carbon cycles and biodiversity. Activities that undermine those critical services and systems quite literally threaten the survival of human civilization. The fundamental resilience of the Earth's geophysical systems simply means that, when we ignore our effects on the planet, we're simply making ourselves disposable, just another passing blip in the planet's long history.

In trying to minimize the harmful impacts of human activities upon the global ecosystem, environmentalism supports the continued healthy existence of humankind.

Earth will be just fine, thank you [Open the Future]

Attendees listened to talks with names like "What product features will influence an animal advocate's decision to move from vegetarianism to In Vitro Meat?" and went to panels devoted to "large-scale tissue engineering." While it's still more expensive to produce cultured meat than it is to raise chickens for the slaughter, the economics are changing as swiftly as the technologies to produce cultured meat. Mostly the barriers to market entry in a few years will be the meat industry itself, which may attempt to scare consumers away from the stuff or pull strings in government block the synthetic flesh via regulations.

For the record, cultured meat tastes just like regular meat — it's tissue-engineered muscle, made of exactly the same biological ingredients as meat from dead animals. It can also be a lot less fatty. Texture is one of the remaining issues, which is why proponents of cultured meat suggest it will first come to market as chicken nuggets and ground meat.

Andrew Revkin of the New York Times Dot Earth blog imagines vat meat as an eco-alternative:

But one could envision someday a model, say, of a solar-powered facility in southern California or Singapore basically turning sunlight and desalinated seawater into growth medium and then tons of cruelty-free, sustainable nuggets of chicken essence.

Whatever works best. If it is harder to move people [to stop slaughtering animals] on ethical grounds than it is to provide a sustainable humane substitute, I'm all for the substitute.

Can People Have Meat and a Planet Too? [Dot Earth]

To-Do Lists for Futurists:

1. Five ways to build an ecotopia, an urban space that exists in harmony with nature
Sure, recycling helps, but so does repurposing an old machine.

2. Five ways to contribute to the creation of artificial intelligence
You can help bring about machines with the ability to reason just by surfing the web.

3. Five ways to start planning for a future moon colony in your bedroom
From growing plants with LEDs to participating in a space elevator contest, there are a lot of things you can do to make that moon vacation in 2030 a reality.

4. Five ways to become posthuman by this time next year
A software download that makes your computer search for proteins that cure cancer while you sleep, and a tiny device that will make your body machine-readable tomorrow.

According to Ecocity Builders, the process of recreating the city would involve:

restructuring while recycling building materials, digging up once-buried natural waterways, adding pedestrian infrastructure and building upon a transition to "mixed uses" and "balanced development" in which the important activities are provided for within a short distance.

An ecocity downtown with waterways restored, bridges between buildings, pedestrian streets, solar active and passive energy technology and design, rooftop access to elevated "streets" and bridges between buildings. Slowly, people are moving in from the suburbs toward city and town centers using development profits to help pay for buying and removing buildings in automobile dependent areas. Now the city center runs on a fraction of the energy as before, has streets filled with fruit trees, is extremely friendly to the pedestrian and the whole city takes up much less room, making room for more agriculture and natural land.

Ecocity Builders [via TreeHugger]

I love the look on the forklift operator's face. Says scriptwriter/comics artist Kang:

I wanted to maintain the grace of the original film and to overcome the difficulties and limitations a sequel could have. And I wish to show more action with multiple monsters.

The Host 2 takes place in 2003, six months before the first movie. Once again, our sympathies are with the regular people. We follow the street vendors displaced by the renovation and the demolition workers and police involved in it. Supposedly a line in the movie actually mentions Lee pushing for the river project so he can run for president. The project disturbs horrible creatures that live underground, and you can guess the rest. Monster pile-on! [Scifi Japan, via MonsterFest]

Apparently women untouched by Green crazoids would normally "dream of marriage and babies" and think that being childless is "unnatural." But expose them to Ralph Nader and the Sierra Club and they become the only thing worse than child-rapers: child-refusers! My favorite bit is when the author describes Toni, a childless woman and environmentalist who says she's happy to live without kids:

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.

But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to "protect the planet".

Incredibly, instead of mourning the loss of a family that never was, her boyfriend (now husband) presented her with a congratulations card.

While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.

Meet the women who won't have babies [via Neatorama]

At least, that's the story that the show's indestructable cheerleader, Hayden Panettiere, is putting about. Talking to E! News - surely the last bastion of journalistic integrity in these troubled times - Panettiere announced that there's a warrant out for her arrest in Japan, following her participation in a protest against the slaughter of whales and dolphins:

Her group attempted to reach a pod of dolphins before it was driven into a nearby cove and massacred, but they were blocked by a fishing boat before they could reach the sea creatures.

"It was really frightening," Panettiere said at the time. "But in the end, all we really worried about was the dolphins."

After returning to shore, the group headed directly to Osaka and left the country to avoid being arrested for trespassing by the Japanese national police.

Now it looks like the scare's not quite over for the actress.

When asked what the arrest warrant could mean, Panettiere replied, "Potentially jail, but I doubt it."

Hayden Panettiere wanted in Japan [E! News]