io9: weather engineering

Geoengineers Will Prevent Rain Over Olympic Stadium in China

Annalee Newitz — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:20:56 PST

The top of China's "bird's nest" Olympic stadium is open to the elements, and therefore the government has ordered the Beijing Meteorological Bureau to make sure it won't rain during the games. The Bureau has already had some success preventing light rain, but heavy rain is harder to control. They'll use two different "seeding" techniques for dissipating droplets in frozen clouds, and dissipating warmer clouds before they start forming water droplets. Beijing's head of weather manipulation, Zhang Qian, explains how.

She said:

For cold clouds below zero degrees, we use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their mean size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall and precipitation can be reduced. For clouds above zero degrees we use the seeding agent silver iodide to accelerate the droplets' collision and coalescence, producing a downdraft which suppresses the formation of clouds.

China 'will stop the rain' [News.com via Slashdot]

Weaponizing Climate Change for Battle

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:45:29 PST

A new article in Foreign Policy suggests that geoengineering (or weather engineering) may be part of the next high-tech battle strategy for troops who want a force multiplier. The article is an updated version of an essay by futurist Jamais Cascio. Others have already speculated about how the ability to control rain systems and pull down lightening may be the future of warfare. In fact, all the technologies to do this already exist. But Cascio thinks forced ecosystem imbalances may be the weapon of choice for offensive geoengineers.

"It's only a matter of time before the world's militaries learn to use the Earth itself as a weapon," Cascio writes. He speculates about how climate change and global warming could also be weaponized:

The offensive use of geoengineering could take a variety of forms. Overproductive algae blooms can actually sterilize large stretches of ocean over time, effectively destroying fisheries and local ecosystems. Sulfur dioxide carries health risks when it cycles out of the stratosphere. One proposal would pull cooler water from the deep oceans to the surface in an explicit attempt to shift the trajectories of hurricanes. Some actors might even deploy counter-geoengineering projects to slow or alter the effects of other efforts.

Weird and thought-provoking stuff.

Battlefield Earth [Foreign Policy]

Weather Engineers Remove CO2 From Atmosphere, Stop Global Warming

Annalee Newitz — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:43:03 PST

Some Harvard scientists suggest that we could turn back the clock on global warming by sucking CO2 out of the air and de-acidifying the oceans.

Says weather engineer Kurt Zenz House:

The technology involves selectively removing acid from the ocean in a way that might enable us to turn back the clock on global warming — removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere while simultaneously limiting the rate at which man-made CO2 emissions are acidifying the ocean Essentially, our technology dramatically accelerates a cleaning process that Nature herself uses for greenhouse gas accumulation.

These kinds of massive geo-engineering projects are becoming more and more popular as solutions to the geo-engineering project, known as global warming, which we've been undertaking without realizing it for decades. Maybe the best way to reverse climate change is to treat the Earth as a massive system that we can hack. No "hack the planet" jokes, please. Image courtesy of Mikefl99.

Engineered Weather [Eurekalert!]