“The Ecologist” Blurs the Line Between Bad Science and Just Plain Nuts
June 3rd, 2008
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Sometimes it’s hard to tell where bad science become “crazy.” There are plenty of things people might think and still be relatively sane, but misinformed. Things like beliefs that solar power can sustain humanity or that you should put butter on a burn are the kind of bad information that, while unacceptable, is at least somewhat understandable as just lack of good information.
Then there are those beliefs which make me think “this person honestly should probably see a mental health care professional.”
This article in the eco-stupid publication “The Ecologist” is one of those. It seems that the greens are pushing bad science to the breaking point not jumping on the “Weather Wars” bandwagon and claiming the HAARP and all other manner of military programs are actually covert weather modification programs using directed energy weapons to somehow alter the climate for the purpose of… evil.
I’m going to have to do a more in depth post about this idiocy tomorrow, but it just makes me shake my head. As far as weather alteration, the truth is that our ability to do so is pretty limited. Sure, human activities like damming rivers or starting a forest fire can alter the local climate, but that’s not something that’s generally predictable or controllable. As far as local weather modification the only capability currently in existence is cloud seeding, and as far as cloud seeding goes, it ranges in effectiveness from somewhat effective, but only in limited situations, to not effective at all. There’s been some debate on how well the technique works, but current information indicates that heavy cloud seeding may increase local precipitation modestly, and only when the conditions are favorable to begin with.
A decades long history of weather modification research has indicated that in general, while some techniques for seeding of clouds or adding water vapor to the atmosphere do have some effect on weather, it’s neither predictable nor reliable, and more importantly it is only relevant to very localized weather. There were attempts to seed the eyewalls of hurricanes. The data from these experiments is difficult to interperate, due to the chaotic nature of weather, but it seems that the eyewall may have temporarily been disrupted by very heavy seeding, but only to reform almost immediately after the operation halted.
Directed energy weather modification is still mostly fiction, due in part to the enormous amounts of energy required to significantly alter a cloud formation or weather pattern. And even if HAARP were a weather modification system, it would only be able to alter weather patterns in the immediate area around the facility.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 12:50 am and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Enviornment, Not Even Wrong, Obfuscation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 2:43 am
I was going to say that “The Ecologist” is not exactly a mainstream or middle of the road enviornmental source, but unfortunately in this day and age it kind-of is. It seems even groups like The Sierra Club are more like Greenpeace and groups like Greenpeace are more like Al Queda. Seriously though, it’s not that far off from the ‘green’ culture.
And yes, that’s not just ignorance or missleading or misunderstood science but instead that is downright insanity when you start getting into the conspiracy theories over something like HAARP and weather modification as some kind of major world thing. I’m not aware that HAARP is even investigating weather modification as any of the activities, and I think probably not because it’s HF so that’s too long wave for use with tropospheric stuff.
I’ve heard of some experiments with using microwaves for modification of weather patterns in the Soviet Union and I recall hearing basically what you’d expect about it, which is that enormous amounts of energy are required for even very modest and local changes. IE: Putting a whole lot of megawatt radar sets focused into a valley full of clouds, MIGHT have some noticable change, but only if the valley is small. This is generally what has been revealed and anyone who knows the first thing about meteorology knows that mankind cannot exert direct control on weather beyond (maybe) some modest and local changes, but only when conditions are at the tipping point and only with extreme effort.
I’m not counting building cities or clearing forests and stuff, because that’s more something that changes the local climate than one given weather system or another on a whim.
Complete BS. These people need to go to science class. Scary how many buy into it.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 4:11 am
HelperMonkey is absolutely correct about the Ecologist. However, it gets worse: Zac Goldsmith, who runs the Ecologist, is an influential environmental advisor to the (UK) Conservative Party (likely, on current polls, to form the next government) and also a parliamentary candidate in the safe Conservative seat of Richmond.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 8:26 am
Let me get this straight: this eco-clown is going to get a safe seat for the Conservative Party? Say what? What has happened to the party of Margaret Thacher?
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June 3rd, 2008 at 11:30 am
It turns out you can accomplish a lot more rain in a specific local with a pump and some pipe.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 11:36 am
The data behind the effectiveness of cloud seeding is not that good, but there is universal agreement that it can change the ice distribution of a cloud and this would theoretically be a mechanism to cause rain, but it also seems that it only really works in conditions where rain clouds would be forming anyway and it may be able to accelerate it. Even the proponents of cloud seeding admit it can only at best increase precipitation in a given area by something like 20% for a given event at best.
Then there are ground based cloud seeding systems with generators that pump out seed material when there are clouds detected. These are even more suspect in effectiveness. They MAY be able to increase precipitation a little bit by making clouds more prone to forming ice, but that’s not certain. It’s a small change at best.
Of course, local weather can be changed by the events mentioned like forest fires or major agriculture or altering water.
The idea that you could flip a switch and say “rain here” or “sunny here” or “more hurricanes” or “windy until five oclock and then not windy anymore” That is pure fantasy. It’s completely impossible. You can’t make that happen. Anyone who says you can is nuts.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 12:31 pm
It seems that the first and second law of thermodynamics are becoming an invconvenient myth (to be ignored) by these people. On one hand they want to harvest the energy in weather (wind, solar), and find that it requires VERY large installations to get significant energy. On the other hand they think that relatively piddling amounts of energy introduced into the system can significantly alter it. Simple thermodynamics should show it is not possible that way. The chaotic nature of weather already makes already reliable forecasting almost impossible. How could you then control it with only the relatively tiny amounts of energy these things produce?
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June 3rd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Would a nuclear explosion be able to alter the weather? It seems like it would be enough energy to alter it in the local area at least.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Dave G said:
I think we have to make the difference here between alter the weather, which purportedly can be done by a butterfly flapping its wings, and controlling the weather to do what we want. The latter is what is out of reach by current technical means.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Dave G said:
Yes, it certainly could, but only in the local area, and lets not forget that we’re talking about the most energetic technology avaliable to mankind. A large nuclear bomb could and has altered the local weather somewhat for a short period of time.
The ones tested in Nevada really did not do much more than kick up a lot of dust, but in the case of the nuclear bombs which were tested in the Pacific, they occasionally would vaporize millions of tons of water. As the water vapor rises in the mushroom cloud it will eventually cool and form ice. This basically creates an enormous artificial cloud of water droplets.
The Ivy Mike test was the second largest US test and was at ground level at Enowetok Atoll. It was conducted during a cloud-free day, but it produced a massive mushroom cloud with a lot of water in it. Shortly after lightning and thunder was observed. It basically made a manmade thunder strom. The Tsar bomba also had weather effects. It was detonated in a cloudy area but the airburst fireball completely vaporized all clouds within several miles.
Of course, this is not a good way of controlling the weather, since that’s the least of the effects. And again, it’s a local thing. No one will dispute that human activity can have some effect on the local level. For example, large paper mills are known to contribute to fogging in local areas because they produce so much water vapor.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 1:01 pm
There has been a large amount of research into weather modification over the past 40 years by the United States, the Soviet Union and Russia, China and other countries. The conclusions have generally all been the same and that is that in order to modify the weather in even a very small area reliably requires an extreme amount of effort.
For example, if you wanted to disperse a medium sized cumulus cloud, either breaking it up or causing it to precipitate and the water to fall from suspension, it probably would be possible to do this if you used several large aircraft (for example C-130’s) and repeatedly seeded the cloud with chemicals or other agents. Now lets consider the effort that needs to be expended on one cloud. Lets say you wanted to somehow alter something like a small thunderhead? Could it be done? I would imagine it probably could if you had dozens of aircraft, rockets and so on. That’s a lot of effort for a weather formation that would only be over a small area.
There have been experiments with energy directed at weather patterns too. Some of the big lasers used in the Star Wars program in the 1980’s are powerful enough to vaporize water in high altitude clouds, but the beam is not very big, so each shot will blow a hole in a cloud a few inches in diameter and the hole will close up quickly. What good does that do you?
Explosives can disperse clouds. Seeding can condense water vapor. Flying big prop planes in and out of a small cloud repeatedly can “chop it up” essensially dispersing it and reducing the density.
In the end, what’s the point, though? Commit half the air force to trying to suppress one small rain shower? Hardly practical.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 2:01 pm
HAARP is not the first ionospheric heater. It’s not the first to break records for size. It’s not the biggest military research project. It’s not really that unusual or that large as far as military general-purpose and applied science research projects go and not even for enviornmental research.
I think the military interest in the ionosphere and the possibility of ionospheric modification is not that big a stretch. The ionosphere is vital for HF communications. Ionospheric excitement can impair satellite communications by causing microwave reflections. It could also be used for communications if it could excited enough to be used for that. We also know that nuclear weapons could trigger a geomagnetic storm or cause high altitude disruptions which are a concern for communications and space systems. This was established back during the high altitude tests in the early 1960’s.
On top of this, it has been theorized that modulating the energy from an ionospheric exciter could be a method for generation of ULF for submarine communications that is more secure than the very large antenna arrays currently used.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the military would sponsor this kind of aural research and it doesn’t seem especially sinister either. It gets a lot more attention than it deserves from the CT’ers.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Luke – Do not underestimate the power of the Tesla side…
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June 3rd, 2008 at 4:00 pm
The Red Air Force supposedly spent alot of time and energy keeping the skies clear for the annual May Day parade. But again all they were doing was being mostly successful at getting clouds to rain themselves out before they got to Moscow.
I would not expect people who don’t laugh at a car with solar panels built into the roof to understand the amount of energy required to do some things is very large.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 4:29 pm
I’d reckon the simplest and most controlable method for modifying this or any earthlike planet’s weather system is to modify the inputs, the main such input being, of course, solar radiation. Due to the high mass required for a substantial soletta or parasol system, I would expect that deploying one won’t really be feasible until we have some industrial capacity in space to exploit asteroid resources.
It would probably be worthwhile, though. Ten to twenty million tons of material, fabricated into a parasol just past the earth-sun L1 point should compensate for the greenhouse effect quite nicely.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Finrod said:
And we know enough about the weather a a whole system that we can make wholesale changes like that and know what the effects will be? I’m not so sure. This is like dumping iron in the oceans to get algae to suck up CO2, it’s risky because you are making large adjustments to very big systems without any real understanding of what sort of long term impacts it will have.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 5:19 pm
DV82XL said:
I think there is an important distinction between being able to modify the local climate of an area or even of the globe and being able to ‘control’ the weather at will. There are plenty of activities which can alter the local climate and weather of a region by some amount, and usually it’s undesirable. This might be something like having a lot or if water is diverted, like if a very large basin is blocked by a dam and it creates an artificial lake in an area. It can also be changed somewhat by cutting down trees, paving and that kind of thing. We know cities are ‘heat islands’ and there is the ‘asian brown cloud’ and also big forest fires or dust storms caused by bad soil management that blocks off the sun.
What the CT’ers with the HAARP thing are imagining is that there’s some way that weather can actively be controlled at will. It’s like someone can say “lets make the hurricane hit Mexico instead of Texas” or “lets start a huricane” or “I want rain on tuesday but I want it to stop before three o’clock”
That’s ridiculous. You can’t “control” it like that. It’s too big a system to have any active and predictable control. Even the major land and water changes are only modest in most cases. And look at greenhouse gases. We’ve been dumping them into the atmosphere about as fast as we can for the past century and we are only just seeing the results. No one entity could ever hope to make an immediate change like that!
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June 3rd, 2008 at 5:30 pm
DV82XL said:
Of course not! I’m not saying we can do this tomorrow. It’ll take decades to build the space infrastructure needed for it anyway.
The situation isn’t entirely unprecedented though. The sun has been getting steadily brighter throughout its life. What a parasol system would achieve would be to ‘wind back the clock’ on global insolation.
The point I was trying to make is that you can at least be sure it would work on some level, and unlike dumping a load of iron in the ocean, if it turns out to be a bad idea you can take the parasol away!
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June 3rd, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Finrod said:
That is a point Finrod – a flimsy one mind you – but a point nevertheless.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Iron dumped into the ocean will not be there forever either. It will eventually sink to the bottom of the ocean sequestered in dead organisms. Undesirable changes with a time constant larger than the decay of iron concentration back to it’s natural level will be undoable.
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June 4th, 2008 at 1:47 am
Yojimbo said:
No doubt Tesla was a genius. He invented three phase power and the motors and generators to go along with it. He invented the phase system for multiple AC generators. He made some major advancements in wireless and also high frequency lights that fluorescent lighting descended from. Also all kinds of other inventions.
He was also kinda nutty, especially in his later years.
I’m inclined to go with the general consensus that HAARP and directed energy to actively control the weather is something that belongs in the loony house. I agree you can probably manage to alter the weather with some control in some very local areas and with extreme amounts of effort (like maybe seeding rain clouds enough to try to rain them out before they get to a parade). That’s very limited in what you can do and what you have to work with.
This sounds like something a villain from a Saturday morning cartoon would do.
These idiots also seem to fancy themselves “ecologists.” pfff.
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June 4th, 2008 at 5:04 am
DV82XL said:
Flimsy? well, perhaps.
Another point you may wish to analyse for its robustness or lack thereof is that there’s some evidence that the solar output varies naturally over decades on the order of 1-2%, so a parasol which intercepted ~1% of earth’s insolation might well be operating within parameters we have experience of over historical timescales.
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June 4th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Chem Geek Gregor said:
No, no, no – Tesla was the Great Mage, for whom laws of physics were merely advisories he could ignore. HAARP uses secret technology based on Tesla’s notes stolen by the military….
Sorry – I’m making myself ill
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