spinning clouds, turning to the songs of our waste
pouring with poisons squeezed from grey ignorance
affecting and transforming to a speed only light sees
embracing what physical matter not consciously serves
the world is changing toward a different being
and human weatherveins turn red aware

It’s time to put our heads together and fix the weather problem

Fires in California, hurricanes in Florida, floods in China and Bangladesh, drought in Australia and it’s all because of the weather. We can fix anything, right? We put men on the moon, we bring men back from the moon, we build buildings that pierce the sky and revolve on their own axis, we make new islands in the sea and we dig canals and change the geography of the world. How come we do nothing about the weather?

New project

Let’s initiate a new project to conquer the weather. We start by taking a couple of Personal Loans and buying a modest TV set and we keep it permanently tuned to the CNN or some other weather channel. Bad weather news starts around May and June when temperatures heat up. A hurricane is born somewhere east of Japan and sets out in a westerly direction, destination Florida. Now is the time to act.

The Bad Weather Response Team

The BWRT swings into action, sends up a squadron of weather planes to examine the situation and decides on the best action to change the course of the hurricane or to drive it out to sea or bomb it out of existence.

Here’s another example. The temperature in California moves into the 90s on its way to the 100s. Fire alarm threat! The BWRT zooms up north, gets hold of some cool air and drives it south towards California and staves off the extreme temperatures.

There has to be way…

These examples sound frivolous, but some weather control must be possible. Israel solved a potential drought problem this past winter by seeding clouds. This is old technology, the main problem being how to make sure you get the right sort of clouds to seed when you need them.

Watching the floodwaters hitting the coast of Louisiana a few years ago was heartbreaking. Why was it not possible to divert that disastrous hurricane? It moved so slowly, almost as though begging someone to do something.

Man proposes

There is not much that man has not learned to control on this planet. We actually manage to do some amazing things. But along comes the weather and we stand petrified and helpless in the face of its unbelievable power. Remember the 2004 tsunami, the loss of 225,000 people in eleven countries, the 30 meter high waves? We watched and could do nothing. What’s worse is that we cannot even manage to get the survivors back on their feet, but that’s another story.

It’s time

It’s time to stop spending these huge amounts of money on arms and weapons and direct our attention and resources to the subject of weather control. I’m sure we have the brains and capability of doing something. Perhaps it’s the enormity of the challenge that’s put us off doing something and concentrating on lesser projects. At the moment, the world’s attention is focused on weaning ourselves off oil and we are pushing the development of solar energy to the outer limits. But, Gentlemen, if the sun don’t shine, there won’t be no solar energy. There’s another project for you. It’s time to get our act together!

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That has not happened. The House has passed a climate bill that is not as strong as needed, but is a start. There are doubts about whether the Senate will pass any bill, given the reflexive opposition of most Republicans and unfounded fears among many Democrats that rising energy costs will cripple local industries.

The problem, when it comes to motivating politicians, is that the dangers from global warming — drought, famine, rising seas — appear to be decades off. But the only way to prevent them is with sacrifices in the here and now: with smaller cars, bigger investments in new energy sources, higher electricity bills that will inevitably result once we put a price on carbon.

Mainstream scientists warn that the longer the world waits, the sooner it will reach a tipping point beyond which even draconian measures may not be enough. Under one scenario, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, now about 380 parts per million, should not be allowed to exceed 450 parts per million. But keeping emissions below that threshold will require stabilizing them by 2015 or 2020, and actually reducing them by at least 60 percent by 2050.

That is why Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — no alarmist — has warned that “what we do in the next two or three years will determine our future.” And he said that two years ago.

Advocates of early action have talked about green jobs, about keeping America competitive in the quest for new technologies, and about one generation’s moral obligation to the next. Those are all sound arguments. They have not been enough to fully engage the public, or overcome the lobbying efforts of the fossil fuel industry.

Proponents of climate change legislation have now settled on a new strategy: warning that global warming poses a serious threat to national security. Climate- induced crises like drought, starvation, disease and mass migration, they argue, could unleash regional conflicts and draw in America’s armed forces, either to help keep the peace or to defend allies or supply routes.

This is increasingly the accepted wisdom among the national security establishment. A 2007 report published by the CNA Corporation, a Pentagon-funded think tank, spoke ominously of climate change as a “threat multiplier” that could lead to wide conflict over resources.

This line of argument could also be pretty good politics — especially on Capitol Hill, where many politicians will do anything for the Pentagon. Both Senator John Kerry, an advocate of strong climate change legislation, and former Senator John Warner, a former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, say they have begun to stress the national security argument to senators who are still undecided about how they will vote on climate change legislation.

One can only hope that these arguments turn the tide in the Senate. Mr. Kerry, Mr. Warner and like- minded military leaders must keep pressing their case, with help from the Pentagon and the White House. National security is hardly the only reason to address global warming, but at this point anything that advances the cause is welcome.

Five U.S. Patent and Trade Office patent applications, made public on July 9, propose slowing hurricanes by pumping cold, deep-ocean water in their paths from barges. If issued, the patents offer 18 years of legal rights to the idea for Gates and co-inventors, including climate scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Hurricanes, most famously demonstrated by the deadly intensification of Hurricane Katrina before its landfall in 2005, draw strength from warm waters on the ocean’s surface. The patents describe a system for strategically placing turbine-equipped barges in the path of storms to chill sea surfaces with cold water pumped from the depths.

First requested by Gates and colleagues last year, the patents describe methods “not limited to atmospheric management, weather management, hurricane suppression, hurricane prevention, hurricane intensity modulation, hurricane deflection” to manage storms.

Given the scope of the applications, “I suspect these will have a lengthy stay in the examiner’s office. They are talking about some interesting issues here,” says patent expert Gene Quinn of IPWatchdog.com.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Caldeira declined to comment on the patents.

“The bottom line here is that if enough pumps are deployed, it is reasonable to expect some diminution of hurricane power,” says hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is not part of the patent effort. Cutting sea surface temperature by 4.5 degrees under the eye of a hurricane would actually kill a storm, he adds. “This would have to be done on a massive scale, but is still probably within the realm of feasibility.”

Says climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in State College: “Needless to say, there is a whole lot of skepticism about this among tropical meteorologists. But it’s not so ridiculous that I would actually dismiss it out of hand. There is certainly an important role of upper ocean mixing on tropical cyclone behavior.”

Ocean water quickly grows colder with depth, reaching temperatures of 28 to 37 degrees (salty ocean water doesn’t freeze at 32 degrees) about 500 feet down. The patents envision sail-maneuvered barges, with conduits 500 feet long, pumping warm water down to the depths and bringing cold water up. The average depth of the Gulf of Mexico is 5,300 feet.

“By cooling a region in the path of a hurricane (over 60 square miles), models suggest we could knock a half-a-category in wind speed out,” says Philip Kithil of Atmocean in Santa Fe, an ocean-pumping firm mentioned in Gates’ applications. “All the models indicate the path of the storm would be unaffected.”

In the average year, six hurricanes develop in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico in a season that officially extends from June 1 to Nov. 30. Over the past century, the annual cost of hurricanes to the USA has averaged about $10 billion, according to a 2008 Natural Hazards Review study. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina killed at least 1,800 people and caused at least $81 billion in damage.

“From a scientific and political standpoint, (the Gates plan) looks fanciful,” Quinn says. “But the physics is real and like a lot of things, the question is whether the damage you prevent is worth the money you would spend to develop something so massive.”

There are many opinions surrounding global warming. Climate researcher, Frances Moore, breaks them down with scientific evidence.

http://climate.weather.com/science/urban-legends/

Someday the U.S. military could drive a trailer to a spot just beyond insurgent fighting and, within minutes, reconfigure part of the atmosphere, blocking an enemy’s ability to receive satellite signals, even as U.S. troops are able to see into the area with radar.

“This scenario may not be far away,” says Defense Tech pal Sharon Weinberger in this month’s edition of the always-excellent Defense Technology International.

An engineer with Research Support Instruments in Princeton, N.J. recently completed the first phase of work for a U.S. Air Force sponsored project called Microwave Ionosphere Reconfiguration Ground based Emitter, or Mirage. (scroll down)

The work involves using plasma — an ionized gas — to reconfigure the ionosphere. Mirage would employ a microwave transmitter on the ground and a small rocket that shoots chaff into the air to produce about a liter of plasma at 60-100 km. (36- 60 mi.) in altitude, changing the number of electrons in a select area of the ionosphere to create a virtual barrier. Ionosphere reconfiguration offers two major applications of interest to the military: bouncing radars off the ionosphere, also known as over-the-horizon radar, and the ability to jam signals from the Global Positioning Satellite system, according to John Kline, the lead investigator for Mirage.

This work is only the latest effort in Kline’s more extensive investigations of atmospheric plasmas… Before Mirage, Kline had another contract for a project called Plasma Point Defense, which explored the possibility of using a plasma weapon on board a U.S. Navy surface vessel to protect against threats ranging from surface-to-surface missiles to mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

In the past, NASA’s fringe science arm has looked into tweaking Mother Nature, to throw hurricanes off their course. But those were just computer simulations. No one actually tried to go out a build some weather control machine.

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Scientists have found a way to bend lasers — and may use it to bend lightning as well.

A team led by Pavel Polynkin of the University of Arizona sent a special sort of laser beam — pulsed instead of steady, and asymmetrical so that one edge was brighter than the other — through a series of filters.

They found that the beam actually curved a bit, by about 5 millimeters (about 1/5 of an inch) over the total distance of 60 centimeters (2 feet).

“People expect lasers to do certain things, like propagate in a straight line,” Polynkin told Scientific American. “The fact that a laser beam actually curves is quite unusual.”

Since the laser pulses are so intense, they zap the air they pass though, leaving behind an ionized plasma trail. That trail might be conductive enough to form a natural pathway for lightning to travel along, points out Jérôme Kasparian at the University of Geneva.

Kasparian, who’s been trying to coax lightning from thunderclouds using straight plasma beams, thinks Polynkin’s curved beams could be used to divert lightning toward or away from specific targets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkLTzesBxGE

Todd S. Anderson used to keep his rain harvesting a secret

DURANGO, Colo. — For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with one of the most entrenched codes of the West.

Precipitation, every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that water were assigned a century or more ago.

Now two new laws in Colorado will allow many people to collect rainwater legally. The laws are the latest crack in the rainwater edifice, as other states, driven by population growth, drought, or declining groundwater in their aquifers, have already opened the skies or begun actively encouraging people to collect.

“I was so willing to go to jail for catching water on my roof and watering my garden,” said Tom Bartels, a video producer here in southwestern Colorado, who has been illegally watering his vegetables and fruit trees from tanks attached to his gutters. “But now I’m not a criminal.”

Who owns the sky, anyway? In most of the country, that is a question for philosophy class or bad poetry. In the West, lawyers parse it with straight faces and serious intent. The result, especially stark here in the Four Corners area of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, is a crazy quilt of rules and regulations — and an entire subculture of people like Mr. Bartels who have been using the rain nature provided but laws forbade.

The two Colorado laws allow perhaps a quarter-million residents with private wells to begin rainwater harvesting, as well as the setting up of a pilot program for larger scale rain-catching.

Just 75 miles west of here, in Utah, collecting rainwater from the roof is still illegal unless the roof owner also owns water rights on the ground; the same rigid rules, with a few local exceptions, also apply in Washington State. Meanwhile, 20 miles south of here, in New Mexico, rainwater catchment, as the collecting is called, is mandatory for new dwellings in some places like Santa Fe.

And in Arizona, cities like Tucson are pioneering the practices of big-city rain capture. “All you need for a water harvesting system is rain, and a place to put it,” Tucson Water says on its Web site.

Here in Colorado, the old law created a kind of wink-and-nod shadow economy. Rain equipment could be legally sold, but retailers said they knew better than to ask what the buyer intended to do with the product.

“It’s like being able to sell things like smoking paraphernalia even though smoking pot is illegal,” said Laurie E. Dickson, who for years sold barrel-and-hose systems from a shop in downtown Durango.

State water officials acknowledged that they rarely enforced the old law. With the new laws, the state created a system of fines for rain catchers without a permit; previously the only option was to shut a collector down.

But Kevin Rein, Colorado’s assistant state engineer, said enforcement would focus on people who violated water rules on a large scale.

“It’s not going to be a situation where we’re sending out people to look in backyards,” Mr. Rein said.

Science has also stepped forward to underline how incorrect the old sweeping legal generalizations were.

A study in 2007 proved crucial to convincing Colorado lawmakers that rain catching would not rob water owners of their rights. It found that in an average year, 97 percent of the precipitation that fell in Douglas County, near Denver, never got anywhere near a stream. The water evaporated or was used by plants.

But the deeper questions about rain are what really gnawed at rain harvesters like Todd S. Anderson, a small-scale farmer just east of Durango. Mr. Anderson said catching rain was not just thrifty — he is so water conscious that he has not washed his truck in five years — but also morally correct because it used water that would otherwise be pumped from the ground.

Mr. Anderson, a former national park ranger who worked for years enforcing rules and laws, said: “I’m conflicted between what’s right and what’s legal. And I hate that.”

For the last year, Mr. Anderson has been catching rainwater that runs off his greenhouse but keeping the barrel hidden from view. When the new law passed, he put the barrel in plain sight, and he plans to set up a system for his house.

Dig a little deeper into the rain-catching world, and there are remnants of the 1970s back-to-land hippie culture, which went off the grid into aquatic self-sufficiency long ago.

“Our whole perspective on life is to try to use what is available, and to not be dependent on big systems,” said Janine Fitzgerald, whose parents bought land in southwest Colorado in 1970, miles from where the pavement ends.

Ms. Fitzgerald, an associate professor of sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, still lives the unwired life with her own family now, growing most of her own food and drinking and bathing in filtered rainwater.

Rain dependency has its ups and downs, Ms. Fitzgerald said. Her home is also completely solar-powered, which means that the pumps to push water from the rain tanks are solar-powered, too. A cloudy, rainy spring this year was good for tanks, bad for pumps.

The economy has turned on some early rainwater believers, too. Ms. Dickson’s company in Durango went out of business last December as the construction market faltered. The rain barrels she once sold will soon be perfectly legal, but the shop is shuttered.

“We were ahead of our time,” she said.

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