Weather Manipulation

[Rodri]

Hands up anyone who has heard of global warming?

Man-made changes to long term weather patterns have been happening for far longer than most people realise and are now happening on a scale that could completely upset the global balance and cause huge disruption to human society.

Read the Bible. Israel was a productive land with orchards and vineyards at the time of Jesus Christ. Remember that this was at a time before complex engineering and the ability to pump water from underground aquifers.
The fertile crescent, the birthplace of modern civilisation is where agriculture was first developed. The area of the fertile crescent was from Israel through Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. This is where most of the cereal crops and domesticated animals came from. These areas are now mostly dessert.

What does this suggest to you?

To me it's pretty obvious that there has been some pretty radical climate change in those areas that has led to them becoming hot, dry desserts. Some of that climate change may have been natural but I also think that much of it was brought about by the human population and their activities. Tree clearing to make room for cropping and grazing, as well as firewood and building material collection is the major problem in that case.

We are still doing the same things today but on a much larger scale now. Huge areas of rainforest are cleared every day and becomes grazing land for cattle or oil palm plantations. Much of the carbon locked up in those forests is re-gassed by burning-off and enters our atmosphere. Meanwhile, cattle pump out ever increasing amounts of methane gas, another greenhouse gas, so we can have a Big Mac.

But let's just look at the more immediate affects of tree clearing.

On a hot day, is it hotter in the shade of trees, or hotter on an open piece of ground?
Of course it is hotter on open ground and that heat is either reflected back into the air or goes into the soil and is slowly given back off into the air. A Forrest canopy absorbs sunlight and heat to generate the energy required for tree growth. It also shades the soil from direct sunlight, thus keeping soil temperatures lower.

Now hands up who has heard of transpiration? Anyone? No-one?

Transpiration is a process that occurs in all plants as a part of the process of photosynthesis (that's a big word, isn't it boys and girls? pho-to-synth-es-is). Basically the process of transpiration is the absorption of air, from which carbon-dioxide is broken down to produce a carbohydrate and the extra oxygen is expired back into the atmosphere. But along with that oxygen, water and some other chemicals are also expired. It has been found that those chemicals help in the process of cloud formation and rain making.

The short version is, rainforests help make rain.

Bare ground on the other hand can become super heated in direct sunlight and much of that heat is given back into the air, even after dark. Clouds moving over an area of bare ground are forced higher into the atmosphere by the heat given off by that bare ground. This can have a couple of different effects. Either no rain will fall in that area or the clouds are pushed so high that ice particles begin to form, which then become hailstones, which then fall to earth with sometimes devastating consequences.
The hailstorm events are rare. Reduced rainfall is common. Land becomes less productive and that means more land needs to be cleared to produce the same amount of food.

There are many other activities of mankind that are having an affect upon our climate. This was just one example. Chinese government weather experiments hold much less menace to me than the simple truth that we are all helping to permanently change our climate just by living a normal western lifestyle.