A Place to Stand

this winter, the mayor of Moscow promises to keep it from snowing. For just a few million dollars, the mayor's office will hire the Russian Air Force to spray a fine chemical mist over the clouds before they reach the capital, forcing them to dump their snow outside the city. Authorities say this will be a boon for Moscow, which is typically covered with a blanket of snow from November to March...

The air force will use cement powder, dry ice or silver iodide to spray the clouds from Nov. 15 to March 15 - and only to prevent "very big and serious snow" from falling on the city, said Andrei Tsybin, the head of the department. This could mean that a few flakes will manage to slip through the cracks. Tsybin estimated that the total cost of keeping the storms at bay would be $6 million this winter, roughly half the amount Moscow normally spends to clear the streets of snow...

The idea came from Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who is no stranger to playing God. In 2002, he spearheaded a project to reverse the flow of the vast River Ob through Siberia to help irrigate the country's parched Central Asian neighbors

Full article here. Now that is what the world needs. A few politicians willing to try some progressive big engineering projects. The northern river reversal project is a, slightly less ambitious, version of my project for greening central Asia.

The Chinese have also used cloud seeding to produce desirable weather during the Olympics.

Cloud seeding is not a magic wand, it will not produce rain where there is no excess water in the atmosphere, but the statistics prove it does work.

The results indicated increased rainfall. Compared to the non-seeded cells, the seeded clouds increased in height by 7%, rainfall coverage increased by 43%, duration of storms increased 36%, and volume of rain increased 130% (Rosenfeld and Woodley, 1993).

However so strong is the Luddite movement here that people who accept tiny variations in very small surveys (ie well within the limits of statistical variation) as proving the dangers of passive smoking, eating margarine, not eating margarine etc but refuse to accept proof from massive studies of the hormesis theory that low level radiation does no harm also find the statistics of cloud seeding producing rain unproven.

For that & other "environmental" reasons it doesn't happen here. Once again we see that just because the western countries are retreating from even developed technologies much of the world is less backward.

Labels: International politics, Science/technology