Climate engineering on a large scale

[Hans de Vries]

I know there are cloud seeding technologies already but for me that's sh*t. Will we one day we able to control every aspect of weather all over the planet? Like controlling what temperature we want to have, how much rain and when/where should it fall, how much UV we want etc.

 

Coruscant from Star Wars (a gargantuan planet-sized multi-level megalopolis) had such a system. Personally I would like to see nice 20 degree Celsius weather in Sahara year round.

Edited April 4, 2015 by Hans de Vries

[swansont]

I know there are cloud seeding technologies already but for me that's sh*t. Will we one day we able to control every aspect of weather all over the planet? Like controlling what temperature we want to have, how much rain and when/where should it fall, how much UV we want etc.

Probably not. Precision control of chaotic/nonlinear systems is inherently problematic.

 

Coruscant from Star Wars (a gargantuan planet-sized multi-level megalopolis) had such a system.

That's science fiction, where you can write any scenario you like, and ignore the details.

[StringJunky]

Weather is caused by disequilibrium; remove that and you will remove the weather. Trying to create a cooler more temperate equator is not a good idea because you will upset the dynamics by not having a wide enough variation in temperature or will move weather systems to the detriment of other areas. The last thing we want is a globally stable atmosphere.

[Hans de Vries]

What are chaotic and non-linear systems?

[swansont]

What are chaotic and non-linear systems?

 

Things that do not respond linearly to a change in initial conditions, and are very sensitive to them — small changes in the initial conditions can give rise to widely varying result.

[EdEarl]

 

Climate engineering on a large scale

Climate engineering is different than weather engineering. We are engineering the climate as an unintended consequence of the industrial revolution, and weather patterns are changing, but the main variable we control is CO₂ level. We also add a little heat to the environment, but not much compared to the heat added by the Sun and Earth. We change the weather in many micro-environments, for example cities by clearing and building, but without precision. We are largely ignorant of how weather can be controlled.

 

Weather is affected by events that occur very fast, rather slow, and many time-scales between. For example, electric charges in rain clouds move very quickly, water molecules move slower, depending on their temperature and wind-blown velocity, rain drops move yet slower, and the cloud forms and moves even slower. The day-night cycle and yearly cycle are quite slow, but sun cycles and variations in Earths orbit also affect weather. I doubt we know how to write the equations to model weather for a location, and other surrounding locations affect each other; thus, one would have to model weather for the entire Earth to get any accuracy, and no computer network has sufficient power to calculate the weather anywhere near real time speed.

 

Even if such a computer existed, the random effects of quantum mechanics affect electrons (e.g., lightning), atoms, and molecules; thus, the process is chaotic and can never be modeled to perfection. Moreover, we can never build a computer large and fast enough to model everything that moves in a weather system, from roofs to electrons, and all the boundary conditions with things that do not move. Without a good model, we can not control weather accurately and weather forecasts are computerized guesses.

 

Predicting average temperature for a decade based on CO₂ levels is easy and fairly accurate. If we can control CO₂ levels, we can successfully engineer the climate, but not weather.