Why not change the weather?

Rubberstamper

Been looking at this stuff on the internet. Now Hurricane Bill is on its way over the Atlantic.
Why don't we do like the Chinese did for the Summer 2008 Olympics and try to change the weather? They managed rain to clean the air before the athletics and managed to keep it mostly dry for the remainder. They think it's important enough to put billions into their ministry for weather modification. The Russians have been at it for years apparently. That's how they avoided the Chernobyl fallout in 1986. I remember the weather system headed over Scandinavia, and then over us. There's all that stuff about chemtrails, blah blah. But the Australians have been at it too.

I know in the West weather modification is not supposed to work. But then the strangest thing happened at the beginning of the Republican convention in the run up to the Presidential elections. A hurricane went screaming into the Gulf of Mexico, headed straight for New Orleans. Bush got to be away from the convention (embarrassment avoided) and got to be nice and sensitive, the way he wasn't with Katrina. Mk II was the perfect storm, almost. The right place, at the right time.

We have been blasted by rain and wind for the last 4 years (since October 2006); the Gulf Stream is either on top of us or below us every summer, why not try to deflect some of these storms above us or at least not rain on us? With Global Warming hotting up, maybe some kind of direct action is required?

karlog

I have a feeling that sort of thing would cost money.

So it probably wont happen.

M.T. Cranium

We're talking about different scales of weather modification here, that's why.

The examples from China and Russia, which may be disputed (not my main area of interest) are local modifications of existing weather patterns, like suppression or intensification of local showers.

Nobody has any technology to change large-scale weather patterns and systems the size and strength of a hurricane. Proposals have been made but they are all extremely expensive, and nobody in meteorology is even sure if they would have an effect.

It's bound to happen one day, but I expect this to be 50-100 years into the future, at a minimum. Costs (and technology) would be astronomical. It would be cheaper to improve responses at this point.

Russians have always claimed some success in hail suppression which is a relatively small-scale technology of bombarding storm cells with the right mix of chemicals to inhibit ice formation. I hadn't heard about the Chernobyl example, what was done there? I thought the radiation from Chernobyl spread mostly to the west because of the random circumstance of the weather pattern that happened to be in place when the reactor blew up. And wasn't there a pretty significant impact on Belarus and the nearby parts of the Ukraine and Baltic states? So I'm wondering, what did they do to improve the outcome?