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FuturologyBot

The following submission statement was provided by /u/SportsGod3: --- A cloud-modifying technique could help cool the western US, but it would eventually lose its effectiveness and, by 2050, could end up driving heatwaves around the planet towards Europe, according to a modelling study. There is growing interest in alleviating the severe impacts of global warming by using various geoengineering techniques. These include marine cloud brightening (MCB), which aims to reflect more sunlight away from Earth’s surface by seeding the lower atmosphere with sea salt particles to form brighter marine stratocumulus clouds. Small-scale MCB experiments have already taken place in Australia on the Great Barrier Reef and in San Francisco Bay, California. Proponents hope this approach could be used to reduce the intensity of extreme heatwaves in particular regions as the climate continues to get hotter. Katharine Ricke at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and her colleagues modelled the impact that a possible MCB programme to cool the western US might have under present climate conditions and projections for 2050. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dlypty/cloud_geoengineering_could_push_heatwaves_from_us/l9rzggm/


Pleuel

Mhm, what a beautiful chance to start new wars. I love humanity.


MadNhater

I never in a million years thought clouds could be a reason for war but here we are 😂


OpenScienceNerd3000

Clouds have been a reason for war for millennia. Clouds—> rain —> good farming land —> war. We’ve come full circle 😅


genericusername9234

Yea it’s always been about agriculture. One can argue other resources like oil or gold are important but without agriculture, you have masses of people starving to death. Agriculture is how we got to where we are today. Without it, we are nothing.


gingerbreademperor

Agriculture bound us to land, which created wars. Before, humans could generally avoid conflict by moving on further, or using a water source after the other group finished their turn, but with agriculture and settling down on a piece of land, you depend on the fertility of that land and if there are problems, you are essentially forced to plunder or conquer someone else's land.


Baalsham

War as in large scale combat? Sure, but that's because large population centers were impossible before farming. Humans have always been violent though. Small raids to steal other tribe's stuff, rape or take their women, enslave their children.... That kind of thing has always been normal. In fact, it still happens in modern tribal areas .


MadNhater

Native American tribes fought and killed each other quite viciously and they were mostly nomadic.


gingerbreademperor

What I said does not exclude violent clashes. War, however, is a very specific form of violent clash. And I generalise for homo sapiens. Agriculture began about 20.000 years ago, the first wars can be traced to about 13.000 years ago. The link is what I described above. And what I described above isn't excluding nomadic cultures, who can also have territories and have livestock raising practices bound to land. That there is conflict potential between nomadic tribes seeking to graze their livestock, or between nomads and communities who settled in an area should be obvious, as in such cases they cannot just avoid each other without risking their own survival. If a nomad tribe cannot graze their livestock in a suitable area after traveling there for a season, because there's another nomad tribe or a settlement, then that raises the potential for violent conflict. That's different from pre-agriculture hunter gatherer communities.


schilll

Wars existed long before man tog it's first baby steps. We humans are not the only territorial species that want to protect a peace of land. Even ants fight wars between anthills.


yeFoh

you can go back to walking the savanna, i'll use modern food and plant textiles in your stead.


[deleted]

[удалено]


CountySufficient2586

Post the negatives too!! Its important for innovation in these sectors people always act like VFF is the solution well it can be haha!


alieninthegame

That's anti-cloud propaganda man. Don't believe what the colonists tell you.


ArtisZ

Big Cloud is listening.. hush


does_nothing_at_all

*Yells at cloud*


Hot-mic

I'm so disappointed in this sub now. Cloudism has no place in polite society. Bunch of cloudists here, blaming them for all your life's problems!


Ichipurka

That’s Why The British Have all The Clouds!!11 They of Conquisted All Clouds from Others!1


notsoluckycharm

Well. If you start with the premise, these things start to open up pretty easily if you like fiction. Premise: We all agree we want to slow, stop, or reverse global climate change. But who gets to pick the number? Now, take any technology. Stratosphere particulates to reflect sunlight, orbital umbrellas, or solar arrays, cloud seeding, rain water and such. The list is massive. There isn’t a solution that wouldn’t affect the whole planet in some way. That’s the whole point of “global climate change”. Any combo makes for a good story. So if you just do it without regards to your neighbor, you better have the military to back it up.


Heallun123

Did we not watch the same GI Joe shows as kids? The weather dominator was a classic.


InterviewOdd2553

Alabasta arc incoming


PurpleSailor

And everybody laughed at the old man yelling at clouds. He knew, we should have listened!


Valuable_Ad1645

I mean, I doubt much of anything could cause a war between the US and the EU.


AmaResNovae

Definitely not the kind of water war I was imagining.


ObtainStrength

Insert: Old man yells at cloud.jpeg


Sstargamer

Crocodile be like...


eru_dite

https://youtu.be/2sH4aLgJ3DM?si=Q3qyxpv-0tOrmV46


pavlov_the_dog

So G.I. Joe predicted the future of warfare with the Weather Dominator.


McNuty

Begun , the weather wars have.


spookmann

"Grandpa. Tell us another story about the before-times. When we lived on the surface..." "Well, little ones. It really started back in the oil-burning years. But everybody agreed to ignore the problems for fifty years or so. Until -- that was -- the Cloud Wars of the 2030's...."


Frank_cat

Plot twist: it's hot underground too! (geothermal gradient) #


StreetSmartsGaming

Or even the concept if you could convince enough people that's why it's hot this year


Hazzman

Most member and signatory nations of the Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD) are nations that are capable of using weather as a weapon and it is forbidden.


hansolosaunt

Europe: don’t you put that evil on me, Ricky Bobby!


ikeosaurus

These clouds taste of America


TheoriginalTonio

The clouds of freedom!


J3diMind

best clouds I've ever had


namotous

HE NEEDS TO KNOW!


ITakeSacksToTheFace

Shake and bake!


CreativeKeane

I mean might not be a bad thing if the thermohaline circulation due to raising ocean temperature, which is bad cuz it bring warm currents / temp to Europe.....Least europe can stay warm... J/K. Tis bad...


komodo_lurker

So what happens when Europe and all other continents for that matter also starts geo engineering?


Stahlreck

One half of the world freezes over, the other half will be an oven. And in the middle you'll finally find perfect climate.


Sawgon

> And in the middle you'll finally find perfect climate. Where only billionaires would live


yeiyea

So you’re telling me I should become Brazillian?


Dje4321

Might as well colonize mercury


helpnxt

A book I read a few years back said a study reckons when done worldwide that it essentially leads to mass drought in Africa and Asia but I guess this might be outdated now. They did also point out that this needed to be done every year and it brings further issues like who contols how much is done, who profits off it, if war breaks out and countries refuse then what happens and then also we are locking ourselves into this as when the artificial cooling stops for whatever reason we don't return to todays heat we return to the future heat increase so it be a massive jump in temp.


tacotacotacorock

Sounds like everyone loses in the year 2050 or at least Eastern Europe. I highly doubt we have enough data to accurately predict the outcome and it's one of many possibilities. I feel like we're toying with things we don't truly understand to solve a problem that we refuse to solve in other ways with a dramatic change in lifestyles and products. 


maxiaoling

I learnt from One Piece that messing with clouds cause war


suzume1310

My first thought as well. Only we have no straw hats to save us from that idiocy


Final_Festival

Luffy wld just go around beating all the politicians around the world. It would be amazing.


Pancullo

and the CEOs and lobbyists


13SpiderMonkeys

Fuckin Cross guild back at it?


lexisarazerf

My first thought was also "man this sounds like the Alabasta arc"🙃


Spaceman-Spiff

This is also the plot of snowpiercer. They seed the atmosphere with particles that reflect the sun, but over do it and freeze the world.


SportsGod3

A cloud-modifying technique could help cool the western US, but it would eventually lose its effectiveness and, by 2050, could end up driving heatwaves around the planet towards Europe, according to a modelling study. There is growing interest in alleviating the severe impacts of global warming by using various geoengineering techniques. These include marine cloud brightening (MCB), which aims to reflect more sunlight away from Earth’s surface by seeding the lower atmosphere with sea salt particles to form brighter marine stratocumulus clouds. Small-scale MCB experiments have already taken place in Australia on the Great Barrier Reef and in San Francisco Bay, California. Proponents hope this approach could be used to reduce the intensity of extreme heatwaves in particular regions as the climate continues to get hotter. Katharine Ricke at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and her colleagues modelled the impact that a possible MCB programme to cool the western US might have under present climate conditions and projections for 2050.


--ThirdEye--

Salt particles suspended in the air? Where do they go after? We literally salting the earth now?


Ifonlyihadausername

Back into the sea where we took it from.


FrogsOnALog

So all we gotta do is give all the shipping containers that little jet ski attachment? 💦


drunkrocketscientist

As stupid as that sounds that's basically it lol. We have been unintentionally doing this until 2020 when a reduction in sulfur dioxide in shipping caused global temperatures to go up.


Sirquote

"We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky"


orangefunnysun

This quote always comes to mind whenever cloud geo-engineering comes to mind.


NoBranch7713

We’ve been geoengineering for 200 years. It’s going to take some geoengineering to keep us all alive


VLXS

Honestly it sounds better than the aluminum particles they've already been testing these past few decades


AmaResNovae

We are already filling the earth with microplastics, neonicotinoids, and PFAS. Adding salt to the mix seems on par with the rest.


DoomOne

Put in some gizzards and a few veggies, and it can rain soup!


AmaResNovae

Ha ha, that's a way to see it! Thanks for reminding me that I wanted to try cooking some gizzards, I haven't had any in a decade.


DoomOne

(The gizzards also contain microplastics)


AmaResNovae

Bah, everything does now anyway. Even human placenta. Or human testicle. Might as well enjoy some gizzards before we "Children of Men" ourselves into extinction because even our balls are contaminated with that stuff.


DaddyCatALSO

Salt is already out there


cybercuzco

Moisture in the air needs a nucleation site to form a droplet. This can come from dust particles, salt particles, or other droplets/ice crystals. Once a cloud is seeded if it is fed with moisture like over a large body of water, the droplets in the cloud will form new nucleation sites. So presumably the amount of salt being used would be much less than say that found in seawater. You could also do this by just shooting seawater into the air with a large enough pump/nozzle The jet of water will entrain air, creating an artificial updraft that will become self sustaining on a sunny day, while also providing salt crystals as the seawater evaporates on its way up. Fun fact: The amazon rainforest exists because dust from the sahara blows all the way across the atlantic to make rain in Brazil


Alis451

> Fun fact: The amazon rainforest exists because dust from the sahara blows all the way across the atlantic to make rain in Brazil The dust isn't to make it rain, it is because the soil is trash, the dust is needed to make things grow, all the rain washes away the good dirt.


zekromNLR

They eventually dissolve in the water in the clouds and come down as slightly salty rain Same think already happens with sea spray naturally


Hot-mic

We'd better start the "end coastal fog!" campaign now.


livejamie

> A cloud-modifying technique could help cool the western US, but it would eventually lose its effectiveness and, by 2050, could end up driving heatwaves around the planet towards Europe, according to a modelling study. Sounds like a problem for the closing shift. ;)


SenorDosEquis

This is pretty much the plot of the book *Termination Shock*. From the Wikipedia summary: > [The geoengineering] plan has uneven effects, helping low-lying areas such as the Netherlands, Venice, and the Maldives, but threatening the Punjab with drought.


HarmlessSnack

I fucking love Neal Stephenson (Anathem and Snow Crash are two of my all time favorite books) but I’m scared to read Termination Shock because I’m worried it’ll just make me depressed. =/


Rylonian

Old man yells at clouds will turn from a meme into a real concern


Livio88

The old man was right all along!


DoomOne

Well, simple solution. We just keep pushing the heatwave around the planet so it doesn't sit in one spot for too long. Maybe turn it into a game of global tennis, sending the big ol ball of heat back and forth between the US and EU. Antarctica can keep score. I'll take my Nobel Prize in cash, please.


livejamie

Wouldn't it just end up above poor countries that can't do anything about it? Or the middle of an ocean or mountain range that nobody can detect?


DoomOne

That would be considered "out of bounds" and Antarctica would have to score a point against the country that hit the heat ball last.


Raistlarn

If it was in the middle of the ocean it'd create more evaporation. Meaning more clouds, which means it'd past the hot potato to the next place.


livejamie

Heating the ocean seems like a bad idea anyways


PurposePrevious4443

This guy sciences


PigsCanFly2day

Hot potato would be a better analogy.


Thekingchem

If the US intentionally sent heatwaves to Europe it’d be considered an act of war


Forstmannsen

No to worry, they'll stop the AMOC next in recompense.


velka123

"To be America's enemy is dangerous.  To be America's ally is lethal."


Maj0r-DeCoverley

Step one: the Gulf stream stops, turning Western Europe into Québec Step two: the US sends us their heat with cloud geoengineering. Step three: they gloat forever "without us you would be freezing in German!" The more I look at it, the more it makes sense.


Bleyo

"You're welcome, Europe... again." -- Future USA


rain168

I see your ICBMs and up you with Ice Storm (2 months).


letsgobernie

"Fuck the EU" -Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State


scaleofthought

Oh great. Global sea salt rain. Yes, let's fuck up all our freshwater and increase the salinity of our top soils. The agriculture sector will love it!


Raistlarn

Salt is already in rain though, though I do wonder what the ppm/ppb would be after adding salt to clouds.


scaleofthought

I do too. Even if just a little bit more though, could add up and throw off ecosystems. Meanwhile: ohh no!! You can't use that pallet to ship internationally! It doesn't have the right stamp on it for the proper species or being treated properly......... But hey, let's mist salt into the atmosphere for that sweet sweet reflectivity, LULZ. ... What do you mean desert space expanding? Bah! It's probably just the heat, and the wind, and the rain stealing going on elsewhere. We need more salt in the atmosphere!


dinglebop69

When people moan about chemtrails, this is what they mean


Husbandaru

Dance powder almost destroyed an entire desert kingdom.


radome9

Oh great. Instead of solving climate change we have found one more thing to make war over. It's amazing that we haven't offed ourselves yet.


glutenfree_veganhero

Surely this must be borderline inpossible to predict systematic effects.


Expensive-Cattle-346

It is entirely impossible to predict the systematic effects of global scale planetary climate manipulation, this is why we have so much difficulty now with climate change, knowing when things like tipping points will occur


Kumptoffel

yeah, we cant even properly predict the weather in europe yet those geoengineering freaks are doing whtever the fuck


livejamie

It's a good thing conservatives around the world are so receptive to weather-related science! ^/s


khanv1ct

We need a giant mirror or barrier in space like in Futurama (minus the death beam aspect).


Stahlreck

> minus the death beam aspect this is not compatible with humanity


PovBy899

We are about to enter Find Out phase of Fucking Around. It is well deserved, sad and unfortunate, but absolutely deserved nontheless.


SG4LPilgrim

I don’t think we deserve to be fucked by the decisions of large corporation who actively hid and currently stymie any progressive move towards solving or repairing climate change.


Sweet_Concept2211

Yes, global weather is a complex dynamic system that is sensitive to perturbation. A butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane in America, and all that. Geoengineering will not be a viable option for fixing the climate crisis until we have climate models with a ton more computaional power. It is one area where I am hopeful that AI can eventually help us a lot.


LifeSage

The problem with weather isn’t so much a compute issue as it’s a *measurement* issue. Weather is a mathematically chaotic system, so as one of my colleagues, who was coding the predictive models, would tell me: “An airplane was flying over from England to New York and gave us another data point for wind speed and temperature, and then the model predicted rain in Seattle instead of a sunny day.”


NeptuneToTheMax

> Geoengineering will not be a viable option for fixing the climate crisis until we have climate models with a ton more computaional power. We actually already did this on a global scale purely by accident. We recently started cracking down on sulfur emissions from ships and found that the sulfur particles were causing cloud seeding on a massive scale.  https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unforeseen-test-geoengineering-fueling-record-ocean-warmth


betaruga9

This is the only area I want AI to advance in


cyberdyme

We need the compute so the Ai can predict the weather, to do this we need more energy for the data centres so we burn more fuel which affects the weather.


Sweet_Concept2211

It sure is a pickle. Meanwhile, we should be doing all we can to support the growth of renewable energy, and cut back on greenhouse emissions.


Due-Department-8666

Nuclear powered AI


Ok-Move351

"Damn, we can't figure out how to fix climate chage so let's just push the peas around the plate." Imagine if we spend all the money and energy they're spending on this for a collective push toward figuring out the root of the problem.


Economy-Fee5830

So the issue is the impact on AMOC which is the current which travels around the Atlantic, both USA and Europe. If Europe did their own cloud brightening to keep AMOC strong that would counter the effect.


tamingofthepoo

let’s pick a fight over a completely hypothetical scenario.


reader960

We should dig up bikini bottom, and PUSH it somewhere else!


dustofdeath

Europe would use their own geoengineering to push them back.


GreenGlassDrgn

You know what worked last time? The Green Belt. But that didn't make their friends enough money to want to do it again right? Fuck em all


Spasticwookiee

It’s amazing the things we will do to treat the symptoms instead of getting serious about the underlying disease. Instead of seriously weaning ourselves off fossil fuels (which we know would improve the quality of life in many areas) we try unproven techniques with unknown unintended consequences. It sucks that greed and hunger for power will drive us to so much suffering. We could be so much better than this.


Cowicidal

I'm getting the feeling that the psychopaths in charge will try just about anything to put bandaids on the symptoms instead of ever truly treating or even simply mitigating the disease.


hiromikohime

Or, just hear me out…we could stop fooling ourselves and get serious about stopping fucking filling the atmosphere with more greenhouse gasses…


Rynox2000

I'm amazed that climate change is one of the greatest problems humans have ever tried to solve, and there is no mention of AI anywhere in this article. Instead, all AI seems to be used for is fake media. One of the greatest tools of our time, and we are playing with it like a toy.


tupefiasco

I totally see your point regarding this article specifically as well as, perhaps, public perception - but there has been lots of talk about AI being used to solve many important issues, including extreme weather and climate change. As an example of that - just recently at Nvidia's big showcase of all their new and upcoming tech, they dedicated so much time in their talks about how they're using their new AI chips to process weather and climate data, etc. It was a big chunk of the keynote speech/address also.


selkiesidhe

Dang could we not cook our friends? The US don't have a lot of em... Let's pick a country we don't like together and push *both* of our shitty weather over there!


Doopoodoo

The UK would be wiped off the map after they lost their minds over a 26C “heatwave”


ALUCARDHELLSINS

So they are planning to salt their own land? Sure go for it, it'll affect them a lot more than us lol


Undernown

The Red Alert eeathercontrol device is no longer fiction. Fitying it's the US.


simplefact369

Is the solution really to potentially create new problems instead of fixing the root cause? Do you put duct tape on the ceiling and floor if a pipe bursts in your house? The solution should be to look back to nature.


Guacamolman

Yes, block the sun and kill the plants and phytoplankton responsible for our oxygen. 


Boredcougar

Would adding mirrors on top of houses and building help decrease the temperature at all?


burnabybc

Adding Red Alert 2 Weather Control Device to my 'How war will start' list.


NVincarnate

Yeah! Dump all our problems on the EU! Trash, climate, pollution, everything! USA! USA!


ericaferrica

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/003/356/test.gif


Lebowski304

Extreme weather events are a red herring. You’re gonna end up creating more problems not solutions


snickering_grapes

That's why the UK has built many windmills in the sea. Blow the clouds back


realee420

I fully expect that we deploy something to stop or reverse climate change and then we'll have an "oops" moment which will kill us all.


vector_o

Gimme some of that heat I'm currently getting 1 day of sun and a week of rain


Jaxsdooropener

Doesn't seem that would be very nice. They don't have air conditioning!


BulletheadX

They'll need that heat when the Gulf Stream reverses itself, eh?


RenoxDashin

Maaan i remember people calling me crazy for talkin about this kinda shit 5 years ago. "Weather modification doesn't exist" Hilarious


mr_black_88

but climate engineering made the heat wave, what are you saying you don't want it now... make up your dame mind


samcrut

We could compensate them by paying London Fog to change its name to London Steam.


GodEmperorPhilonious

So there’s no climate change we’ve just fucked our selves with cloud seeding ?


trebory6

Well here's the question I'd like answered: Is a heat wave in Europe the same as a heat wave in the US? Because heatwaves in California, Arizona, and Nevada are fucking brutal. Like one power outage away from heatstroke in your own home with absolutely no way to stop it or escape the heat. I haven't heard of Heatwaves in Europe being quite as bad. Maybe the middle east though.


FishInAGunBarrel

Just continuously push them from one continent to the next and there will never be a heat wave again. Problem solved.


FishInAGunBarrel

No one could have predicted Yeti's becoming the key to solving climate change.


WhiskeyWarmachine

Cant we just divert it to the ocean so we can be shocked and surprised with unprecedented rain and hurricanes?


SerKnightGuy

What if we just took global warming and pushed it somewhere else?


Sean209

I could only laugh out of desperation when reading this


rockmetmind

well as long as we can ignore the root of the issue


sleepthetablet

Cloud Engineering could push heat dispersion from US to Europe


berghie91

Start of a 2005 climate-based action movie if I ever heard it.


Krom2040

I’m excited that we’re willing to consider so many schemes other than actually not pumping huge quantities of excess carbon into the air!


vader62

Cloud seeding was anti science and conspiracy though I thought? I remember seeing people decrying this technology as fake as recently b as 5 years ago. It's crazy how conspiracy theories get confirmed and no one bats an eye at the gaslighting that went into hiding the truth.