Recently Majorie Taylor Greene has been ridiculed for suggesting that "they" can control the weather. Did you know there are a number of US patents for methods to control the weather? For example US20030085296A1 is a patent for Hurricane and tornado control device.
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Trader | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ111 | |
| 2 | Ṁ111 | |
| 3 | Ṁ46 | |
| 4 | Ṁ33 | |
| 5 | Ṁ27 |
People are also trading
@WilliamGunn I think you’re on to something. I think there’s a false equivalency suggested in the resolution criteria between controlling the weather (MTG) and influencing the weather, like cloud seeding. Can we make a secondary market about whether this question will be resolved by use of empirical means? I’m thinking 80% no.
This is in the FAQ for hurricanes..
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd-faq/
Under “Attempts to stop hurricanes in its track”
Pragmatically, no.
It would probably be a bad idea to stop the formation of hurricanes as we need the rain from them. Maybe if we could change the amount of flooding, and wind damage so they all become fast moving tropical storms that don’t cause much flooding that might be desirable. That level of control seems fairly far into the future, if at all possible, to do so economically. A prerequisite would be understanding and predicting tropical cyclones, and this is something that has been challenging for decades. Geoengineering applied to the atmosphere and oceans would more likely be a priority (and this is becoming less taboo).
It might be possible a combination of advances in a variety of fields such as quantum computing, AI, big data analytics (the amount of data that is going into weather models is on an exponential curve upwards), and expansion of space and in-situ networks for atmospheric and ocean monitoring (satellites, drones, etc) might make this possible in an utopian world, but given the realities of what I expect for the next few decades (we can’t even get the necessary funding for critical climate projects now) this seems extremely unlikely.
Suppose you put a big mirror or lens in space and used it to focus lots of solar radiation at or near the formation site.
Do I think you would be able to control the effects? I have no idea.
Do I think it would have much effect? Quite possibly not much, but we could always add more mirrors or lenses.
Do I think there would be absolutely no effect if enough / large enough mirrors lenses used? No.
Do I think it would be worthwhile and sensible? Probably not at present.
Suppose all these thoughts were accepted by majority of voters. How should people vote on the poll?
Yes because there is some effect even if not really significant, controllable or worthwhile?
Or no because in practice we wouldn't know if it would give us enough control and the expense would be too great for it to be considered a viable proposition?
Without guidance on this, I think the formulation of "Is it possible to influence..." is just too vague and open to interpretation.
@ChristopherRandles Yeah, in a similar vein, I think using the world's entire nuclear arsenal would probably let you influence the formation in some way. I don't think that would be a good reason for this to resolve YES.