The Future of Weather: Part One

of silver. Eyah died in Microwaves. I'm Joe McCormick, I'm Lauren Bulck Obama, and our regular host Jonathan Strickland is not with us today since he is currently in the middle of the Pacific Ocean attempting to circumnavigate the globe in an old timey wooden bathtub, but in his stead, joining us today is our absolutely fantastic coworker, uh, former co host of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and the new host of Stuff of Life, which you're all very

excited about, Julie Douglas. Howdy, Thanks for having me. Yeah, yeah, thanks for being here. How you doing, Julie, Well, you know, I'm pretty good, pretty good. I'm excited about today's topic because, you know, one of my one of my flags in my back pocket is a bit of a futurist flag, is a bit of a what futurist flag that's not one that just rolls off the tongue, is it. It's

kind of a inturist flag, futurist flag, futurist flag, futurist flag. No, I can't tell her you're talking about a literal flag or you're just saying that you enjoy futurism topics. I enjoy futurist topics, and I do have a flag. You don't have flags in your back pocket proclaiming your interests. Only my interest in the Soviet Union. I suppose if by flags you mean cell phones, then yes, hey, we should get on topic. No, today we're going to be

talking about weather control. Uh, the issue that has come up on the video series before. Jonathan has done a video about it back in January and he's blogged about it a little. But I realized we've never done a full podcast episode on weather control. And just so you know in advance, this is going to be part one of a two part episode we're going to be doing on today's topic. So please after this one is over, join us next time for for the exciting conclusion of

the future of weather control. Yeah. Also, when we came to Julian said, hey, would you like to guess on our show while Jonathan is out she said, she said yes, and we were like, well, do you want to talk about a thing? Is there a thing that you would be interested in talking about? And you said weather control? And do you want to talk about why that is? Yeah, I'm reading a book by Lauren Redness. It's called Thunder

and Lightning Weather, Past, Present and Future. And um, some of your listeners may be familiar with her past project. It's called Radioactive Marie and Pierre Cure, A Tale of Love and Fallout, Yes, which is a bit like that. But it's it's amazing the way that she goes after a topic because she really overlays a massive amount of reportage and research, um. And then she kind of takes these illustrations and storytelling and history weaves them all together.

And she has done the very same for this book about whether. Yeah, and it's it's a gorgeous book. I mean it looks it looks like an art piece, not a nonfiction title. Um. And and there's no reason why those two things can't exist at the same time. Yeah, it's kind of I was thinking about this. It's like in a adult picture book, but in the very best ways. You know, somebody can take that the wrong way. Absolutely could take it the wrong way, But I don't mean

it that way. What I mean to say is that she she does exhaustive research and in reporting, like I said, but she also kind of slips in all of the scientific understanding there and then takes it to another level by illustrating the concepts. Yeah, Julie photocopied several pages for us, and I thought it was a blaster read. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

And one of the things she covers is this idea of weather control and the implications of that, and for her, this came up as a kind of uh side issue or complication and discussion about what we could do to counteract climate change, right right. And one of the examples that she covers is a technology called the strato shield. Now, strato shield, doesn't it I mean it just sounds great, right, You got the shot the strato shield up in the sky,

no worries. Yeah, But it also sounds like it could be a medical device, do you think, Yeah, like you got your pacemaker, you got your strate shield. I'm not quite sure what it does, the strato shield or the pacemaker that the internal strata shield. I like I like to think that it like Colins anxiety. What would this proposal do for for weather system? Well? This let me

I should mention that this is UM. This is from Nathan Mervold's company called I believe it's called Intellectual Ventures, and some of the listeners may be familiar with him. UH is known for sort of what people have called, you know, patent trolling. We've talked about Mervold on the podcast before. He's he does kind of eye catching technology proposals. Did Mirvold have something to do with the mosquito laser? Oh? So I'm glad that we could return to this topic

to get today. Even though we're not talking directly about insects, we still managed to tweak it in there. Yeah, if you want to hear about the mosquito laser, we did a podcast about that a while ago, something about our war against mosquitoes. You can look it up on the website. Yeah. And I mean, and that's not surprising, right because the company holds patents, so probability was you know, a couple of them are going to be great ideas and possibly

pan out, and you know, obviously they're in it for that. UM, but what they're interested in terms of global warming and climate change is solar radiation management to try to counter the effects of global warming. So essentially what we're talking about is bouncy some of the sunlight back into space to prevent it from entering the atmosphere and then warming

the atmosphere globally. So this would fall under the category of things we would call geoengineering solutions to global warming that say like, Okay, look, we're just not going to get people to stop polluting. Everybody's going to keep putting carbon in the atmosphere. There's nothing we can do about it. So instead, we've just got to find a way to counteract the warming with some kind of massive engineering projects. It's saying that essentially it's easier to stop the sun

than it is to get people to not drive as much. Yeah, yes, which is why geo engineering has gained in popularity as a field right over over the last couple of decades. But it's kind of a scary concept, didn't it. It is um because what you're essentially talking about is an eighteen mile high host to the sky held up by balloons like a string of pearls, pumps oud aerosolized sulfur dioxide. So these particles would then act as a shield and reflect back the sunlight back into space and then help

ameliorate some of the warming. Okay, it's a Mr. Burns kind of idea. It's putting an umbrella over the Earth to kind of help protect and block out some of that hated sunlight. Exactly. I can even hear him saying, like that sunlight, Well, what does he say? He's like, for years men has dreamed of destroying the sun, and

I have the perfect technology strata shield. So I mean, if you think about it, it actually is a very elegant solution, Okay, because we are talking about something that wid wise is like it's no bigger than a garden hose, and it's really cheap um. So you've got some pros there. My Myra Bold also claims that the amount of particles up there would not obscure or change anything measurably in terms of our perception of the skuys. He's still have

a sparkling blue sky. Um, And you could argue that this kind of device is just management of weather in earnest. In other words, we're changing the chemical composition of Earth's atmosphere, so why not just you know, take hold of it and take responsibility for it. So this would be the pros right. But of course, anything that has the power to affect the climate on a large scale also probably has the power to have some pretty devastating specific weather effects.

And we've talked about the difference between climate and weather on the podcast before. I like to use the analogy that climate is like a person's personality. Weather is like

their mood today. That's a perfect analogy. So you essentially would be creating a kind of I don't want to call it prozac, but some sort of mood altering drugs for the atmosphere that you would have turned on forever, right or definitely, because as soon as you change their circumstances, um, you would have to make sure that it would continue

to run. Yeah. Yeah, And we don't know what effects that could have on on weather patterns and you know, and and the climate in general over a long period of time, and whether whether it would be devastating or helpful or more or less harmless. That there's so many variables involved in the weather, yeah, which is in a way like the problems with this are kind of a microcosm of the whole topic. The problems with the whole topic, right, like,

how do you control something that's so wild? But the biggie is that it could be used as a weapon, oh, weaponized weather. Mr burns again, Well it is, yeah, weather control and weaponized. Since is the classic uh mustache twirling mega villain plot. You know, it's in the superhero the old superhero cartoons. What is the mad scientist always build? It's a weather control machine, of course it is, because why, I don't know, he hates earth and he's like, yes,

I'll send tornadoes against you. Well, and I think it's one of those things too, where it's like, well, well you have that technology. I would like to have that technology too. And I'm speaking as countries right, Like Canada is all of a sudden like whoa us so close? How about we have that too, just to ensure that, you know, we could control our own weather and then you know, certainly you could begin to really break some havoc with that. And we do have some examples of

this type of warfare in history. Yeah, And I think that's going to bring us to our central topic today. So so throughout the podcast, we're gonna be asking essentially how feasible is real technological weather control, like can we cajole the skies to bring rain to regions of drought or or dissipate tornadoes or throw tornadoes and hurricanes and lightning at our enemies, uh, and and just generally play gods over the weather and fur the work. Can we

do that without massively screwing up something somewhere else unintentionally? Yes? And that that is a very good point, because I think first we should start by looking at why exactly it is we're at the mercy of the weather, Like, why it's been so difficult to control the weather despite the fact that we've got all this great technological power that we can use to do other things with, you know,

big difficult projects. Why can't we just uh send a hurricane going the other way or do things like that. And I think there are two main answers to this problem. One of them is that weather events involve colossal amounts of energy, more energy than we realize. Because you know, you getta you getta some wind and some rain. You're like, well, you know, like a truck can hit me harder than the wind pushes me, so feasibly our technology should be

more powerful than the wind. Right, Well, but there's there's a lot more wind than there is truck. I think that's a very good way of doing it. I found a really good answer to this question in a piece written by the American meteorologist Chris Lancy. And he wrote this piece for the in O. A a s. Hurricane Research Division website, answering a question they apparently get a lot. People are always asking why don't we just nuke the tropical cyclones? You know there's a hurricane coming our way,

Why can't we just nuke it? We got nukes. Strangely enough, that was one proposed use of nuclear technology that we did not explore in our in our episode about Operation Plowshare. Oh yeah, they they you know we're gonna dig tunnels with nukes. Why can't we knw hurricanes? Lancy explains several reasons why this is not a good idea. We we will put aside for now the fact of of nuclear fallout,

and there's kind of obvious problems there. But but Lancy also points out that you've just got an energy problem. For example, he writes, a fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of five to twenty times ten to the thirteen watts and converts less than ten percent of the heat into mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a ten megaton nuclear

bomb exploding every twenty minutes. According to the nineteen ninety three World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of ten to the thirteen watts in nineteen ninety a rate less than twenty of the power of a hurricane. Oh, that's there's like a lot more wind than truck. Say, there's a lot more wind than truck. And furthermore so, it's not it's also not just a question of how much energy you can create, because we could just detonate a whole bunch of nuclear bombs and

that would in truth create a lot of energy. But you kind of need to use your energy in a particular way if you definitely want to stop a storm. For example, Lancy says, for normal atmospheric pressure, there are about ten metric tons of air bearing down on each square meter of surface. He's talking about in the ocean when tropical cyclones develop. Um, he says, in the strongest

hurricanes there are nine as opposed to ten. To change a Category five hurricane into a category to hurricane, you would have to add about half a ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion tons for a twenty kilometer radius. I it's difficult to envision a

practical way of moving that much air around. So there he's talking about there are specific problems of pressure that affect the formation of hurricanes tropical cyclones that turn into the hurricanes that we would want to deflect, and and we just don't have a way of putting the pressure

where it needs to be. Well, not's assuming a constant for that, right, Like it's like each hurricane is going to behave that way as a category five and assuming that whatever conditions that were arrived at were which were an average to be present. Um. And so as you know, I mean there's variables all the time. Yeah, And that leads us to the other things. So number one, there's there's a ton of energy. There's way more wind than truck.

And number two, weather is really complex and complex in the mathematical sense because if you ever wonder why the weather forecast for today and tomorrow is, you know, it can be wrong, but it's reasonably accurate but the ten day forecast just gets less and less accurate as it goes on and farther into the future. It's just a you know, it's a dice roll pretty much. And this

is because weather is chaotic and mathematically complex. Weather patterns are subject to tiny variations and perturbations and things like heat and pressure, which gets amplified over time, kind of like a swelling feedback loop and an amplifier. Uh yeah.

Forecasts work or or don't work, as the case may be, by creating digital simulations of the current state of the weather in a given location and then adding in data from surrounding locations and and just kind of seeing how that MUCKs everything up and making a good statistical, educated guess of which muck up is the most likely based on based on what we know about what has previously

happened under those kind of conditions. Um. So, you know, satellite and ground data can give us a pretty good idea of what's going on in a particular location at a given moment, but at our current state of technology, having all of that data almost hurts more than it helps, because there's just so many variables interacting with each other, so so basically You've got two factors that are making prediction difficult. You've got that the number of variables and

the sophistication and or accuracy of the simulation software. So more data is better, but it makes it harder on the software. Yeah, And to revisit Landsy again from from the same piece I was talking about earlier, he also talks about how it's it's difficult to predict the emergence of extreme weather events like hurricanes, because he says, for example, quote, attacking weak tropical waves or depressions before they have a

chance to grow into hurricanes isn't promising either. About eighty of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin, but only five become hurricanes in a typical year. And so the problem is, I mean, so you can see a depression start developing, but you just don't know which ones are going to be the problem ones because of these unstable effects, tiny variations get amplified over time, and that turns into a big storm or a big, big, big box of nothing. And either way, it's hard to

know in advance which it's going to be right. And you can try to manipure that. You can spend tons of energy and time and financial resources to do that, but that doesn't guarantee that it's going to create an outer eyewall, which it might do naturally. So it's kind of like the coin. Yeah. But despite the fact that whether is both very energetic and takes a lot of effort to control and very unpredictable, there have been plenty of ways throughout the past and up into the present

that people have tried to control the weather. I would say all of them kind of strange and iffy, some of them complete rubbish. Yeah. Lauren Redness has some illustrations of them actually in her book, and uh, they vary in nuttiness and effectiveness. Yeah. Yeah. One of the ones I wanted to talk about is hale cannons. If you'll ever seen these, I have not seen a hail cannon.

So this is generally considered complete pseudo scientific garbage. But the meteorological community they don't think that there's anything to this at all. But they are a supposed weather control device that's been used for a long time, more than a hundred years, maybe a couple hundred years, goes back into the you know, I found a report about it from nineteen o nine, used by whom, Who's who's running

around with hail cannons. So let's say you've got a vineyard or something, and you are afraid of hailstones damaging your grapes, and so you want to keep the grape safe, so you employ a grapes security guard. That's a terrible metaphor going nowhere. No, what you do is you get this thing that looks like a giant upturned megaphone, and you aim it up at the sky when there's an oncoming storm that you fear may bring destructive hailstones, and

then you set this thing a squawk in. I want to read a quote from one hail cannon manufacturer's website that I found. Yes, there are manufacturers today who will sell you these things, they say, quote. An explosive charge of a setylene gas and air is fired in the lower chamber of the machine. As the resulting energy passes through the neck and into the cone, it develops into a force that becomes a shock wave. The shock wave

clearly audible as a large whistling sound. It's got to be great to be one of these People's name rus by the way, then travels at the speed of sound. I like that it's a sound that travels at the speed of sound into and through the cloud formations above, disrupting the growth phase of the hailstones. The device is repeatedly fired every four seconds over the period when the storm is approaching and until it is passed through the area. What would otherwise have fallen as hailstones then falls as

slush or rain. From everything I've read, scientists think there's absolutely no good evidence that these things work. But it also works via the tiger repellent method, right, because like every time you see a cloud and use it and then it doesn't hail wo who proof that it works? A little confirmation bias? Yeah, yeah, And I think that a lot of these methods uh prove out in that in that way, in that well, it didn't happen, So either it was never gonna happen anyway, or this totally worked. Yeah,

there's always a little bit of uncertainty. Now there's a differ technology that's been used to control weather that I do think that there it's also uncertain, but there's a little bit more to it, and that's cloud seating, right. Yeah, I mean there's evidence that it works to what extent, though is still sort of the big question mark, right, because again, the cloud formations sort of happen on their own, and so people spend a tremendous amount of time and

effort to try to seed clouds. Now, I think most people are probably familiar with cloud seating from the Beijing Olympics um, which the Chinese government used to try to clear the skies before the big event. Yeah, they claimed that they had perfect weather for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics because they had they had drained the clouds of all their rain and sent it on unsuspecting cities nearby, right, and cleared out all the pollution as well.

But it actually historically has its roots as a practical application in Vietnam. And you mean in the Vietnam War, Yes, yes, excuse me, the Vietnam War um. But more specifically, in nineteen sixty three, there were some c i A and beds in Vietnam, and they were kind of worried about Buddhist monks who were protesting the South Vietnamese president, who

was an anti communist outlet of the United States. And so while they were keeping tabs on the monks, they noticed that the monks could withstand pretty much anything including like tear tear gas and other aggressive acts toward them, but as soon as the rain would fall, they would disperse.

That that kind of makes sense if you're doing a whole passive resistance thing, like if somebody is being cruel and aggressive to you, you can hang out and withstand what they're doing to you as an active you know, as an active resistance. But if it rains, I mean, that's not the enemy doing to you. Yeah, if and if you're underpants are damp, like, man, it's just time to go home. That's one of my Yeah, that's one of the creeds I lived by. So unless the sky

is your oppressor, which maybe, and that's a whole other thing. Yeah, that's another episode right there. That is so what So what happened with these with these months? The ci I was like always got something to report to you there. Bill uh sons out that if you could just make it rain, we could well we could do some stuff with this. And so the CIA said, okay, well let's

let's look into this whole rainmaking endeavor. And they found out you know, Nix, Kurt Bonnegut's brother Bernard, a physical chemist, figured out you could make a sacrifice to Jupiter. Yes, no, that's not it. Uh, well that too, but more specifically for cloud seating. He found out while working for g E at the time that silver dot iodide was the perfect cloud seating agent to really actually create precipitation. And so the military wasn't the story before that They tried

to use dry ice. Yeah, they tried a bunch of different stuff, and you know, and that's a big moment, right like you're like, no, it's silveriety, this is this is the thing, we are God's We're making rain. Um. So you know that the people in the government were probably like when can we use this? And so did they actually use it on the monks? Yes, they used it on the monks. They made it rain on the monks, and so they said, okay, maybe this actually has some

sort of military application. Okay, So what meteorologists think about that, I mean, do they do they say yes, they were definitely able to make it rain on the monks or or is it just kind of like, well maybe it worked, maybe it didn't. Again, maybe this is confirmation bias, right, like oh, if they're just happy to be a weather pattern that was supportive of these conditions, and it happened, but as far as I could tell, it looked like

it was working. And so and the Monk thing wasn't the only time during during the conflict in Vietnam that this was put into use. So that's just the taste, right, that was just like a proof of concept, right, And so they created Operation Popeye. Right. So the North Vietnamese government that this was famous. Have you ever heard about

the Ho Chi Minh Trail? And in the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese government was able to move troops and weapons and supplies up and down the length of Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was this network of roads and tracks and tunnels that went all all up and down to Vietnam and then across its border from Laos and Cambodia. And of course a rule of war is that if you can disrupt your enemies supply lines, you can often defeat them without having to outright destroy

their fighting force. But this was a massive system of roads and stuff, and and they tried bombing parts of it, but that wasn't effective at completely shutting it down. So another strategy that was tried by by the South Vietnamese and the in the America and troops was well, what if we could just kind of make it really hard to drive on exactly right like that, there was like this four part I guess walk onto I mean there's a lot of like there's a lot of hand and

bicycle delivery, I think. But so this this clandestine weather control operation to to basically flood out the Ho Chi Minh Trail and make it difficult or impossible to use via weather control was known as Operation Popeye YEP from March nine seven until July. They aim to quote increase rainfall sufficiently and carefully selected areas to deny the enemy

use of road surfaces. And this is according to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but they also looked at different areas and for instance, the Mujah Pass bridge used by North Vietnam for supply transport was bombed over and over again to no avail. But according to Ben Livingston, who's one of the pilots, it was easily washed out from cloud seating. In fact, the entire valley flooded in and

there are lives lost in that um. So essentially what this was doing, or the aim of it, was to extend the monsoon season over North Vietnam and viet Cong supply routes. Yeah, and that is assuming that the cloud seating actually worked, which it looked the people involved with it think that it did, right. Um, Yes and no. So Redness actually talks about this in the book, and she talks about in nineteen Senate hearing, and there's a hearing with Dennis Jay Dolan who is a Deputy Assistant

Secretary of Defense, and Lieutenant Colonel Ed Soyster. And I'm just gonna read their quotes here because I don't think anything is more illuminating than this. Um. According to Colonel Ed's uh Soyster quote, it was one of the most difficult parts of the project to try and quantify how well we were doing. And then Dulan says, in my own mind, on the basis of the material that I have seen, I'm not convinced that it had anything more than marginal effect. But that is something that even the

experts disagree on. And Dealing. Dealing goes on to say, Um that you know that thing said he would rather be stopped by a ringstorm than by bombs, so he felt like this was the more humane way to go about it. Yeah, there, there did seem to be that strain of thinking. But it's weird to me because, I mean, more people get killed by weather events than by bombs, and if you can make extreme weather events happen, that is in some ways sort of equivalent to dropping bombs.

You're causing large amounts of force to be applied to an area in a way that they wouldn't usually be applied, and probably a lot of people are going to die. Right, It's still with the truck wind thing, right, it can be catastrophic. Sure, it's like saying that sending a hurricane against somebody is more humane than sending a lot of trucks to run them over. Yeah. Yeah, there's a little bit of justification in the air perhaps. Okay, So hypothetically,

if this does work, how how does it work? Oh? Well, so, the basic ideas that clouds form naturally in the atmosphere out of water vapor and in order to induce rain or snow, you add a huge mass of tiny particles to the cloud. And what this does is it gives water droplets something to coalesce around. This is what happens in clouds often, you know, tiny particles that are suspended in the air will become the nuclei around which snow

crystals or water droplets form and then it rains. And so you can scatter them above or through the cloud from an airplane, or you can do the much cooler thing which China does and blast them into clouds with rockets. So you name an anti aircraft gun full of silver eyedide particles at a cloud, fire away, you murder the cloud with these tiny particles and then rains on your on your farmlands. Yeah, well, as long as they're still

explosions involved, I think that's really the important thing. If you're if you're not exploding people, then you still I mean, you've got to explode something, and it might as well be a cloud. Well, I find that it's fascinating that cloud seating. It's this thing that's been done for decades

and it has this huge pedigree. It's been used as a weapon of war, it's been used for maybe kind of frivolous sometimes, but at least peaceful purposes in in uh, you know, having some nice weather for your Olympic ceremony. But that's not the only time China has claimed to do weather modification. That the Chinese government has a whole weather modification program. It's officially part of their government. There's

a Beijing Weather Modification Office. I know. Also, uh, there were a few years ago Abu Dhabi claimed that they were causing a bunch of rain storms in the desert by by some ionization technique that I think was met with a bunch of skepticism from the scientific community whether this was really working or not. I find it's strange that despite all of these programs, we still don't have a very clear answer on exactly how effective cloud seating is.

Seems like it's probably sort of effective, but maybe not. I don't know. I wish there was a clearer answer. Well, and it might be the kind of thing where it has been effective in certain situations and not in others, and it just happened to have the desired effect. But but but but but again, we're getting back into that concept of they're just being too many variables to really be able to tell and and not the ability to to measure every single molecule right right, right, which might

complicate things. I mean, and we give you a clearer picture of that areas weather pattern, Yeah, if we if we could get some like nano drones with with cameras in them up up into the cloud area, broadcasting back to us exactly what was going on. You know what you're describing describing the plot of Twister? Don't you remember that? All all that I remember about Twisters? Cow, that's it Twister.

They're they're trying to get some all these little tiny robots to get sucked up into a tornado so they can see what's going on inside the tornado. That did happen? Yeah, okay, I remember there's a scene where the opposing scientists gets murdered by the storm, and they're all like, yeah, the evil scientists dealt the death blow the evil rival scientist who gets his come up. And but that being said, I think it's worth mentioning that there are forty countries

that have weather modification systems. Now, whether or not that's keeping up with the Joneses, I don't know, but certainly there is potential there in cloud seating. We just don't know to what extent. Moreover, when cloud seating was used in Vietnam and and it was brought to the public's attention,

there was quite a reaction to it. And again there was another Senate hearing about at it and um this led to the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques or and MAUD and MAD and MAD. So the treaty went into effect in nineteen seventy eight. And so this is the United Nations Treaty. Yeah, in in nineteen seventy six, I believe the United Nations adopted it, and then I believe a year two later Carter ratified it for and said, yes,

we we agree to this. But it bans aggressive environmental modification activity on the scale of several hundred square miles. Oh good, So there's a little bit of wiggle room under the word aggressive. Oh wait, it gets better, and it says that last for a period of months. Uh so, again that's a little bit general, and that involves quote serious or significant disruption or harm to human life, natural

and economic resources, and other assets. So, as you can see, as you've already pointed out, there's a little bit of a loophole here, and it has been criticized for that. So if you only smite a few people with lightning for a short amount of time right right for you know, over a period of days, not months, then you're then you might be in the clear. Yes, okay, yeah, not asking for any specific reason, guys, just just just like to have everything laid out. I understand, Uh, you need

a strategy there for your rockets. I also need a mustache to twirl right now. Um. But okay. So the question of whether or not cloud seating is effective ties back into that that question of whether or not we can truly predict what the weather is going to do anyway, because because of all those variables that are involved, and and predictive modeling is another form of proposed control over

the weather. Yes, I would say that despite the fact that you're not actually literally controlling the weather, there are our best line of defense to get today against the cruel whim of the weather gods is knowing what's going to happen in the near future. Yeah. And it's and it's that big data problem of of the interaction between having you know, increasingly more data about this sort of stuff and uh needing to create increasingly more sophisticated computer

software to handle that, for instance, supercomputers. Yes. Yeah, And whether or not it seems like it, it is true that our weather modeling has gotten steadily more accurate over time, you can track the progression of of predictive weather forecasting as opposed to what actually ended up happening with the weather from the nineteen eighties until now, and we have gotten better and supercomputers might push that even further in

the relatively near future. Um I took a look into a project that was run in fifteen in Japan with the k supercomputer which okay UM which which is the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world, or was at least as of November. The rankings are put out once every six months. It lives at the Rickan or Reken probably depending on your accent. Advanced Institute for Computational Science and

researchers there created a model of Earth's atmosphere from November one. UH. They plugged in data from satellites and ground radar stations all over the world and and to sort of keep it all organized, they divided the global atmosphere up into a hundred and twelve kilometer sectors and then took that and ran over ten thousands simulations and and statistically computed the most likely model outcome which happened, I mean didn't happen, which UH radically UM matched up in the teenage mutant

in turtle sense of the word radically matched up really well with what actually happened from November one through November eight, So really a good number crunching is what they did. And uh and their main finding that that the most interesting part about it was that that the butterfly effect is real. Basically that that data from like around the Great Lakes in North America had a clear impact on

the weather in Europe a few days later. And I mean, like, of course it does, right, It's common sense that the weather, the atmosphere is all one giant thing. Weather systems are connected, but it's really terrific to have this research to back that up. And they're saying that they're they're going to work on creating tools for weather forecasters to start better incorporating global data in making their local forecasts. So exciting times,

absolutely they are. But one of the things that occurs to me about that is, you know, no matter how accurate our predictive models get, one thing I noticed when there are extreme weather events in this country is that often even when we have for warning at a time, people do not take the proper steps that they need to take in order to prevent that disaster from happening, you know what I mean, Like we can we can even have a pretty good idea that the weather is

about to get really scary, and some people just are like, Nope, I've got this canned corn over here, I'm fine, or or we like you know, mob a grocery store and say give me all your food right now and then and then you know, they're fourteen car crashes in the parking lot and I don't know, we're just not good at managing disasters. Is there any way we could get one of these supercomputers to do that for us too? Yeah? Yeah, Because it turns out there's a market for this. There's

a market for inability to really assess a threat. Um, and it's called disaster economics. Like that. Yeah, and your major I hope, so right? I mean that would like look great on your resume. Um. But Planalytics is a company that is profiled in Redness Book, and they actually have a bunch of clients who are concerned with weather and how it affects their bottom line. And a really good example is this grocery store chain in Florida that's

one of their clients. Um that wants to know way in advance, like Wayne advance of the weather channel, if there's going to be a hurricane, because it gives them a leg up on the ability to get the product. The number one product that sells out in Florida when a hurricane is predicted. Okay, I mean, I I know here in Georgia, whenever there's like a like a snow warning, we we run out of bread and milk and eggs. Yes, but people don't even eat those things. They just think

they need them. It's true. I have done this before, by the way, Like I'll face up. I've been like, oh, no, snow m Ageddon, Let's get a loaf of bread, and then I pizza. I don't have ducks in my house. I'm not making grilled cheese, and you know, like and so yeah, right, so we don't always react in a

way that kind of squares with what's actually happening. And it turns out that this is regional, by the way, And so in Florida, if a hurricane is predicted, the number one thing they sell out of it is fried chicken. Fried chicken. People just get a hanker in for chicken when it's hurricane Seas it's a comfort food, I guess. I mean, you know, like like a storm's bruin, like you're worried about it. You don't have time to prepare a meal, and you want something comforting and stick to

your ribs. So fried chicken, okay, Yeah, I think I think something there. Yeah, I think it is a comfort food thing. And so that grocery store chain has to then secure a batload of chickens, and you need to contact the chicken houses in Georgia in South Carolina and put their orders in just to make sure that they can take it manage of this swell fried chicken impending

disaster and swell. Yeah, it's almost like we see this complex system of cascading dynamic effects in the human side of the storm, just like we see in the chaotic uh developments of weather patterns. Yeah, because I mean essentially like weather is emotional, right, Like you look up at the sky and you can't help but to you know, project your own feelings and fears and all of that stuff on it. And I feel like it's just sort of like these ancient tropes within us and see it's

like survival weather fried chicken. I know, I look up at clouds and say, why can't I control you with lasers? Yeah, I've overheard you say that before. Actually it's yeah, the office is really I mean it's an open office, so we can all hear you. That's my greasy face mudge on all the windows when I'm bare early in the morning, staring at the sky with anger in my heart. And Joe, you mentioned lasers and you're not just being purely ridiculous.

That is a proposed future way of controlling the weather. But we have just about run out of time for this episode, so so if you would please join us in our part two of this weather extravaganza, we will pick back up with these with these future proposal of how we may soon be controlling weather across the globe totally. So join us next time where Julie will be back with us. And I really want to thank Julie Douglas for joining us on this episode today. It has been

so much fun. Julie. And hey, why while you're here, why don't you tell us about your new podcast. Oh, it's the Stuff of Life. It's just this podcast that just came out. I think we're two episodes in. I'm not sure when this one will air, but so far we've got the power of fear and glossophobia, which is the fear of public speaking. And Joe you are on the power of fear, and Lauren you are on classophobia. And UM so happy to have you guys's voices and

your insights on the Stuff of Life. Um, I am insights, yes, insights. So it was so much fun. I had a really good it was a really good conversation. Yeah, and you guys are great and it's it's awesome that you showed up and um hung out with us. So the Stuff of Life does have, um, you know, a little bit of a different format and that it has some interview with experts and then it has some folks from house

to forks and some lovely soundscaping. Uh. You've been working with, of course, our terrific producer nol To to create some original music for it and stuff like that, sound effects, lovely things. So if you are a fan of this show, I bet you would be also a big fan of Stuff of Life. You should definitely check it out. Julie, where can they find it? They can find it every Wednesday at iTunes of course, or you know, whichever your

favorite podcast pervey areas. I know it's on the stitcher and Spotify as well, and they can find you on so will media. I'm sure, Oh yeah, they can. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter. I believe it's Stuff of Life show. If you would like to find Forward Thinking on social media, you can. You should, You should get in touch let us know what you think about this. If you have any other questions for us, you can find us on Twitter at f W thinking,

search that thing on Facebook. You can also email us at f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. We hope to hear from you, and you will hear from us again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,