drought (Page 9)

We recently did a Dreamland show about weather wars. Now Chinese farmers are shooting bullets at the sky in order to try to end a drought.

In the Asia Times, Pallavi Aiyar writes that Chinese farmers have given up on prayer and are trying a new technique to bring rain: they are firing rocket launchers and anti-aircraft guns at clouds. They aren?t firing bullets, they are firing silver-iodide pellets which they hope will seed the clouds by attracting enough moisture to bring on rain.

The Chinese s;pend between $60 and $90 million a year on weather modification. Aiyar quotes Chinese official Wang Guanghe as saying, “Ours is the largest artificial weather program in the world in terms of equipment, size and budget.”

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With all the terrible droughts going in the world right now, including Australia and now the US, the obvious solution (especially for the island nation of Australia) would be to remove salt from sea water, but no one has figured out how to do this efficiently yet.

In LiveScience.com, Michael Schirber quotes Australian water expert Gary Crisp as saying, “Until recently, seawater desalination was a very expensive water source solution.”

Why can’t we just drink seawater? It’s because our body can’t stand so much salt, so we end up urinating more than we drink, in order to get rid of it, and thus become even more dehydrated.
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Global warming has led to major storms in Australia, China and the Middle East, and Australia has just experienced a major drought. In the USA, it’s causing the biggest drought since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s?one that isn’t yet being widely reported in the US media.
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Global warming can cause floods, but it can also lead to the opposite condition: drought, because as greenhouse gases make the air warmer, it can hold more moisture. This water vapor then moves out towards the poles, making dry areas dryer and wet areas wetter. Australia is experiencing a massive drought right now.

There are indications that the Australian government may have underestimated the effects of the current drought in the important Murray-Darling river basin. While there has been some rain recently, dam levels remain around six percent. Bill Heffernan of the Northern Australia task force, told the Australian Financial Review that previous estimates had been done incorrectly, and that water resources in the area are actually 40% lower than official estimates. read more