Desal doesn’t have to kill animals, you can put a filter on your intake. And even so, we kill millions of fish every year on purpose. The number of fish or plankton killed would be minuscule compared to other forms of pollution. Yes, concentrated brine would be toxic, so dump it deeper into the ocean and diffuse it so it isn’t concentrated anymore. And who says we have to use fossil fuels to run the desal plant? Any source of energy would work.
The point is, if we want to move water from point A to point B it’s a heck of a lot more energy efficient and environmentally friendly to just pump water from point A to point B than it would be to try to move rainclouds from point A to point B. The energy needed isn’t just a lot less, it’s many orders of magnitude less. The amount of energy in a rainstorm is greater than a nuclear bomb. You can’t just flap a butterfly’s wing in South America and expect to move a raincloud from Louisiana to California.
Indeed. In my air mass relocation example (see post #17), the required energy - 9 trillion kilojoules - is equivalent to about 2.2 megatons, which is near the high end of the nuclear weapon yield chart on this page. That’s just the kinetic energy required to get the air mass to move cross-country at a convenient speed; it doesn’t even consider the sensible/latent heat contained within that air mass.
We have a means (admittedly poor) of cloud-seeding to make it rain.
Do we have a means of preventing rain in a flooded area?
Other than giant dehumidifiers mounted on jumbo-jets, all I can think of is seeding clouds in regions upwind of the target area, in hopes that they’ll dump their water early. Seems to me to be likely even less effective than seeding for rain. Any thoughts?
A story I once read and I’m wondering if anybody can confirm or refute it.
Back in 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear plant released a bunch of radioactive particles into the atmosphere. The story I read was that the Soviet government began seeding clouds within a matter of hours. Their goal was to create artificial rainstorms. The reason for this is that they wanted the rain to deposit all the radioactive particles in Belarus and Ukraine rather than have them be carried into Russia.
We’re able to seed storms. We can break up most storms (but something like a cyclone/typhoon/hurricane (depending on where you are) is too big to seed. China did it during the 2008 Olympics, in the middle of the wet season, they ensured clear skies and no rain.
“Most storms” is a bit optimistic. You can seed any rainclouds upwind of the target zone and cross your fingers that they will precipitate and disperse by the time they get there. It works for isolated showers but you would have a hard time making a “hole” in a decent sized rain-bearing front.
Claims of the effectiveness of cloud seeding are very mixed. It appears to work to some degree, but the idea that we can break ups storms is so far unsupported and there’s a huge amount of anecdotal evidence without controls.