“If you could all the water vapor in a volume of saturated frigid air into snow, you would get less snow than if you did the same thing to a volume of saturated chilly air”
If you could all the water?!? Somebody wake up the proofreader.
They forgot to proofread your post, too ;). If they did, they surely would have noted that the column in question, Is it ever too cold to snow, is a Staff Report, and not a Cecil’s Column.
Moving to the appropriate forum.
So, based on the nucleous theory of snow and rain, and that there now exists technology to create nano sized grains of any element, I have a question. Could an evil person seed the sky’s with nano copper or some element and cause all the water vapour to condense and fall out of the sky, removing cloud cover and forcing the earth into an early ice age?
It doesn’t much matter what chemical you use, aside from its solubility, and some substances, we’ve been able to produce grains of appropriate size for a long time, now. Ever hear of folks “seeding” clouds in a drought, trying to bring some rain? That’s what they’re doing. It doesn’t work too well, and other substances wouldn’t work too much better, but it’s the best we have.
Now if you look it up in the dictionary, you will find that “could” is the past tense of “can”. So what I was really saying was that if you canned all the water (like my mother used to can tomatoes), then…
Oh, wait, I can blame Ed for this one, can’t I? Apparently he liked his nonsensical butchered version better than my original, which was
Hey Chronos,
I’ve heard of seeding clouds for rain during droughts etc. On the theory that they have to keep seeding the clouds over and over again cause the seeding agent falls out of the sky. With nano size particles, the seeding agent would stay in the sky and do a more complete job of removing all water from the atmosphere.
Plus, a ‘buffered’ nano particle could present multiple surfaces for all the different variations of nucleation.