Frank Wigglesworth Clarke, who was he? A serious person. Chemist and geologist together, he is considered the father of geochemistry since it revealed the composition of the earth’s crust. In 1901 he founded the American Chemical Society, taught at various universities, directed the chemical section of the US Geological Survey. Before this story, I knew him for his important contributions to applied statistics.
Clarke was certainly a real scientist, famous even in Europe. He’s a witty man. In 1891, he published it in the American satirical magazine par excellence, which it was at the time Lifea short poem entitled “The Rhyme of the Rain Machine”: The Nursery Rhyme of Rain Machine. It tells the story of the three Jones brothers, farmers hit by drought. The trio, brought to their knees by the drought and absolutely desperate due to the aridity of their fields, decides to invest their last savings in the Rain Machine, a modern device capable of triggering the longed-for rainfall. This is where the story begins, a funny but bitter story that would be very popular with an early comedian on Radio 24.
Clarke used the weapon of irony because he was annoyed with the federal government which had financed the self-styled General Dyrenforth for an original scientific expedition to Texas. Equipped with a good supply of gunpowder and powerful explosives, the general was able to arm rifles and cannons to point at the sky in the hope of triggering heavy rain. Wasted money. And it was a lot of money for the time, when scientific research was much less funded than today.
There weather manipulation it was nothing new. One of the fathers of modern meteorology, James Pollard Espy, had been baptized the Storm King by contemporaries. Towards the middle of the 19th century, the King of Storms had theorized the possibility of influencing meteors by spreading dust which would have functioned as condensation nuclei. It was inspired by the outcome of the famous Battle of Waterloo, lost by Napoleon due to torrential rains that many believed were triggered by battle fumes.
In the volume The Philosophy of Storms (Boston: Little & Brown, 1840) Espy had proposed a brilliant theory on the physics of thunderstorms, still acclaimed by the scientific world. But he was also a person practice. To counteract the lack of rainfall that had hit the country in the mid-19th century, he had proposed starting a huge arson fire along the entire Appalachian chain. The particulate matter, once diffused into the atmosphere, would have facilitated the rain. Nothing came of it, luckily for Chip’n’Dale, commonly Chip and Dale. But the gimmick could also have worked, with a price for the Appalachian forests.
Shooting towards the sky to alter the meteorological pattern can therefore be done. Maybe lasers could be used instead of rifles and cannons or the boilers that stokers still use on the roof of the world (Figure 1). It’s an aspiration ancientwitnessed by the superstitions of the Goths (see Figure 2).
(Figure 1)
(Figure 2)
In the second volume of Life of Benvenuto by Maestro Giovanni Cellini, written for himself, in Florencethe impetuous Florentine sculptor says he “styled several pieces of large artillery, indeed that part where the clouds were smallest. And since a very heavy amount of water had already begun to rain, and I had begun to fire these artillery, the rain stopped. And at four times the sun showed itself.”
Cellini had contributed decisively to “saving more than a thousand scudi of damage” on a solemn occasion: the entry into Rome of Margarita of Austria, Duchess of Florence. It was November 3, 1538, when the betrothed of the Pope’s 15-year-old nephew triumphantly entered the city, dressed in black (Figure 3).
(Figure 3)
As many authoritative hydro-meteorologists have ruled in recent days, it is impossible – given the state of scientific knowledge – that torrential rain like that of Dubai was triggered by cloud seeding. It is likely that none of them have ever seriously addressed weather manipulation – a scientific topic taboo for more than a century for academics — but physics doesn’t lie and they are certainly right. I fully agree with them.
The seeding of the air with substances capable of triggering precipitation It has limited power. As noted by Ryan Maue of Nooa (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) if it had “happened because of cloud seeding, it would have rained the whole time. It is not possible to create rain out of nothing by itself and produce 15 centimeters of water on the ground.” Such an amount of water needs a cloud column very oftenimpossible to create with the insemination techniques known so far.
Can humans control the weather on a scientific basis? In Dubai and other desert countries they have certainly tried. Cloud seeding has been used for some time, as well as in Texas, with not particularly brilliant results (Figure 4). By virtue of its wealth, the UAE can also experiment with other technologies, perhaps immaterial, since littering the soil with silver salts could have negative impacts. And there are rumors, absolutely far-fetched, that they have already tried to do so in the past, as have the strategists of some of the most recent wars.
(Figure 4)
Anyone who has had the patience to read me this far might wonder what happened to the good brothers Jeremy, Jonathan and Joseph Jones. They confidently aimed the Rain Machine they had just bought with so many sacrifices at the sky and fired at will. Unfortunately, the same thing happened Apocalypse tested in Dubai, as anyone who watches the YouTube video I linked will be able to verify, where the brilliant poem is interpreted in the right country key.
It was poor Jeremy, who had come up with the brilliant idea, who got the worst of it; along with his once-thriving farm, which was transformed into a muddy lake. And only one federal ordinance he was able to stop the rain! Even then the power of ordinance, so dear to Italian emergency enthusiasts, was the supreme instrument.
Tags: Cloud seeding physics doesnt lie impossible create rain Dubai
