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Chaos Theory Provides Hints for Controlling the Weather

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday April 03 2022, @02:15PM   
from the controlled-chaos dept.

upstart writes:

Chaos theory provides hints for controlling the weather:

While weather predictions have reached levels of high accuracy thanks to methods such as supercomputer-based simulations and data assimilation, where observational data is incorporated into simulations, scientists have long hoped to be able to control the weather. Research in this area has intensified due to climate change, which has led to more extreme weather events such as torrential rain and storms.

There are methods at present for weather modification, but they have had limited success. Seeding the atmosphere to induce rain has been demonstrated, but it is only possible when the atmosphere is already in a state where it might rain. Geoengineering projects have been envisioned, but have not been carried out due to concerns about what unpredicted long-term effects they might have.

As a promising approach, researchers from the RIKEN team have looked to chaos theory to create realistic possibilities for mitigating weather events such as torrential rain. Specifically, they have focused on a phenomenon known as a butterfly attractor, proposed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorentz, one of the founders of modern chaos theory. Essentially, this refers to a system that can adopt one of two orbits that look like the wings of a butterfly, but can change the orbits randomly based on small fluctuations in the system.

Journal Reference:
Miyoshi, Takemasa, Sun, Qiwen. Control simulation experiment with Lorenz's butterfly attractor [open], Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-29-133-2022)

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Original Submission

• Re:Can we first figure out... (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 04 2022, @11:44PM

  by khallow (3766) on Monday April 04 2022, @11:44PM (#1234881) Journal

  Reality. Here's some US examples.
  
  Regulation: the Raisin Administrative Committee [reason.com].

  Here's a concrete example. In 2003–04, the RAC demanded 30 percent of the crop, which amounted to more than 89,000 tons of raisins. It gave away 2,312 tons to school lunch and other government programs and it sold 86,732 tons for export. The RAC pocketed $111,242,849 from that sale, or $1,249.30 per ton. It then spent all of the proceeds on its own operations. In return, raisin growers got nothing.
  
  From the feds' point of view, this might make sense. Raisins are kept off the domestic market, prices are tightly controlled, and a government agency makes a few bucks along the way. But there's a major problem with the government's approach. According to the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the government must pay just compensation when it takes private property for a public use. And as far as Marvin and Laura Horne were concerned, the raisin marketing order was nothing less than an uncompensated taking of their valuable property. "It was a theft," Marvin Horne told Reason TV in July 2013. "The reserve was nothing but highway robbery."

  See also banning plastic straws, large glasses of soda, incandescent light bulbs, and toilets that flush and shower sprayers that spray. Taxation: Taxing luxury boats [boatingindustry.com].

  New Zealand, Italy, Norway, Turkey, and Spain have all tried to implement luxury taxes on boats but ended up repealing them. They realized that the luxury tax had a serious negative economic impact on their country while actually decreasing government revenue. However, the luxury tax lesson that was clearest to me was right here where I live, in the United States.
  
  In 1990 a 10% luxury tax was applied to boats in the U.S. and the results were disastrous. Over 25,000 boating industry jobs were lost and a tax that was supposed to generate millions of additional government revenue actually cost the government revenue. Fortunately, Congress was quick to acknowledge the damage they were causing, and the tax was repealed. Unfortunately, before the repeal was enacted it severely damaged many American families.

  See also sin taxes.
  
  Crushing social mores: sumptuary laws [bustle.com] and other social mores.

  According to Yvonne Seale, assistant professor of medieval history at SUNY Geneseo, the way Christians saw it was that one's spot in society was divinely assigned, meaning if you were a serf, you had to pick up the serf clothes that went with the part.
  
  "As far as medieval Christians were concerned, the existing social hierarchy was divinely mandated," she tells Bustle. "If God made you a lord living in a castle, your clothing should reflect that; the same applied if you were the wife of a wealthy town merchant or a leper."

  In the Bible, pride and gluttony were counted among the seven deadly sins, so followers were discouraged from decorating their arms with layers of gold bangles or wrapping themselves in pretty silks and prints. In order to not lead yourself into temptation and keep straight on the pious road, sumptuary laws were put into place by the government that would dictate which clothes were banned. But while these laws had the added benefit of keeping greed down, their main purpose was actually to control the social hierarchy and make sure everyone stayed firmly in their station.

  "For example, John of Reading, a 14th-century English writer, wrote with disapproval that when Philippa of Hainault, the foreign-born queen of Edward III, arrived in the country, her influence on fashion was such that men started dressing like 'torturers or demons' and women began 'wearing clothes that were so tight that they wore a fox tail hanging down inside their skirts at the back to hide their arses,'" Seale says. Any fashion outside of the one that had been agreed upon was painted with a demon-like color.

  "Covering your head was the norm for men and women in the Middle Ages, as it was in most of Europe and North America until quite recently: Think of how every adult in a movie adaptation of a Jane Austen novel is wearing a bonnet, cap or hat when they’re in public," Seale says. "Your clothing, including your head coverings, and your hair (length, style, visible or not) indicated your rank, occupation, gender, marital status, and religion, all at a glance." So when deciding what to do with your hair, you didn't just get to focus on your personal taste — maybe a bob this month, some bangs? — you had to make sure it aligned with your rank in society.

  And reputation in that group was everything — they were so image-conscious and wary of their character that it was scary trying to toe the line. That included hair. Loose, tumbling hair was so synonymous with sexuality that women couldn't appear outside without it neatly tucked away. Proof in point: Only prostitutes could walk around with their locks out.
  
  "In fact, it was often illegal for sex workers to cover their hair outdoors in the Middle Ages," Seale says. "In the 14th century in Bristol and London, prostitutes could only cover their hair with striped hoods in public. There might not have been a formal legal reprimand, but the power of social disapproval was extremely strong."

  It goes on and on. You dressed right for your class, wore an appropriate hat, and didn't show any loose hair as a woman unless you were a prostitute. Some of it was law, but some was excessive social disapproval. They were cracking down (hypocritically) on that materialism - but caring more in the process about one's station than helping anyone.
  
  See also what happened to American Natives. Their social mores were great for the environment they originally were in - rough environment where people had to share to insure the tribe (or city for larger cultures) survived combined with often hostile neighbors. But those social systems were no match for the White Man, the Europeans who brought so much change to the Americas.
  
  Religious opprobrium: The above bit about rules on clothing was partly religion driven. But I think the worst religious shtick is the idea that living requires sacrifice. For example [grist.org]:

  For a long time, the climate science consensus suggested that to avoid increased average surface temperatures beyond those to which our civilization could adapt, we need to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050. (No one suggested we stop there, but that goal was advocated as a way to avoid tipping points.)
  
  There were voices from the beginning arguing that this was too slow a phase-out. But as Joe Romm has argued, the consensus-seeking nature of the IPCC process tends to downplay and ignore real dangers. It has become obvious that we need to reduce emissions faster than the conventional wisdom of a few years ago suggested.
  
  For example, the rate at which the oceans absorb CO2 has slowed drastically as they become saturated. This suggests another tipping point looms: when the oceans begin to release the CO2 they contain, they'll become a source rather than a sink. At any rate, if the ability of nature to absorb our emissions has dropped, we have to cut emissions more than we would have.

  This was written in 2009. No tipping points have been found since and nobody is interested in cutting emissions by 80% because they don't want to impoverish their societies.

  Parent