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Published online 18 June 2008 | Nature 453, 970-974 (2008) | doi:10.1038/453970a
News Feature
Meteorology: Taming the sky
Is it really possible to stop rain, invoke lightning from the heavens or otherwise manipulate the weather? Jane Qiu and Daniel Cressey report on the once-scorned notion of weather modification.
China wants everything to be under control at the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games on 8 August — even the weather. The chance of rain that day is 47%, according to the Beijing Meteorological Bureau.
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It is very doubtful that we can control weather or Earth's climate, although some politicians would like to make us think so. Decades of careful studies [1-10] have shown that our climate is still closely linked with events on the Sun - the violent star that provides essentially all of Earth's light and energy. REFERENCES: [_1_] P. D. Jose: 1965, "Sun's motion and sunspots", Astronomy Journal 70, 193-200; [_2_] E. K. Bigg: 1967, “Influence of the planet Mercury on sunspotsâ€, Astronomical Journal 72, 463 – 466; [_3_] R. W. Fairbridge and J. H. Shirley: 1987, "Prolonged minima and the 179 year cycle of the solar inertial motion," Solar Physics 110 191-220; [_4_] Theodor Landscheidt: 1999, "Extrema in sunspot cycle linked to Sun's motion, "Solar Physics 189, 413-424; http://bourabai.narod.ru/landscheidt/extrema.htm [_5_] O. K. Manuel, B. W. Ninham and S. E. Friberg: 2003, "Super-fluidity in the solar interior: Implications for solar eruptions and climate," J. Fusion Energy 21, 193-198; [_6_] S. Pireaux, J-P.Rozelot and S. Godier: 2003, "Solar quadrupole moment and gravitation non-linearity contributions to Mercury's perihelion advance", Astrophysics and Space Sciences 284, 1159-1194; [_7_] J. Shirley: 2006, "Axial rotation, orbital revolution, and solar spin-orbit coupling," Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 368, 280-282; [_8_] J-P. Rozelot and S. Lefebvre: 2006: “Is it possible to find a solar signature in the current climatic warming?â€, Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 31, 41-45. [_9_] S. Yousef: 2006: “80–120 yr long-term solar induced effects on the earth: Past and predictionsâ€, Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 31, 113-122; [_10] O. Manuel and H. Ratcliffe: 2008, "Fingerprints of a local supernova," in Supernova Research [Nova Science Publishers, Inc., Hauppauge, NY, USA] in press. http://www.omatumr.com/abstracts2007/20071202_Manuel_and_Ratcliffe.pdf/ics2007/pdf/ICS176.pdf Sincerely, Oliver K. Manuel, http:www.omatumr.com
The weather: Deal with it or go someplace else. Some of these advocates of weather modification ought to go find another planet to live on. The only places we should control the weather are inside our homes and inside our clothes. That's why we invented them. And if you make the weather "better" for one place, it will be worse down the road. Solar heat must flow from the equator to the poles, and the irregularities of our planet's surface make storms inevitable, therefore, necessary.