In a recent e-mail to me, David Wells, the leader of a weather-control club calling itself the Weather Rangers, wrote:
"Nature is far from perfect . Most animals die before they ever grow up . We are not messing up the weather . It has always been messed up And there was nothing that could be done about it . Now at last , the tools have been discovered that can control the weather and eliminate the natural disasters."
Now this reveals quite a lot about the mind-set of a man who wants to control the weather. He considers the normal functioning of the atmosphere as it has been since it came into existence, to be "messed up". I would think that since life has been around on this planet for at least some 2,000,000,000 years, that is evidence that this planet is a good place for life to exist, isn't it?
Humans have lived on earth for somewhere around 2,500,000 years, and they seem to have managed all that time without being killed off by inclement weather. That looks to me like the natural weather of at least some parts of this planet is good enough to allow them to survive. If the weather has always been messed up, why are we still here?
What looks to an anthropocentric, obsessive-compulsive control-freak like "imperfection" is what an ecologist would call "variability" and would consider vital to maintaining biodiversity. If the atmosphere was under human control, or rather, at least, the control of Mr. Wells and his followers, that variability would be subjugated to the demands of political vested interest groups like the agribusiness industry and the variability essential to biodiversity would be lost.
The atmosphere, at least when it is functioning normally and not being blocked by DOR, most of which nowadays is of human origins, regulates itself in a way that all the many life-forms of this planet are adapted to and most of them need the kind of weather they are used to. And deaths from natural causes, including those from extremes of weather, are a necessary part of the way an ecosystem evolves, just as deaths from predators are necessary to the prey species, keeping their numbers in balance with their food supply, and keeping them healthy by weeding out the weak and sick.
Over 100 years ago, in an excess of misguided zeal, an attempt was made in one place in the American West to "protect" deer by exterminating wolves. In ten years, the deer herd went from 10,000 healthy deer to 100,000 sickly starving deer and it was necessary to hire hunters to cull the herds to prevent mass starvation.
The disruptions caused by extreme weather events are not "disasters". They are a part of the ecosystem and are one of the processes by which it is kept in balance and kept healthy. It is true that newscasters on the evening news call them "disasters", but it is not a good idea to get your science education from the evening news.
"Nature is far from perfect . Most animals die before they ever grow up . We are not messing up the weather . It has always been messed up And there was nothing that could be done about it . Now at last , the tools have been discovered that can control the weather and eliminate the natural disasters."
Now this reveals quite a lot about the mind-set of a man who wants to control the weather. He considers the normal functioning of the atmosphere as it has been since it came into existence, to be "messed up". I would think that since life has been around on this planet for at least some 2,000,000,000 years, that is evidence that this planet is a good place for life to exist, isn't it?
Humans have lived on earth for somewhere around 2,500,000 years, and they seem to have managed all that time without being killed off by inclement weather. That looks to me like the natural weather of at least some parts of this planet is good enough to allow them to survive. If the weather has always been messed up, why are we still here?
What looks to an anthropocentric, obsessive-compulsive control-freak like "imperfection" is what an ecologist would call "variability" and would consider vital to maintaining biodiversity. If the atmosphere was under human control, or rather, at least, the control of Mr. Wells and his followers, that variability would be subjugated to the demands of political vested interest groups like the agribusiness industry and the variability essential to biodiversity would be lost.
The atmosphere, at least when it is functioning normally and not being blocked by DOR, most of which nowadays is of human origins, regulates itself in a way that all the many life-forms of this planet are adapted to and most of them need the kind of weather they are used to. And deaths from natural causes, including those from extremes of weather, are a necessary part of the way an ecosystem evolves, just as deaths from predators are necessary to the prey species, keeping their numbers in balance with their food supply, and keeping them healthy by weeding out the weak and sick.
Over 100 years ago, in an excess of misguided zeal, an attempt was made in one place in the American West to "protect" deer by exterminating wolves. In ten years, the deer herd went from 10,000 healthy deer to 100,000 sickly starving deer and it was necessary to hire hunters to cull the herds to prevent mass starvation.
The disruptions caused by extreme weather events are not "disasters". They are a part of the ecosystem and are one of the processes by which it is kept in balance and kept healthy. It is true that newscasters on the evening news call them "disasters", but it is not a good idea to get your science education from the evening news.