In Mexico, the car-maker Volkswagen is being criticised for overuse of Hail Cannons. To avoid damage to the new cars they store outside, they’ve invested in vast machines that fire waves of pressure into the air to prevent hailstorms. But the farmers around them are claiming that this also prevents rain, so their crops are failing. Cloud-busting has been going on for quite a while. For their Olympics, the Beijing Weather Modification Office used 21 rockets around the city to fire silver iodide into the clouds, to make the rain fall before it reached the capital.
And manipulating the weather has been a motivation for religion since time began. We’ve had sun gods and rain gods, gods of thunder and gods of the winds, and we worshipped them to seek a measure of control over the weather. The Bible itself is full of weather phenomena – Noah’s flood and the famous rainbow; it raining quail and manna during the Exodus; Jesus calming the storm; and the sky turning black on Good Friday. In those days, God made the weather. But these days, we make it; not just through cannons and rockets, but through how we live. The choices we make, and our addiction to fossil fuels, are contributing to the slow baking of the earth. And while it can feel like we’re too small to take on such a big global issue, perhaps we could all join the dots more than we do.
We’re getting better at carrying shopping bags, to avoid the 5p charge for a plastic one, and hopefully reducing the amount of plastic ending up in the oceans and in landfill. But there’s still a lot of plastic in our clothes. Nylon can take 30 to 40 years to break down in landfill, so perhaps the next thing we could work on is how to re-use and recycle our clothes, so we’re all doing our bit to make the right sort of weather in future.
We’re also getting better at working with the weather, and finding ways to harvest it too, through forests of wind turbines, and fields of solar panels. Of course Scotland has pioneered hydro-electricity for many years, given that we’re often blessed with wet weather. And as Autumn starts to be felt, perhaps one day, we’ll find a way to do something productive with all those Autumn leaves, too.
Other Thoughts
I have been delivering “Thought For The Day” pieces on BBC Radio Scotland since November 2016. By kind permission these pieces are reproduced in blog posts here on my website. To find my other pieces click here go to my Thought For The Day index page.
