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Will Salter’s clouds save the world?
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LONDON,
December 2 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A professor at
Scotland’s Edinburgh University has been awarded a government grant
to develop the world's first rainmaking machine, the Times reported
Monday, December 2.
Professor
Stephen Salter will create a 200-foot (60-meter) high turbine to suck
water out of the sea and turn it into water vapor through nozzles,
spraying it out into the atmosphere, the U.K. daily paper said.
The
rain maker, described as looking like a “giant egg-beater”, would
be based on catamarans and placed off the coast of desert land.
They
would have to be used in places which are not totally dry, or the
artificial clouds would never reach critical mass, the paper said.
They
would be used in areas where there were already some clouds but not
enough to produce rain.
Salter’s
rainmaker uses wind power to drive a 200ft high turbine that sucks
water out of the sea, and turns it into water vapor through nozzles,
spraying it out into the atmosphere, creating clouds, the Times
reported.
The
professor even claims his invention can reverse the advance of
deserts, stop sea levels rising, and even help the Middle East peace
process by easing Israel’s dependency on the West Bank for its water
supply.
However,
according to the Times, the rainmakers would not work in areas that
were too dry because the artificial clouds would never generate the
critical mass needed. They would be used in areas where there were
already some clouds but not enough to produce rain.
Salter
calculates that the machine would produce a cubic meter of water for
one fifth of a U.S. cent, one thousandth the cost of water produced by
electrical desalination of sea water, the paper said.
According
to the Times, Salter also calculates that if hundreds of thousands of
machines were used for many years they would transfer so much water
from the sea to the land that they would reduce sea levels by up to
3ft, reversing the rising levels caused by global warming.
In
the face of skeptics, Professor Salter, 62, takes a historical
approach.
“They
said you couldn’t make ships out of steel. They said Marconi’s
radio waves couldn’t be broadcast beyond the horizon. The
Establishment is almost always wrong.”
Nonetheless
the British government is handing him a 105,000-pound (160,000-dollar)
development grant to get his pipe dream off the ground.
Serious
weather modification efforts started after the Second World War when
the U.S. scientist Vincent Schaefer experimented with seeding clouds,
the Times reported.
The
idea of seeding clouds is that small crystals are dropped into clouds
from aircraft and that the moisture collects into water droplets
around them that are too heavy to be held in the cloud and so fall to
the ground as rain.
In
the 1950s in Utah scientists claimed to have produced 2.5in of rain
from seeding clouds but the experiment could not be repeated, the
paper said.
In
the 1990s South Africa carried out tests and claimed significant
success.
Two
years ago the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research gave its
backing to cloud seeding after a trial in Mexico showed that it could
increase rainfall in certain circumstances, the Times reported.
Regular
use of seeding to influence weather patterns remains, however, a long
way off.
It
remains to be seen whether Professor Salter’s invention will perform
a more effective rain dance.
