Weather is outside human control

Some have hard coming to terms with the idea something can’t be controlled.  The fear they display leads to the most absurd ideas.  I have read about people denying that natural weather phenomena would exist nowadays.  The trouble is weather patterns can still be discerned.  They have been shifted but has not been replaced.  It is not like the seasons happens at entirely different parts of the year.  Or come and goes unpredictably.

In reality there is something called probability.  It can be described as percent for something to happen.  To understand such percent rates nuanced thinking is required.  There is a difference between for example 10%, 20%, 25%, 33% and 50%.  In the same way there is a difference between 67%, 75%, 80% and 90%.  No-one of these can be equalled to “will not take place” or “has to take place”.  Instead it is in how many cases out of a certain number it happens.  All don’t give the same result is this particular context.

We can only predict the weather by a certain probability.  Different countries’ weather services are trying to do just that.  They have become better at that over the course of decades.  However, they will never succeed to predict the weather exactly.  The weather is influenced too much by too many factors for that to be possible.  Unfortunately, people notice all the times they fail.  Which leads to the faulty belief it is a matter pure guess.  In fact it is educated guess based on measurement and physics.  They not always being right does not mean total unreliability.

This means uncertainty on how well cloud seeding works.  Some substances may be spread from airplanes at certain times.  Shouting up these substances from the ground is done too.  Both are thought to increase the probability of it raining shortly afterwards from already existing clouds.  How much they increase the probability opinions are divided on.  Which tells something about how hard it would be to control the weather.  I don’t think control in detail will ever be possible.

Of cause humanity affect the weather in an indirect way.  The presence or absence of forest can affect how it rains.  Repeated waves of depopulation contributed to the Little Ice Age.  Large areas having been deforested where after those covered in forest.  Since trees bind carbon dioxide this led to cooling.  But I think its peak in the 17th century was caused by low solar activity.  Anyway, the Little Ice Age was over by the middle of the 19th century.  Then the world’s population had already exceeded a thousand million.

I think global warming started in the 1980ies.  The fraction of carbon dioxide in the air started to rise already towards the end of the 18th century.  Also the fraction of methane in the air has increased over the same period.  However, the effect of greenhouse gases were long masked by visible smoke.  The later has the opposite effect.  Now visible pollutions are directly harmful to your health.  In the 80ies the emitters managed to get them down.  Which got as by-effect the world becomes warmer.  This increases or decreases the probability of different weather events.  So the weather has changed but mainly not deliberately.

 

Uploaded on the 18th of November 2025.