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mugenhunt t1_j6e4gt4 wrote

Reply to comment by Coconspiritors in ELI5/Why can’t we change the geography of a large area of land to bring desired weather by Coconspiritors

The sorts of changes needed are WAY more expensive than you're thinking.

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byfpe t1_j6e6crz wrote

Good answers. But worth highlithing that there is geo engineering or climate engineers that could actually modify some parameters in the environment. As an example, some countries are able to induce rain, by dissipating very fine particles in the sky (please dont think that plane contrails are involved!).
An issue is that we cant really understand full effect of implementing this regularly or at large scale. For example, you could make it rain in some regions, but how would this affect other regions, what damage could it result in in the environment, or how could it backlash. Lots of ethic questions involved.

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GovernorSan t1_j6ebfgn wrote

China has or had a desertification problem because the communist government decided to use cloud seeding to control weather patterns, but they didn't actually know what they were doing, so large areas of the country turned to desert because they were no longer getting their natural amount of rain.

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