Forgive me before the fact, some of us maintain a relentless fascination with the philosophical foundations of cutting edge physics – believe it or not, a dual Ph.D. in philosophy and physics is a thing. So it’s possible to be interested without the math. Thus it is that famed physics professor Michio Kaku went on CNNÂ this morning and actually confirmed that Marjorie Taylor Greene wasn’t totally batsh*t crazy in saying we could manipulate the weather. She was just totally wrong in what they can and cannot do with it right now and what they would actually do with it in the future.
Dr. Kaku says that they can shoot… lasers (Why did it have to be lasers!) into cloud cover and induce rain. He maintains that shooting “one trillion watt lasers” into clouds can do the job with respect to making it rain in drought areas. Indeed, he says it has allegedly been tried by many countries (Allegedly) in disaster areas and places where they just want to mess with it.
He even mentions something about hurricanes – vaguely – but not stopping them – perhaps slowing them down and certainly not “directing” them into red areas as Marjorie Taylor-Greene suggested. Recall, she said that someone in the federal government shot those really really expensive light bulbs into Helene to hurt rural voters in red areas.
Kaku did nothing more than mislead some people and he did not specifically call out MGT – only let the most important part out.
CBS spreading conspiracy theories on weather manipulation? Saying we have trillion watt lasers pointed at the sky? And scientist Michio Kaku mentions hurricanes at the end of this interview? I thought this was disinformation…Right? pic.twitter.com/98gb19BtMQ
— John Rich🇺🇸 (@johnrich) October 10, 2024
So how do we know that he is not confirming MTG’s contention? Because he said it was “alleged” and experimental. He also says the technology might bring rain drops down or prevent weather – he said hurricanes but said it could happen in the future. The ideal would be to shoot them into clouds to mitigate drought.
What he did not say is that physics has the current capability to direct a thing – only get water to form around ions taken up by the lasers in the laboratory. The “laboratory” thing would seem to be key.
How else do we know that MTG is full of it? Because IF they could mitigate or direct a hurricane they most certainly wouldn’t send them over the land, nor ask it to send more water! If for not other reasons than to not bankrupt massive insurance companies, which includes the United States government – the insurance company of last resort! If politics could play a role in altering the weather then so does money and the lasers would only ever be used to save money not assure that billions more must be spent.
Sadly, MTG is not totally full of sh*t in the ridiculous notion that they can maybe control the weather, only totally wrong in how they can and how they would. But given that they can’t yet control it – at least not hurricanes and weather that is already wet, given the amount of money that goes into disaster relief, and given the fact that trillion watt lasers are most certainly not free (So it damn well better save a lot of money somewhere) they aren’t being used in the sense that MTG says.
So, because she was mercilessly mocked for the statement, it is probably best to give her a fractional slice on this – just no validity in the way she meant it. She has maintained enough historic and offensive stupidity that it really doesn’t matter, it’s fine to note this.
She’s still wrong but…
God Bless:Â I can be reached at [email protected] and @JasonMiciak
Look, we can seed clouds with silver iodide. THAT is our weather-changing capability. Trillion watt lasers? Well, not plural that’s for sure. ONE, LFEX, has been powered on for for an incredibly short duration, approximately a trillionth of a second or one picosecond. Others are in various stages of construction. So, why build the damned things? They vaporize shit. They vaporize shit and create plasma. We don’t have that on earth but it does exist in space. We consider this to be an extreme state which if we could create plasma we could replicate conditions as they were at the start of our universe.
We use lasers today-medicine most often. They could be used for alternative energy production. One thing they are NOT being used for is weather changing. When you vaporize shit and it becomes plasma, it doesn’t become rain. When you have something that COULD vaporize, say clouds, it could also vaporize things like…people, infrastructure, …I have a feeling anyone making one of the monster lasers that can be somewhat easily transported will not be lauded.
Of course humans can affect the weather.
Since humans started burning fossil fuels the Co2 in the atmosphere has increased from 280 parts per million to 450+ ppm. This increases the amount of heat retained in the atmosphere, instead of letting it radiate away into space, so the retained heat raises the temperature of the atmosphere and the earth’s surface. This heat particularly increases the heat stored in oceans and lakes raising their temperature. This increased energy drives increasingly stronger and more frequent weather events as the heated gases and fluids move around redistributing it.
We call this global warming, or anthropogenic climate change, and it is the reason that hurricanes are becoming more frequent and stronger. You may have heard of some hurricanes striking land recently, causing a great deal of deaths, damage and suffering.
In a world ruled by responsible people this heating effect would be tackled by decreasing the amount of Co2 emitted by burning fossil fuels, by replacing them with different sources of energy, particularly with renewable forms like wind, solar, and hydro electricity – which don’t need any expensive climate altering fuels to be supplied and paid for, at all.
You’ think that the people of a large peninsula surrounded by, currently quite warm oceans would be aware of this more than other people. But this is not the case, Florida is ruled by people who lie about cause and effect so that they and their friends can continue to profit off selling fossil fuels, and deny the resulting hurricanes, now occurring fortnightly, as being caused by human activity at all.
But some people have noticed the death and destruction, or to some people, even worse, the financial cost, of fortnightly hurricanes and are looking at replacing the idiots who deny global warming and climate change exist. The idiots who need replacing are called republicans and the ones who think changing things are called Democrats, and luckily we have a chance to change in an upcoming election.
The trouble is that many people believe the lies. Maybe we need a few more hurricanes to convince them?
And then people wouldn’t waste time wondering if giant lasers cause hurricanes and focus, instead, on what is really causing there to be so many of them.
A half assed theory is just mental masturbation. Nothing more. Interesting that facts are ignored while theories that will never materialize are the gold standard.
You would think that an obviously brilliant scientist like Michio Kaku could take a second to anticipate the public effects of spouting off about hazy theoretical possibilities in today’s political climate — and on CNN to boot! Just goes to show that brilliance and common sense don’t necessarily go together…
that’s for sure! how could he be so irresponsible?
People love powerful fantasies. They like to think humans can do miraculous things. But it doesn’t work like Hollywood.
It took the whole human population 150 years to raise the temperature of the world 1.5 degrees. That’s the size of what we are dealing with. No human action is worth more than spitting into the wind of a hurricane. They release power at the rate of an atomic bomb every few minutes.
I might be wrong but I seem to remember claims during the Cold War that Russia could manipulate the weather> Is Marj just following orders?