6 ms·

See also: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/330a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/330a In the U.S., as a non-government organization, if you

See also: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/330a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/330a In the U.S., as a non-government organization, if you’d like to modify the weather you need to fill out the NOAA form 17-4(a). All weather modification projects that have been filed can be found here: https://www.library.noaa.gov/Collections/Digital-Collections/Weather-Modification-Project-Reports https://www.library.noaa.gov/Collections/Digital-Collections...

techdragon 5y ago
“Also expected[sic] from the requirement for reporting are religious activities or other ceremonies, rites and rituals intended to modify the weather.” This just puts such a smile on my face in the middle of reading such otherwise bland government prose.
- rory 5y ago
  Well of course, you can't just have people doing unlicensed rain dances willy-nilly.
  - brazzy 5y ago
    Daniel Howling Coyote has entered the chat
  - bigdict 5y ago
    No no they meant "excepted", meaning the government isn't worried too much about your rain dances.
    - rory 5y ago
      Ah, well that's disappointing (but in as more real sense, reassuring).
      - salawat 5y ago
        Keep in mind, that only holds as long as it's a religious practice, and it doesn't work. Start getting a greater than 50% success rate, and I'll bet you see changes real quick. The Supreme Court case will be amazing.
        GauntletWizard 5y ago
        My rain dance has a >50% success rate! It's part of my Seattle morning ritual.
ricksunny 5y ago
Interesting, and this will sound very off-topic, but it's actually completely connected - there are any number of technical domains in which, if a given project is taken to an extreme in one particular circumstance or another, can feed back and cause havoc on many who aren't even involved with the project, or who have the slightest clue about it and therefore didn't have agency to internalize the risks involved. I'm going to list in no particular order: • tetraethyl lead under Thomas Midgley Jr. and Charles Kettering • chlorofluorocarbons (also Midgely and Kettering) • Chernobyl (I would include other nuclear disasters in this bullet as well) • [90% probability] 1977 Russian flu pandemic • a [50%] probability research-related leak for the current pandemic (simply calling this 50% for this post's purposes because nobody knows and probabilities are difficult to weigh absent more data) They all involve insufficient, blinkered, or mis- or overly-incentivized oversight of the activities at hand. At some level, they all employ an attitude of "prove the work is likely to cause harm" rather than "prove the work carries acceptable level of risk". I don't necessarily know how to solve this without causing scientific and technical progress to slow to a crawl. But I think that stakeholder incentives to the green-lighting of any given project with a remotely global scope, and committees who could intervene to stop it in case of overwhelming safety concerns, should be mapped out in excruciating detail to ensure there isn't the faintest of COI (conflict of interest) that could influence decision-making however subtly. So circling back to the parent comment, the idea that one can modify weather, presumably confined locally or temporally, seems innocuous enough - - it would be impossible for that to have global-scale consequences, right? Fact is, I really don't know, and this article is a good example of such an artificial climate-shifting project. What I would want to be assured of as a member of the public, though, is that the oversight for considering such a project wouldn't unduly benefit in some way - financially, career status, family nepotism, etc. that could cloud sober judgement on whether/how the project should be allowed to proceed. To first-order, I'd like to see a problem-domain-agnostic approach to ensuring the human incentives across all aspects of approval couldn't possibly be operating out of the wrong place. I don't want to have to be able to understand the underlying respective technologies involved to feel assured that the risk-to-public-benefit reward trade-off has been undertaken through an irreproachably sober lens.
- bee_rider 5y ago
flatiron 5y ago
If any super villain tries their weather machine without filling this out first expect the wrath of the US government.
- buescher 5y ago
  But, but, my paperwork was in order!!!
  - chaboud 5y ago
    Oh... Carry on, then.

techdragon 5y ago

“Also expected[sic] from the requirement for reporting are religious activities or other ceremonies, rites and rituals intended to modify the weather.” This just puts such a smile on my face in the middle of reading such otherwise bland government prose.

rory 5y ago
Well of course, you can't just have people doing unlicensed rain dances willy-nilly.
- brazzy 5y ago
  Daniel Howling Coyote has entered the chat
- bigdict 5y ago
  No no they meant "excepted", meaning the government isn't worried too much about your rain dances.
  - rory 5y ago
    Ah, well that's disappointing (but in as more real sense, reassuring).
    - salawat 5y ago
      Keep in mind, that only holds as long as it's a religious practice, and it doesn't work. Start getting a greater than 50% success rate, and I'll bet you see changes real quick. The Supreme Court case will be amazing.
      - GauntletWizard 5y ago
        My rain dance has a >50% success rate! It's part of my Seattle morning ritual.

ricksunny 5y ago

Interesting, and this will sound very off-topic, but it's actually completely connected - there are any number of technical domains in which, if a given project is taken to an extreme in one particular circumstance or another, can feed back and cause havoc on many who aren't even involved with the project, or who have the slightest clue about it and therefore didn't have agency to internalize the risks involved. I'm going to list in no particular order: • tetraethyl lead under Thomas Midgley Jr. and Charles Kettering • chlorofluorocarbons (also Midgely and Kettering) • Chernobyl (I would include other nuclear disasters in this bullet as well) • [90% probability] 1977 Russian flu pandemic • a [50%] probability research-related leak for the current pandemic (simply calling this 50% for this post's purposes because nobody knows and probabilities are difficult to weigh absent more data) They all involve insufficient, blinkered, or mis- or overly-incentivized oversight of the activities at hand. At some level, they all employ an attitude of "prove the work is likely to cause harm" rather than "prove the work carries acceptable level of risk". I don't necessarily know how to solve this without causing scientific and technical progress to slow to a crawl. But I think that stakeholder incentives to the green-lighting of any given project with a remotely global scope, and committees who could intervene to stop it in case of overwhelming safety concerns, should be mapped out in excruciating detail to ensure there isn't the faintest of COI (conflict of interest) that could influence decision-making however subtly. So circling back to the parent comment, the idea that one can modify weather, presumably confined locally or temporally, seems innocuous enough - - it would be impossible for that to have global-scale consequences, right? Fact is, I really don't know, and this article is a good example of such an artificial climate-shifting project. What I would want to be assured of as a member of the public, though, is that the oversight for considering such a project wouldn't unduly benefit in some way - financially, career status, family nepotism, etc. that could cloud sober judgement on whether/how the project should be allowed to proceed. To first-order, I'd like to see a problem-domain-agnostic approach to ensuring the human incentives across all aspects of approval couldn't possibly be operating out of the wrong place. I don't want to have to be able to understand the underlying respective technologies involved to feel assured that the risk-to-public-benefit reward trade-off has been undertaken through an irreproachably sober lens.

bee_rider 5y ago

flatiron 5y ago

If any super villain tries their weather machine without filling this out first expect the wrath of the US government.

buescher 5y ago
But, but, my paperwork was in order!!!
- chaboud 5y ago
  Oh... Carry on, then.