India Trials Delhi Cloud Seeding To Clean Air in World's Most Polluted City (theguardian.com) 30
The Delhi regional government is trialling a cloud-seeding experiment to induce artificial rain, in an effort to clean the air in the world's most polluted city. From a report: The Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) has been proposing the use of cloud seeding as a way to bring Delhi's air pollution under control since it was elected to lead the regional government this year.
Cloud seeding involves using aircraft or drones to add to clouds particles of silver iodide, which have a structure similar to ice. Water droplets cluster around the particles, modifying the structure of the clouds and increasing the chance of precipitation. Months of unpredictable weather over India's capital had put the BJP's cloud-seeding plans on pause. But days after Delhi's air quality once again fell into the hazardous range after Diwali festival, and a thick brown haze settled over the city, the government said the scheme would finally be rolled out.
Cloud seeding involves using aircraft or drones to add to clouds particles of silver iodide, which have a structure similar to ice. Water droplets cluster around the particles, modifying the structure of the clouds and increasing the chance of precipitation. Months of unpredictable weather over India's capital had put the BJP's cloud-seeding plans on pause. But days after Delhi's air quality once again fell into the hazardous range after Diwali festival, and a thick brown haze settled over the city, the government said the scheme would finally be rolled out.
And the Left laughs when they forbid this in Texas (Score:2, Interesting)
Chemtrail conspiracies are mostly nonsense. But weather control IS doable and real. It makes sense to regulate it, and not let some people and companies do what they want.
Or, you know, just quit polluting... (Score:4, Insightful)
...so damn much.
What is it with people who effectively think band aids can cure cancer... this species is doomed by its own idiocy.
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...so damn much.
What is it with people who effectively think band aids can cure cancer... this species is doomed by its own idiocy.
How? No seriously please workshop this for a while. When coming up with your solution see how it factors into a city with an unfathomable population of $35million people, the majority of which are so fucking poor that any attempt to get them to change their practices will need to result in direct capital injection into the practices of private people.
Not as easy when you see the boundary conditions is it? Paris got rid of its smog. It's a city with a tiny fraction of the population, a far better starting po
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What is it with people who effectively think band aids can cure cancer... this species is doomed by its own idiocy.
You should understand that with many problems there needs to be short term solutions to hold things along until there's a long term solution available. To expand off your band-aid analogy it's why we see first aid stations and first aid kits in public places. It would be nice to have a full blown surgical theater but that takes time, space, and money. So if there's someone that had a severe fall, to the point of needing medical care, then the first aid kit comes out to patch things up as best as possible
Acid Rain? (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who grew up in Southern California, I'm surprised this article didn't mention the risk of pulling down that ultra dense air pollution in bursts of abnormally acidic rain. The better option would be "pollute less".
Re:Acid Rain? (Score:4, Informative)
As someone who grew up in Southern California, I'm surprised this article didn't mention the risk of pulling down that ultra dense air pollution in bursts of abnormally acidic rain. The better option would be "pollute less".
Acid rain from cloud seeding? Just...no. The article didn't mention it because that risk doesn't exist. You (and the mods that modded you up) need to brush up on chemistry and atmospheric physics.
Cloud seeding uses silver iodide, sodium chloride, and (occasionally) dry ice to encourage condensation, because their crystal structure looks like ice nuclei to the H20 that is already bouncing around in the clouds. None of those reagents create acids in water. What produces acid rain is sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides reacting with that H2O to form sulfuric and nitric acids. That's the chemistry you seem to be missing. Unless the seeding aircraft are dumping tons of sulfur compounds—which they aren’t—the process doesn’t generate new acids.
What it does do is hasten the removal of what’s already there. If the air column is saturated with industrial SOs and NOs, a seeded rainstorm could bring that down faster, leading to a (very) brief spike in local acidity. But that’s a temporary redistribution, not a new chemical source, and it’s already happening every time Delhi gets a natural monsoon downpour. This is atmospheric physics 101 -- you seem to have missed a few chapters.
The real limitation is that cloud seeding only works when there’s sufficient moisture and the right cloud microphysics—it’s not a magic pollution scrubber, so your SoCal analogy is (way) off. Los Angeles photochemical smog is mostly ozone, peroxyacyl nitrates, and particulates, not the sulfur compounds that drove the 1970s acid-rain panic in the U.S. Northeast. You are mixing apples and turpentine; at least oranges are a fruit.
In short: seeding might wash out particulates and existing acidic aerosols more quickly, but it doesn’t create acid rain. You did get one thing right, though. The “better option is pollute less” is absolutely true—but you really need to work on your chemistry.
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What is in the air already? Its going to mix with water and rain down on you. You are living in it either way.
Is this really that difficult of a concept? While in the air this gets in people's eyes and lungs. If washed out of the air by rain then it's on our shoes and feet. We might kick up some of that dust and chemicals again by our shoes and tires but most of it will become part of the dirt. This is a lot of carbon and nitrogen compounds and so once on the ground is plant food. I don't want to be called a "denier" by being lumped in with those that claim more CO2 is good for plants. The point I'm making is
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Acid rain from cloud seeding? Just...no.
I think you entirely missed the point. The reason they are proposing promoting rain in the first place is so that the rain can clear the contaminants out of the air. The GP was pointing out that the tradeoff to this is that those contaminants being removed from the air in rain will mean that they end up _in_ the rain. The result of that tends to be acid rain. Now, as a tradeoff, acid rain is probably a better outcome for human health than the airborne pollution, so that is not a showstopper for this plan, b
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I think you entirely missed the point. The reason they are proposing promoting rain in the first place is so that the rain can clear the contaminants out of the air. The GP was pointing out that the tradeoff to this is that those contaminants being removed from the air in rain will mean that they end up _in_ the rain. The result of that tends to be acid rain.
Maybe. Acid rain originates mostly from sulfates that come from burning coal (which contains sulfur as a contaminant.) But a large portion of the Delhi air pollution comes from burning the crop residue in fields to prepare the land for the next planting. This most likely doesn't produce sulfates.
Not all of it, though, so some of the pollution may include nitric oxide from internal combustion engines without pollution controls, and sulfur oxides from high-sulfur coal burned in power plants, which indeed woul
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Maybe. Acid rain originates mostly from sulfates that come from burning coal (which contains sulfur as a contaminant.) But a large portion of the Delhi air pollution comes from burning the crop residue in fields to prepare the land for the next planting. This most likely doesn't produce sulfates.
True, but bear in mind that coal contains sulfur because it is fossilized plant matter that contained sulfur while it was alive. The residual organic matter from the crops most definitely contains sulfur. It can be more concentrated in coal, but the actual ratio between carbon and sulfur is going to be in the same general area. So you will definitely get sulfates from burning vegetable matter. Hard to say the exact concentration relative to burning fossil fuels.
Not all of it, though, so some of the pollution may include nitric oxide from internal combustion engines without pollution controls, and sulfur oxides from high-sulfur coal burned in power plants, which indeed would cause acid rain.
Yeah, that stuff is definitely going to be in
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Maybe. Acid rain originates mostly from sulfates that come from burning coal (which contains sulfur as a contaminant.) But a large portion of the Delhi air pollution comes from burning the crop residue in fields to prepare the land for the next planting. This most likely doesn't produce sulfates.
True, but bear in mind that coal contains sulfur because it is fossilized plant matter that contained sulfur while it was alive. The residual organic matter from the crops most definitely contains sulfur. It can be more concentrated in coal, but the actual ratio between carbon and sulfur is going to be in the same general area.
not even close. Coal averages 2.5% sulfur. Plant matter averages about 0.25%.
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not even close. Coal averages 2.5% sulfur. Plant matter averages about 0.25%.
First, from what I can find, coal is reported to have an average sulfur content of between 1.28% to 1.8%, so we can probably go with 1.54%. A s for the sulfur content of the plant matter, it is hard to find a precise source, but I will note that I was curious about the actual sulfur content of the soil around Delhi, so I looked it up and it turns out that there is low sulfur content in the soil there. However, because of this, apparently the farmers have to use sulfur-containing fertilizer. The up side is t
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And you've fundamentally misunderstood the comment I was replying to. The post I replied to didn’t mention wet deposition or pollutant washout — it claimed “bursts of abnormally acidic rain,” which implies a chemical process caused by the seeding itself. That’s the claim I addressed.
What you’re actually doing here is a straw-man rescue: steelmanning the GP’s point into something more defensible (rain pulling pollution down) and then wasting bandwidth arguing that i
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And you've fundamentally misunderstood the comment I was replying to. The post I replied to didn’t mention wet deposition or pollutant washout — it claimed “bursts of abnormally acidic rain,” which implies a chemical process caused by the seeding itself. That’s the claim I addressed.
I really have not. The comment referred to:
...the risk of pulling down that ultra dense air pollution in bursts of abnormally acidic rain.
Clearly was not implying a chemical process caused by the seeding itself. It was implying that the "ultra dense air pollution" would be pulled down. That'
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I am the OP. Tragedy is 100% correct in my intent. I don't care about the seeding chemicals themselves. No one should be. The problem comes from the use of rain to clear the local atmosphere of the pollutants which creates abnormally acidic raid.
I'll say again-- I'm surprised this wasn't in the article. It's a genuine risk/cost of this type of solution to this type of problem.
I'll add to the concern: People tend to use repeatable short-term stop-gaps as long-term solutions, so we could fully expect India to
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The better option would be "pollute less".
How? Those are easy words to type, but not so easy to convert into a policy addressing a city of 35million poor people with little capital to invest in change.
As someone who grew up in Southern California
I want to point out to you that California is not only extraordinarily wealthy, but that despite everything they've done they still top the charts in air pollution, and that despite 40+ years of efforts to get it under control.
The problem isn't easy to solve for a rich state like California, try take away all the wealth and cram the entire population
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Environmentally though, Delhi and some parts of California have a number of things in common. For example LA and Delhi both have very still air that allows smog to accumulate so that the problem is magnified. Basically, a lot of places can get away with polluting locally a lot more, but still having cleaner air. This is among the reasons that California has traditionally had its own stricter emissions controls than the federal ones.
As for polluting less, a large part of the problem is that there are regulat
Drainage (Score:4, Insightful)
India is notorious for lack of basic sanitation infrastructure. Open/clogged drains .. lack of sewage systems. This rain will only increase their already hire morbidity levels. Morbidity is measure of how many people have illnesses such as diarrhea. A significant percentage of Indians don't fear germs and aren't even grossed out by food handlers touching their food. And no, they aren't immune to disease: https://www.financialexpress.c... [financialexpress.com]
They really need intensive training that emphasize always using utensils to handle food (btw gloves dont work if they wear it all the time and touch all kinds of literal crap with it before handling food).
And btw, the issue is definitely not due to poverty .. it doesn't cost much money to be clean and if they dont wanna spend that small amount it's because they prioritized other things.
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Given that in some rural parts of the country people believe stuff like this [wikipedia.org], it's not surprising awareness of importance of sanitation is so low.
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Someone getting bit by a dog makes puppies appear in their abdomen? That reminded me of this SMBC comic...
https://www.smbc-comics.com/co... [smbc-comics.com]
That superstition would not be so bad if the people bitten didn't have charlatans feeding on their fears to make money. It means they seek out the charlatans than medical professionals that could treat rabies or whatever that could have come from the bite.
Stop burning stuff! (Score:3)
I guess it's politically difficult to get people to stop burning stuff but treating the cause rather than trying to remediate the effects is usually a better approach.
Diwali firecrackers prompted the current crisis.
Burning fields intentionally rather than mulching the straw is a recurring cause of the crisis.
Also, the usual suspects... fossil fuel industry, transport.
"Delhi has been ranked as the world’s most polluted city for more than a decade. In 2024, pollution levels – caused by a deadly mix of emissions from crop burning, factories and heavy traffic, which get trapped over the city when the air gets colder – rose by 6%."
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Diwali firecrackers prompted the current crisis.
Solving today's isolated event doesn't solve the underlying problem. I think virtually all people would say treating the underlying very high base level of air pollution is far more important than solving what is a very short lived smog problem. People aren't going to get healthy by banning Diwali firecrackers, not when the average year round Air Quality is 2x worse than the recommended short term daily peak healthy exposure from the WHO.
It's sort of like telling someone "don't go swimming, you'll get wet"
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Burning fields intentionally rather than mulching the straw is a recurring cause of the crisis.
You don't know why they do that? The straw that is left over in the fields after a harvest will be this long stringy grass, so much so that for some of these crops this is used to make ropes. It's hard work to break this up by any mechanical means, and unless they have a tractor or a team of horses then the next best option is fire.
Also, the usual suspects... fossil fuel industry, transport.
Given the option between burning the chaff or a diesel tractor, and a few implements for it, are fossil fuels all that bad?
"Delhi has been ranked as the worldâ(TM)s most polluted city for more than a decade. In 2024, pollution levels â" caused by a deadly mix of emissions from crop burning, factories and heavy traffic, which get trapped over the city when the air gets colder â" rose by 6%."
Heavy traffic is a problem. I've met people from Ind
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Electrify everything
Only works if ... (Score:2)
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I don't know where you live but in rice country Arkansas it's bad. The sun turns everything a sickly yellow color. I wish these folks would measure Arkansas in October.
https://climatetrace.org/air-p... [climatetrace.org]
Can they use something organic instead? (Score:1)
In the fine article is a concern that the chemicals used for seeding rain could cause it's own kind of pollution. Whenever I see or hear mention of cloud seeding I think of studies done to investigate reports from long ago, centuries ago, of grain mills seeing more rain around them than other areas. In the investigation they discovered that some of the fine dust from the milling would indeed be scattered into the air and cause more rain and larger droplets.
I can give a personal experience of this. There'