[DAWN] PAKISTAN'S weather is getting more extreme, less predictable. Concomitantly there is rising temptation to put the onus upon some human agency. Unsurprisingly, sinister and malign forces bent upon reshaping this country's climatic pattern are being conjured up. But how well can they survive scientific scrutiny?| Have these people no faith in their loudly worshipped god, Allah, who is not bound by the laws of nature? Surely that is more likely than the agency of mere humans, whose science is written up for all who have library access to the published journals. |
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
's hospital morgues to store corpses this week after 1,000 people died from a monster heatwave that left Sindh sizzling with 50ºC temperatures. But April was unseasonably cold in the northern areas, where rain and hailstorms destroyed crops and fruit on a massive scale. All these pale before the abnormal events of 2010. Rains of biblical proportion followed a summer of extreme heat. Sheets of water poured from the skies for days leaving 2,000 dead, millions displaced, and 20pc of Pakistain under water.
What is responsible? Some ask a different question: Who did it? A new book, Reality of Floods in Pakistain, purports to give an answer. It echoes the conspiratorial notion, pushed by certain fringe academics in the West, that weather weapons are secretly being used by powerful states against weaker ones. In particular, this book holds India responsible for the 2010 catastrophe.
Expecting that my dissent would add variety, last week I was invited to be a speaker at its launch in Islamabad by the author, Waqas Ahmed, a young Pak telecommunications engineer. Glowing tribute is paid on the book's back cover by Pakistain's famed nuclear scientist, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. Mr Mahmood, who also spoke, was awarded the Sitara-e-Imtiaz in 1998 for being the founder-director of the Kahuta Nuclear Enrichment Project. He is better known as Pakistain's 'jinn man' for advocating the capture of these fiery
...a single two-syllable word carrying connotations of both incoherence and viciousness. A fiery delivery implies an audience of rubes and yokels, preferably forming up into a mob...
beings, who would then duly add their contributions to our electricity grid. He achieved additional recognition after meeting the late Osama bin Laden
... who used to be alive but now he's not...
in Afghanistan in early 2001.
One argument in the book closely follows that of Prof Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, former chairman of the HEC and a Fellow of the Royal Society, which was published in this newspaper on Oct 17, 2010. Therein the good professor, quoting politicians and non-scientists rather than his own research in chemistry, alleged that the massive floods in July 2010, and possibly various recent earthquakes, were likely instigated by an experiment in Alaska called HAARP which directs radio waves at a part of the upper atmosphere called the ionosphere. My objections to this bizarre theory will not be repeated here. The interested reader can google the various subsequent public discussions on the topic.
Less bizarre, but no less wrong, is the book's contention that seeding clouds can lead to catastrophic floods. I say this is less bizarre because diddling with the ionosphere cannot have the slightest impact upon weather but seeding clouds might have some. The book hints that five years ago India prepared some combination of drones, aircraft spewing chemicals, ground-based cloud seeding generators, ionospheric heaters, and aerosol rockets that nearly drowned its unfriendly neighbour. But even if some of this paraphernalia could have been mustered without being detected, to cause massive countrywide rains is impossible. To understand this we first need to understand both the potentialities and limitations of cloud seeding.