The Idea so Powerful

Open eyes, see the land, the Azure, the sky and the “rising sun from the East.”

Hi readers!

Isn’t it a powerful idea? Indeed, it is but do we understand the message contained therein? No, we don’t? Because we don’t have the capacity and vision to understand it. We don’t have even the courtesy to say thank you to:

The spirit of the earth welcoming the Adams which is embedded in this idea.

Yet we are illumined that we will survive respectfully in the comity of the Nations. Don’t you think we have reached the destination to where we are today? The most ungrateful crowd gifted with visionaries possessing: The ideas so powerful.

Have you now realized why I said, “Borrow vision from China if you have to?

The great poet Li Bai written the verse: Don’t you not see the Yellow River comes from the sky? in 752 AD and the Chinese are working since then, on it with conviction and letter & spirit.

What they have achieved till to date ?

Chinese initiated weather modification as ecological security mediated through rain enhancement activities which also includes weather modification in the Tibetan plateau.

Government claims that rain enhancement activities increased the area of two lakes at the headwaters of the Yellow River by 33 and 64 square kilometers respectively since 2006 despite climate change effects on the Tibetan Plateau which also played key role in the expansion of the lakes due to melting permafrost (thick subsurface layer of soil that remains below freezing point throughout the year) and glaciers.

Up to 2020, area covered under cloud modification including cloud seeding has been expanded up to 5.5 million square kilometers: more than half the country’s total area which indicated that “clouds are viewed not as an atmospheric features, but as a resource from which water can be extracted and secured as water resource to used for ecological preservation, it protection, construction, restoration, increasing agricultural production and achieving ecological civilization which are priority areas entered the National political in 2007 and preserved in Chinese Communist Party’s constituting and constitution of Peoples Republic of China. Her president consider “Two Mountains Theory” (clear waters and lush mountains) as invaluable assets for the state comparable to that of gold and silver: the assets of legends and celebrities only (Find and analogy in Pakistan if you can).

The “Two Mountains Theory” work wonder for Huzhou city located in the center of Yangtze River delta and near the freshwater lake Tai. Huzhou was once the hub of bedrock industries only but now is one of the four capital cities of silk in China, textiles, building materials, agriculture, and part of beautiful China:

(The dreams do come true provided you dream)

“Ecological civilizations” is a sociotechnical invention based on China’s traditional philosophy which describe “cultural and national continuity” distinguishing China’s path of progress from the West with focus on scientific and technofixes that connect Chinese with economic growth and ecologically civilized future.

Two principals were used for this, one is selectivity i.e., intentionally choosing some people who are capable of delivering instead dead wood (like we do) and making certain things for using them productively. Second is the reductionist approach based on analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon in its simple and fundamental constituents so that it can be understood by those who matter. It is basically a machine like approach to manage nature which is hypothesized as a set of flexible biophysical relationship that can be measured, modelled, altered, and optimized for human use.

Sky river project is also based on this thinking which describe to the world the hydro-geographical history of China who has been actively manipulated her relationship with water for thousands of years and has been developing weather modification techniques since 1950.

Sky river is one of the largest and most ambitious weather engineering projects seen for the first time both as phenomenon and conceptual model of water vapor transport which can hypothetically be turned into precipitation: a promethean concept based on radically scaling up weather modification with the help of  distributed infrastructure of ground and orbital machinery used for intercepting water vapors and channeling them into dehydrated Yellow River Basin where supposedly, it would fall as rain over an area of 1.6 million square kilometers, for increasing water supply by 5–10 billion cubic meters annually.

An aerial corridor will thus be made for South–North Water Transfer Project  (SNWTP) which proclaim equivalency in value, worth, and function between ground and air transport of water.

The total incoming water vapors into China are close to 20 trillion cubic meters per year: four times the average annual rainfall. These vapors delivered through various long and short-distance channels, ranging from the Caspian Sea, Altai Mountains, Western Indian Ocean, and the Bay of Bengal. Smaller quantities of vapor are conveyed by high-altitude winds originating above the Atlantic Ocean.

All of these channels enter territory of China from the Southeast, partially discharging their water before reaching the height of the Tibetan plateau. The focus on water vapor suggest a shift from the middle and lower reaches of the river to the headwaters of Yellow and Yangtze rivers which are not confined to the plateau but branch off in multiple directions to the sources of each water vapor stream as they approach Tibet from the above. This way, control of the river’s headwaters is extended into the atmosphere. Here is where the rivers of the earth meet the rivers of the sky.

This however, raised the complicated question of the owner ship of the atmospheric water

To resolve the issue, It is, imperative to first look if and where water basin(s) exists and what determines the inter-basin water flow in the atmosphere? This makes resolving ownership of atmospheric water more complicated compared to the issues resolving the land resources.

For atmospheric water,

topography of the earth where watersheds are determined by the processes that shape them and topography of the winds and pressure gradients through which the catchment of the sky river can be determined mathematically must be considered,

Sky Rivers, however, are of four-dimensional topologies of flow projected onto and into the sky. The clouds in Beijing are different from those in Qinghai which seems like pressing on the heads (please see the picture of Qinghai lake in the beginning) giving the feeling that water in the sky is connected to the water on the ground if dynamic theory of sky rivers is considered.

Taking privilege of the Li Bai, the cultural imagination of the Yellow River becomes a scientific reality. Tibetan Plateau extends the presence of water vertically up into the troposphere and across time to locate sources of extraction and optimization of its spatial and temporal instability while transboundary river management is tied to the understanding of the topography pre-arranged by gravity, the interception of water vapor will thus require the imagining and imaging of global wind circulation as a latent topography of opportunities.

In the concept papers, “sky rivers” are portrayed as fractures across the Earth’s atmospheric range which is opposite to the conventional representations of atmospheric rivers characterized by heat maps and vector field graphs (assigning vector to each point in a subset of space where vector is a quantity having direction and magnitude).

Sky rivers are portraying a system of clear and stable pathways that define a hierarchy of primary and secondary streams and their convergence, similar to the classical watershed. Different states of wetness temporality are separated and made evident through these lines. This act of reduction and separation is deemed necessary to image water vapor into a river. Whereas heat maps portray water and moisture in a flux as snapshots of a field of forces wherein the atmosphere is imagined as a whole.  The lines of sky rivers thus, appeared to establish a long-term knowledge of recurrence: something that can be bound to an infrastructure.

Such complicated and multidimensional work require comprehensive thinking, plaining and implementation with Chinese like conviction which Chinese have in Li Bai’s Poetry.

Do we have such conviction in the saying of our national poet? The answer is Big No. We don’t know even what conviction is?  The world is determining their share of water residing in the atmosphere while we are still unable to solve our water problem on the earth not even after seeing rising sun in the East.

Look at China, look at Japan, look at Taiwan, Vietnam, North and South Korea. Are they not in the East?

China, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan: all are in the East, all are manufacturing semiconductors: a factor tacitly responsible for unspoken friction between them and the West.

Dear reader! the sun is not rising from the East rather, it is has already reached above the horizon.

What do you think?

See you next week with the last blog of this series.

Till then, take care, Bye.