Friday, February 7, 2014

Wizard Snow

Last week snow fell all over the country, including some areas in the south and west that rarely get any. As a Minnesotan I cope with lots of snow every year, but some of the cities hit were caught completely unprepared. It makes little sense, after all, to maintain a Twin Cities-sized fleet of snowplows and mountains of sand and salt for snow that only hits every twenty or thirty years, and that means even an inch of snow can shut down an entire metropolitan area. It's not some sort of conspiracy, it's just basic resource allocation.

Some theorists, though, see a sinister hand behind the recent snowfalls. YouTube videos claiming to prove that the snow was "geo-engineered" have popped up all over the Internet. The evidence? Supposedly, the snow does not melt normally when exposed to a flame, so it must be of a different chemical composition than water and therefore created by evil government scientists. Essentially, it's wizard snow - at least to anyone who doesn't understand basic physics.

WTVR Meteorologist Mike Stone explains in the video how the heat applied to the snowball is making the snow vaporize. The snow is disappearing and not melting.

According to Stone, this is known as sublimation, and the US Geologic Survey defines it as “the conversion between the solid and the gaseous phases of matter, with no intermediate liquid stage.”

According to WTVR, The black marks on the snow are caused by the butane in the lighter that is released when the flame is held close to the snow. If you dropped the snow in a saucepan, the snow would melt.


Here's a news flash for those who think that cloud seeding or some other technology that can influence the weather would create snow of a completely different chemical composition - it can't. The same is especially true of any sort of electromagnetic technology like HAARP, which wouldn't affect the chemical composition of the resulting snow one bit because it adds no new chemicals to the clouds - and on top of that there's no evidence suggesting that snow or rain can be triggered by even very high-powered electromagnetic waves.

While seeding techniques can work, what they do is send tiny particles into the clouds around which snowflakes can more easily form. That means the snow is still water when it falls from seeded clouds. Furthermore, the number of particles required would have to be astronomical for them to have played a role in all the snow that fell in so many places. Even if the stuff was loaded onto planes and released via contrails, there never would be enough if it to put much of a dent in the weather system.

Anyway, everybody knows that government scientists aren't using contrails to make fake snow. They're using them to poison the angels in heaven, which sounds way more legit.

Technorati Digg This Stumble Stumble

No comments: