Airplanes can change the weather, according to a new study. It’s not a major effect, but it appears they can marginally increase local precipitation.

This is the sort of thing I find fascinating, for I cannot help thinking that people will gain greater understanding of the various ways we can manipulate the weather in the coming decades. I suspect that one of the ultimate effects of the climate change issue will be not having “no impact”, but rather people discovering new ways of changing the weather patterns. (I know weather and climate are different things, but they are nonetheless related.)

Of course, this might not always be a good thing; as people will probably think they know more than they do, and end up making costly mistakes. It reminds me of early efforts at economic manipulation, when policy makers were doing things to the economy that often had the opposite of the anticipated effect. Obviously, economies and weather patterns are both very complicated systems.

But then again, I may just be crazy. That’s a theory many of my friends propose when I mention this.