Hurricanes and typhoons batter the coast leaving hundreds dead. The rains fail and crops wither in the field, or the stuff keeps falling until the rivers burst their banks. There are tornados, blizzards and blinding sunshine. No matter where you live, or how rich you are, you can be sure that the weather will always have the upper hand. And no wonder. The atmosphere that drives it is a complex machine powered by colossal amounts of energy from the Sun. And not only that, it's chaotic too. What hope is there of controlling the weather when, in the famous words of Edward Lorenz, the flap of a butterfly's wing in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. But what if this exquisite sensitivity could be used to our advantage - not merely to predict the weather, but to actually control it. Warm the ocean at a particular spot in the mid-Atlantic, for example, and northern Europe's next depression might stop in its tracks. Cool the air above Santa Barbara and a welcome rainstorm could go rumbling across the Arizona desert. Researchers believe they have already glimpsed the soft underbelly of chaos that could put the atmosphere under our command. The new ideas are so potent that these scientists are beginning to think on the grandest scale. Perhaps, they whisper, it will one day be possible to control the weather from pole to pole.
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