Towering nearly 830 metres up, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai – part of the United Arab Emirates – is a marvel of engineering, and the world’s tallest building, for now.
It may soon pale in comparison to a new megastructure in the desert nation – the UAE, with the help of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, is considering building a mountain to increase rainfall. The study is only beginning, but the researchers expect to have the first modelling results – showing necessary height and slope – this summer.
While the idea of an artificial mountain may seem outrageous, this isn’t the first time it has surfaced. In 2009 a was proposed for wildlife in Berlin, and in 2011 a Dutch group took a serious look at . While neither got off the drawing board, research concluded that they could be done.
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A mountain in the UAE, , wouldn’t be for animal habitats or skiing, however, but to trigger cloud formation and much-needed rainfall, with some help from . Increasing water demand in the country, combined with , takes a toll on a total annual rainfall that averages  75 millimetres. Hence the heavy use of energy-intensive and often polluting desalination plants in the region.
Climate disruption
Talk of mega-scale projects to lessen some of the impacts of global climate disruption is growing. That is no surprise, as anthropogenic global warming is so intense that we’re to avoid large-scale disasters.
, while reflective blankets and paint may slow glacial melting, and on a global scale, geoengineering to manage solar radiation may slow or stop rising temperatures by seeding the upper stratosphere with megatonnes of tiny particles.
None of these are solutions to global warming; they are, at best, tourniquets intended to keep societies functioning while we desperately work on de-carbonising our economies.
All such projects will have unintended consequences, and a new mountain in the sands of the UAE would be no exception. Generating clouds and rainfall by blocking air flow doesn’t make water appear magically out of nowhere, it just alters where moisture collects and falls – rainfall patterns will shift. Somebody else is likely to lose out.
Depending on where the new mountain was built, this could affect numerous other countries on the Arabian peninsula, the Middle East in general, even eastern Africa. Changes in rainfall in already precarious environments wouldn’t go unnoticed, and may serve as yet another trigger for conflict in an already unstable area.
Even if the UAE builds a mountain, the larger climate problem is not going to disappear. What’s more, oil-rich nations in the region are going to be hit by a double-whammy: local temperatures rising to levels that may be beyond those human civilisation can handle, alongside the imminent end of the fossil-fuel economy.
This could this be a last gasp attempt by the UAE to stave off the first part of that by taking advantage of the fact that the second part hasn’t hit yet.
