Posted by In an i09.com article concerning the bad science that led people to settle the great plains, comes this rather interesting comment:
Sufficient plant life can indeed make it rain. There are some requirements though: 1.) Needs to be lots of plants – typically associated with forests, not farms. 2.) There already has to be water there. 3.) You need a general updraft. 4.) You need enough evaporation (sun/heat, plant surface, general water supply), sufficiently strong updraft and sufficiently low horizontal wind speed that the water that evaporates from your plants rains in roughly the same spot instead of carrying the water away before raining.
Those conditions, of course, just aren’t met in the Great Plains.
There’s plenty of literature concerning the negative effects of man-made policies w.r.t. forests and rains but outside of stopping pollution and planting trees, not much about what man can do to positively effect the environment. We’re not exactly beavers, are we.
