"Education" implies that the people who oppose you are merely ignorant, rather than wrong. It's profoundly disrespectful -- a debating tactic to avoid confronting the opinions of those with whom you disagree, or listening to their arguments.

I can understand how someone could reasonably believe that there are things that we intelligent beings could never control (the spinning of a galaxy or something), but it seems really odd on a tech-oriented site to find those who not only don't agree that we could control natural phenomena on this one little rock, but who don't believe that any argument worth listening to could exist, such that they're calling for the education of those who disagree, rather than the convincing of those people.

You read my call for education as a call for indoctrination. That's not what it is; it is a call for realizing the implications of our actions go deeper than just the immediate consequence, and that if we try to gain control over a system at a natural equilibrium, and attempt to pin it to a new equilibrium that is more convenient for us, we may disturb other equilibria as well. The consequences could be far worse than just leaving the system alone, and building our society to withstand it rather than control it. This is why many houses along the Gulf Coast are built on stilts.

At least in the case of tropical cyclones, I am having a really hard time believing that we will be able to prevent their formation, and still be able to emulate accurately all of the various effects they have on the planet. We'd have to build systems to advect heat from the ocean to the mid-atmosphere and mid-latitudes, rain to places where the storms no longer go. We'd have to find a way to prune all the weak trees these storms naturally prune. The same argument is made for the infrequent windstorms Seattle experiences; it keeps the forests healthy by knocking down the weak and sick trees. We've have to do this identification and pruning by hand, not just in the tree farms, but in whole forests.

This is the kind of education I'm hoping for. Not telling people we can't control nature and that is the end of that, but explaining, with as much depth as they would like into the theory, that attempting to define a new equilibrium for a particular system on this planet runs the risk of other equilibria being redefined as well, and also needing to be controlled; these in turn may redefine even more equilibria, ad infinitum. Maybe "can't" is the wrong word here, maybe what I mean to say is "you don't want to".