host: james kinter? guest: i am not entirely familiar with what you're talking about, but there is a history of weather modification research that has gone on. the military has been involved in that, as well as civilian researchers. this is not my area specifically, but my understanding is that our times to make changes to the weather have not -- our attempts to make changes to the weather have not been all that successful. we have some capability to alter the amount of precipitation in a strong, if we happen to have storm clouds available to us with cloud seeding and those sorts of techniques. but the idea that has been there that we would be able to steer tropical storms into a different place or that we might be able to somehow influence a very large scale circulation in the atmosphere, like the jet stream you mentioned, is probably ill founded. we don't really believe that is particularly possible at this point. host: herre is a tweet. guest: i think a five degrees is probably quite a large number an

anything below 25,000 can be washed out with rain. >> host: james kinter? yes, you raise a number of interesting points. there was sort of from meteorologist and horribly for the nation, an experiment to see what the effect of airplane ises on the atmosphere, which happened in september 11th, 2001 when all airplane traffic was canceled. so we had all of the information at that time of what was going on in the atmosphere with respect to the time prior and the time after the sensation of aircraft travel. and, of course, during the time that we still had all of our satellite data and we were able to do studies. and when i say we, i mean my community. it wasn't something the group did. we did look at the effect of airplane traffic on the atmosphere. particularly contrails. they tend to produce very bright white lines in the atmosphere. if you have enough airplanes, do you produce a lot of reflectance of energy. we found therefore an impact. of course, cutting off all. if we have a situation like we had with irene where a fraction of the airplane traffic is chan

after that, james kinter will discuss climatology and hurricane irene. later in the morning, a discussion on jobs in the economy. we will go to the u.s. chamber of commerce for its annual labor day briefing. live coverage under way at 10:00 a.m. eastern. now, remarks by attorney general eric holder at a government emergency responders conference on communications technology. his remarks are 10 minutes. >> thank you. good morning. thank you for those kind words and especially for your outstanding leadership. it is a pleasure to stand with you this morning and to join you in welcoming so many of our colleagues and critical partners to this important conference. i like to recognize the great work are co-sponsors from the department of defense and homeland security have done to bring such a wide range of stakeholders together. from two federal partners to researchers and for line practitioners. each of you is an essential part of the response. each of you has a perspective that will enrich and enhance our understanding of the issues at the center of this. as