When billionaires like Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates talk about weather control, casual followers of the news might think they are advocating a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. In Gates' case, the ostensible goal is to save humanity from the climate change primarily caused by burning fossil fuels. Yet Gates is not alone in bringing weather control to the global conversations.
There are people who attribute weather-controlling powers to large organizations like HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program), a University of Alaska — Fairbanks program that researches the ionosphere. There is no evidence that HAARP has done any sort of weather control or can create hurricanes. (HAARP did not respond to Salon's request for comment.)
But experts say it isn't a question of whether controlling weather is possible, it's a question of how significantly and how precisely we can wield this influence. In our current reality, weather control already occurs on some level — the real dilemma is over whether that power can be harnessed to solve escalating existential crises like climate change, or instead will create new problems.
Humans can alter the climate, thereby affecting weather, but for the most part we're currently doing it in a clumsy, negative way — one that makes it harder for us to live on this planet, while also driving many species to extinction. Yet Arizona State University law professor Karen Bradshaw knows firsthand that there are forms of weather control that do work.
"To be honest, I think we have passed the time for a moral discussion on 'should human alter the weather.'"
"I became interested in cloud seeding after learning that the tiny, rural community of Mt. Shasta, Calif., near where I grew up, attempted to pass a local ordinance to prevent an electrical utility from cloud seeding," Bradshaw recalled by email. She explained that a group of concerned citizens became concerned about the health effects of local cloud seeding efforts. Cloud seeding is the practice of introducing tiny ice nuclei into specific subfreezing clouds to create rain and even snow. While this can be a boon to the agriculture industry, residents of Mt. Shasta were worried after they read a scientific study about silver iodide showing up in fish populations.
"When I began to dig into that story, I was so surprised to learn about the history and prevalence of cloud seeding," Bradshaw told Salon. "How was it possible that even environmental law professors did not understand how widespread it was? When I began mentioning the topic, people brushed it off as a conspiracy akin to chem trails; very few people were aware that weather and climate modification are real and happening. There is a UN Convention, federal statutes, legal cases and state research reports on the topic."
Weather control opens up all kinds of implications, and not just the sinister, storm-generating kind. It raises questions about what is scientifically possible — and what is ethical. Examples include Project Stormfury, an attempt by the US government to weaken tropical cyclones by soaring planes into them and sprinkling them with silver iodide. Despite multiple attempts, it wasn't effective because hurricanes are just too massive.
Attempts to modify hail storms and increase rainfall have been more effective. Operation Popeye, a weather modification project in North Vietnam and Laos during the 1960s American invasion, entailed more than 50 cloud seeding experiments. The goal was to lengthen the monsoon season, causing excessive rains and landslides that would disrupt truck traffic. The U.S. Department of Defense deemed the results "outstandingly successful," with 82% of the seeded clouds producing rain within a brief period.
The U.S. still does cloud seeding. In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is required by law to keep a log of all "weather modification project reports," with the most recent being "Rainfall enhancement/Hail mitigation" in Mountrail County, North Dakota in 2022. But it's not really much more dramatic than that. We can't adjust global air pressure at will or produce destructive storms out of thin air, though that could change along humanity's quest to be an interstellar species.
New ways of controlling the weather are being researched. In January 2023, researchers reported in Nature Photonics that they'd successfully guided lightning discharges using lasers.
"This work paves the way for new atmospheric applications of ultrashort lasers and represents an important step forward in the development of a laser based lightning protection for airports, launchpads or large infrastructures," the authors concluded. (It should go without saying, this has nothing to do with the debunked conspiracy theory about lasers from space intentionally starting wildfires.) Having established what weather control can do, the next question is what it should do.
"To be honest, I think we have passed the time for a moral discussion on 'should human alter the weather,'" Dr. Jeroen Oomen, an assistant professor of Utrecht University's Urban Futures Studio, told Salon by email. "The fact of the matter is that we are already influencing the planet’s climate in destructive ways." At the same time, Oomen did not argue that this should be interpreted as a justification for the technologies.
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"Discussion of climate engineering are a shiny, flashy distraction from the problem — putting a bandaid over a gaping wound."
"Rather, it means that the questions we should be asking are: which humans are currently doing the damage?" Oomen said. "Which humans would be deliberately altering the weather and climate? Who would be in control? What would the business model or political rationale be? And is that political reality fair, just and stable enough to be banking on these technologies?" In Oomen's estimation, it is "highly unlikely" that these technologies would ultimately be controlled by sufficiently benevolent entities.
Bradshaw compared the predicament involved in controlling the weather with that entailed in advancing other powerful technologies.
"As with many other scientific innovations — including cloning, genetic modifications and AI [artificial intelligence] — small, homogenous groups sometimes try to circumvent the regulatory process to speed technological progress, even when doing so is wildly irresponsible and inappropriate," Bradshaw pointed out. "Climate change has galvanized some people to adopt a Messiah complex, in which they feel empowered to 'get ahead of the regulation' and make unilateral decisions at the edge of the law that affect billions of people and planet Earth. This is wrong and dangerous. Unilateral decision-making by small, elite and non-diverse groups has a horrible track record." Instead Bradshaw advocated "transparent public-private partnerships that engage stakeholders."
Some that study this issue are more cautiously optimistic. Dr. Jesse Reynolds, author of "The Governance of Solar Geoengineering: Managing Climate Change in the Anthropocene," compared the planetary concerns about weather control with a hypothetical cancer patient's concerns about chemotherapy.
"The Hippocratic oath supposedly says 'first, do no harm,'" Reynolds explained. "But doctors poison people with chemo every day. This is obviously because the risks of cancer are worse than those of chemotherapy. Likewise, calls from the cancer-free to prohibit chemo because doctors simply should not poison patients would — and should — be dismissed."
Reynolds emphasized that this did not mean he was saying the risks of deliberately altering the climate are definitely less than those of allowing climate change to continue without it, or that people in climate-vulnerable regions are more likely to support such measures.
"We do not yet know enough to make definitive statements," Reynolds argued. He later observed that, when it came to investigating solar radiation modification, which are attempts to reflect more sunlight back into space, "all supporters of its research (including me) whom I know arrived at their position reluctantly and by following a roughly similar journey." They were all concerned about climate change and initially reluctant to advocate altering the climate because of its known risks.
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"But on further investigation, it turns out that stratospheric aerosol injection [a way to reflect sunlight] appears able to cool the planet and — as far as we can tell — with environmental risks that many decision-makers may find acceptable," Reynolds said. "What's more, it is the only known way to rapidly reduce global warming. And as noted above, dangerous levels of global warming seem otherwise unavoidable."
It's not clear if using aerosols to block the Sun in an attempt to cool the planet will work, because it hasn't really been done before, except by volcanoes or the space rock that killed most of the dinosaurs. To use Reynolds' chemotherapy metaphor, it could have unexpected side effects. Absent international treaties, some even fret that geoengineering could trigger war or other conflicts. So while many experts may begrudgingly admit that it could work, Bradshaw said it was important to resist framing this climate modification as a "solution" to climate change.
"The fundamental problem is that the human relationship with nature, and one another, is broken," Bradshaw said. "There is no technological fix to the fact that our consumption patterns, globalized food systems and legal personhood of corporations are fundamentally at odds with natural systems. Discussion of climate engineering are a shiny, flashy distraction from the problem — putting a bandaid over a gaping wound. We are trying to maintain the illusion that an anthropocentric system is sustainable. It's not."
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