Weather modification

[Alenka]

Why are they doing that?

[Cybele]

Maybe because being able to have control over the external environment, was one of humanity’s oldest dreams (and having control over that, one can exert immense power over the lives of other people as well). For example, these rudimentary weather modification rituals that attempted to invoke rain, documented In different cultures. Or you see different gods being in charge of the thunders, clouds, rain, snow, and so on. Perhaps they reflected the human’s desire to tame the natural elements so they would not be at their mercy anymore; to modify them in their favor, by worshiping these deities. Nowadays, the advanced technology allows that. Some men became the modern “gods” of weather manipulation technology. They economically and politically punished their enemies, dreaming of controlling the world to their own liking, deciding whom can starve, where it will be a drought or a flood.
But as time passes, the humanity goes into totally uncharted territory, by modifying not only the weather in a certain areas, but the planet’s climate, with unknown consequences.

Over the past two centuries dreams of weather and climate control have produced a series of ill-considered and ill-fated interventions aimed at what at the time seemed the most pressing issues of the day: from health and farming in the 1830s, western drought in the 1890s, and fog and aviation in the 1920s, to cold-war attempts to use weather as a weapon, and on to current heroic responses to global warming.
The idea of weaponizing weather to influence the outcome of a war is old too. Thunder and hail and parting the sea were used by Moses to frighten and vanquish the Egyptians. The invasion of Japan in the 13th century was thwarted by a series of devastating storms that destroyed hundreds of Mongolian ships. And the invasion of Napoleon’s army in 1812 in Russia, ended bad because of General Winter. Centuries later in the cold-war era, the military sought to control clouds and storms as weapons. As part of the “weather race,” secret cloud seeding occurred during the Vietnam War. In 1962, at Southwest Texas State University, then‐Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson said:
“It lays the predicate and foundation for the development of a weather satellite that will permit man to determine the world's cloud layer and ultimately to control the weather; and he who controls the weather will control the world”
“Control of space means control of the world,” Johnson declared.

“From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the gulf stream and change temperate climates to frigid.”

Introducing: Operation Popeye

Operation Popeye first came to public light in March 1971, when reporter Jack Anderson published a story based on a secret 1967 memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to President Johnson.
Mr. Johnson as President made the fantasies real by ordering rainmaking in Southeast Asia thus authorizing weather warfare. Between 1967 and 1972 he and President Richard M. Nixon authorized at least $3.6 million annually on secret cloud‐seeding over North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in an attempt to muddy trails and slow enemy movements. The highly classified program attempted to extend the monsoon season over specific areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in order to disrupt North Vietnamese military supplies by softening road surfaces and causing landslides. This seeding resulted in the 1978 United Nations Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD), a landmark treaty that may have to be revisited soon to avoid or at least try to mitigate possible hostile use of climate control.

Project Nile Blue

In 1976, Lowell Ponte, a former Pentagon think tank researcher stated that The United States secretly used cloud seeding to dry up the Cuban sugar crop in 1969 and 1970. Ponte, a former specialist for the International Research and Technology Corp., said the CIA and the Pentagon seeded clouds in wind currents that carry rains to Cuba. “Weather science is too primitive to say that cloud seeding hurt Cuba’s harvest,” Ponte said, “but it could have. The point is that our government secretly attempted to tamper with weather in another nation, with which we were not at war, in an effort to cause economic and political harm.”
Ponte, auther of “The Cooling,” a book dealing with climatic change and manipulation of weather for political reasons, said the cloud seeding near Cuba was to provide information for a Pentagon project called “Nile Blue.”
The secret project, he said, has studied ways to melt polar icecaps, direct hurricanes and tornadoes as weapons and to “destabilize wearther in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba” to ruin harvests.
The Pentagon and CIA study was aimed at increasing America’s “food weapon,” the political use of food sales in much the same way as the Arab nations use oil, he said.


Geoengineering/Climate engineering

Weather modification is now re-branded as “geoengineering”.
Whilst the 20th century may have been about 'weather' modification, the 21st century has focused on 'climate' modification - in the form of geoengineering.
But changing the weather is one thing — changing the climate on a permanent scale is next level. It’d be extremely experimental, with unknown ramifications.
Do we have the right to mess with the weather, the climate or even the planet, when there’s potentially global consequences?
Some took it upon themselves to “save” the world. Today proposals for space mirrors, ocean iron fertilization, and injections of reflective sulfates or engineered nanoparticles into the stratosphere for climate control are being pitched by modern rain kings and queens. In China farmers armed with artillery weapons form part of the world’s largest rainmaking (and rain-clearing) force.

Microsoft’s billionaire founder Bill Gates is financially backing the development of sun-dimming technology that would potentially reflect sunlight out of Earth’s atmosphere, triggering a global cooling effect. The Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), launched by Harvard University scientists, aims to examine this solution by spraying non-toxic calcium carbonate (CaCO3) dust into the atmosphere — a sun-reflecting aerosol that may offset the effects of global warming. Dr. Bill Hare (Climate scientist) along with other physicists, disagrees with this technology of solar radiation management, because there is not a clear understanding of its impact on the monsoon, precipitations and rainfall regimes.

Last September, researchers in the UK launched a high-altitude weather balloon that released a few hundred grams of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, a potential scientific first in the solar geoengineering field. Remarkably, the system has been named – SATAN. It’s an acronym for ‘Stratospheric Aerosol Transport and Nucleation’. Shuchi Talati, a scholar in residence at American University who is forming a non-profit focused on governance and justice issues in solar geoengineering said: “I’m really concerned about what the intent here is. There’s a sense of them having the moral high ground, that there’s a moral imperative to do this work.”

Geoengineering is in fact untested and dangerous. We don’t understand it; we can’t test it on smaller than planetary scales; and we don’t have the political capital, wisdom, or will to govern it. Planetary tinkering is not “cheap,” as some economists claim, since the side effects are unknown. It poses a moral hazard by possibly reducing incentives to mitigate.





https://www.sciencehistory.org/stori...g-the-weather/
https://climateviewer.com/vincent-sc...cloud-seeding/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/weapo...r-brody-hannan
https://expose-news.com/2023/03/03/r...-called-satan/

[robertb]

Wish they would change my weather. All Summer been rain, heat and humid. Can't wait for Summer to end.