Arizonians just endured a wet and dreary weekend. Prescott is dealing with a foot of snow while it even hailed in North Scottsdale! I shouldn’t complain. After all we do need the rain. But at the same time I do have a complaint to lodge: of all the times to rain why did it have to rain over the weekend?! And have you ever noticed how that always seem to be the case? Why can’t it rain from 8 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday and literally never rain over the weekend? It would make traveling and making plans easier. You’d also never have to sit through a rain delay at a baseball game ever again.
Is this just a pointless lament? Or can we one day actually find ourselves with the ability to control the weather? Well, as it turns out we may be able to control the weather after all. In fact, China may have already figured out how.
Bloomberg explains:
“Last month, 16 ‘artificial rain enhancement rockets’ were launched off the back of a pickup truck 300 miles south of Beijing. The operation, ordered up by the Juye County Meteorological Bureau in response to a local drought, was reportedly a success. Over the next 24 hours, the county received more than two inches of rain that, according to local officials, alleviated the drought, lowered the risk of forest fires and improved air quality.
It sounds like something out of a cartoon. But for decades, China has been home to one of the world’s most advanced weather-modification programs. Generally, its goals have been modest: more rain in arid places, less field-destroying hail and sunny days for big national events. But that modesty is starting to give way. Earlier this month, China announced plans to expand its rainmaking capabilities to cover nearly 60% of the country by 2025. Details are sketchy, but fears are rising about the potential military uses of these capabilities, and their effects on an already changing climate. For China, and the world, these concerns need to be addressed soon.
Humans have dreamed of controlling the weather for millennia. But it wasn’t until 1946 that scientists at General Electric Co. discovered that dry ice can create precipitation when it interacts with clouds under certain conditions. By 1953, roughly 10% of the land area of the U.S. had been targeted for cloud seeding. Twelve years later, the government was spending millions of dollars on weather-modification research each year, and 15 other companies had started cloud-seeding operations in 23 states.
It wasn’t just about rainfall, however. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military weaponized cloud seeding to inhibit enemy troop movements and reduce the effectiveness of anti-aircraft attacks, among other things. These uses so alarmed policy makers that they began seeking an international agreement to end “environmental warfare.” In 1978, the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification went into force.
Although China ratified the treaty in 2005, its interest in controlling the weather and the environment didn’t wane. Meteorological calamities such as hail and flooding account for more than 70% of the country’s annual disaster-related damage. Because of that ongoing toll, the government has staked its legitimacy in part on how well it responds to such incidents. In recent decades, as the country has grown wealthier, Earth-altering projects such as the Three Gorges Dam have become a favored solution.
Weather modification, by comparison, is relatively inexpensive. In the 1980s, the government began making substantial investments in cloud physics and related fields. Advances in everything from satellites to rocketry boosted the effort, even though definitive scientific proof for the effectiveness of cloud seeding emerged only in 2018 (and in Idaho, not China). Nonetheless, the government claimed a great success in 2008, when Beijing launched 1,110 allegedly rain-suppressing rockets to ensure that the Olympic opening ceremonies were dry (they were, although scientists have questioned whether the rockets had much to do with it). By 2015, there were rainmaking and hail-suppression programs in 30 Chinese provinces, employing some 35,000 people.”
To me that’s not not something out of a cartoon. It’s something out of a dream. A dream that may be coming true a lot sooner than anyone would have ever thought possible. And it’s a good thing considering just how dire Climate Change is becoming. Soon the only way to save ourselves and stave off disaster may be to take matters into our own hands, to play God or at least the role of Mother Nature, and control the weather or generate our own to get the results we desire.
Obviously the concerns of China weaponizing such technology are real but we have bigger things to worry about right now. Such as how to ensure that I can go hiking next weekend.
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