What we can not do
The variations of climate modification that the conspiracy theorists envision most frequently—considerably altering monsoons or hurricanes or making the skies clear and sunny for weeks at a time—have to date proved not possible to hold out. However that’s not essentially for lack of attempting.
The US authorities tried to change a hurricane in 1947 as a part of a program dubbed Venture Cirrus. In collaboration with GE, authorities scientists seeded clouds with pellets of dry ice, the thought being that the falling pellets may induce supercooled liquid within the clouds to crystallize into ice. After they did this, the storm took a pointy left flip and struck the world round Savannah, Georgia. This was a major second for budding conspiracy theories, since a GE scientist who had been working with the federal government stated he was “99% certain” the cyclone swerved due to their work. Different specialists disagreed and confirmed that such storm trajectories are, in actuality, completely potential with out intervention. Maybe unsurprisingly, public outrage and threats of lawsuits adopted.
It took a while for the hubbub to die down, after which a number of US authorities companies continued—unsuccessfully—attempting to change and weaken hurricanes with a long-running cloud seeding program referred to as Venture Stormfury. Across the identical time, the US navy joined the fray with Operation Popeye, basically attempting to harness climate as a weapon within the Vietnam Warfare—participating in cloud seeding efforts over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos within the late Nineteen Sixties and early Seventies, with a watch towards growing monsoon rains and bogging down the enemy. Although it was by no means actually clear whether or not these efforts labored, the Nixon administration tried to disclaim them, going as far as to mislead the general public and even to congressional committees.
Extra lately and fewer menacingly, there have been experiments with Dyn-O-Gel—a Florida firm’s super-absorbent powder, supposed to be dropped into storm clouds to sop up their moisture. Within the early 2000s, the corporate carried out experiments with the stuff in thunderstorms, and it had grand plans to make use of it to weaken tropical cyclones. However in response to one former NOAA scientist, you would wish to drop virtually 38,000 tons of it, requiring almost 380 particular person aircraft journeys, in and round even a comparatively small cyclone’s eyewall to essentially have an effect on the storm’s power. After which you would need to try this once more an hour and a half later, and so forth. Actuality tends to get in the best way of the most important climate modification concepts.
Past attempting to manage storms, there are another potential climate modification applied sciences on the market which can be both simply getting began or have by no means taken off. Swiss researchers have tried to make use of highly effective lasers to induce cloud formation, for instance; in Australia, the place local weather change is imperiling the Nice Barrier Reef, synthetic clouds created when ship-based nozzles spray moisture into the sky have been used to attempt to shield the very important ecosystem. In every case, the efforts stay small, localized, and never remotely near reaching the sorts of management the conspiracy theorists allege.
What shouldn’t be climate modification—however will get lumped in with it
Additional worsening climate management conspiracies is that there’s a tendency to conflate cloud seeding and different promising climate modification analysis with ideas akin to chemtrails—a full-on conspiracist fever dream about innocuous condensation trails left by jets—and photo voltaic geoengineering, a theoretical stopgap to chill the planet that has been topic to a lot dialogue and modeling analysis however has by no means been deployed in any large-scale means.
One controversial type of photo voltaic geoengineering, generally known as stratospheric aerosol injection, would contain having high-altitude jets drop tiny aerosol particles—sulfur dioxide, most probably—into the stratosphere to behave basically as tiny mirrors. They might replicate a small quantity of daylight again into house, leaving much less vitality to achieve the bottom and contribute to warming. To this point, makes an attempt to launch bodily experiments on this house have been shouted down, and solely tiny—although nonetheless controversial—business efforts have taken place.
