This is a follow-up to a previous investigation into the origins of cloud seeding. Read the first article here.
Does the government control the weather? As more people realize that cloud seeding is a long-established technology that many governments have pursued, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the answer isn’t simply “no.” However, it’s important to understand in what ways and to what extent it does. That said, and with the recent cloud seeding exploration in mind, it’s time to explore the fuller history of weather technology and weather manipulation in the United States.
Many countries across the globe have weather modification departments in their governments. From
Thailand’s Department of Royal Rainmaking and Agricultural Aviation to larger countries’ “cloud-busting” operations like China’s, almost every country has some capacity for weather modification. Cloud seeding was such a widespread concern after the Vietnam War that a treaty was created and signed to regulate weather modification. This was largely an attempt to delimit the use of weather modification in war, like the United States’ Operation Popeye in the Vietnam War. The text of this 1978 agreement, known as the Environmental Modification Convention, and the list of signatories can be found here.
The government has been playing the same game for almost 80 years, pleading innocence when its interference with the weather wreaks havoc on a population.
One of the first hurricane manipulation projects was called Project Cirrus. This was conducted in 1947, a year after Bernard Vonnegut and Vincent Schaefer discovered the possibility of cloud seeding and partnered with General Electric to develop this technology. It seems the military wasted no time. A
report on Project Cirrus from that year reads: “The energy expended by a hurricane is enough to drive machinery in the world for three or four years. Yet the Army, the Navy, and General Electric are collaborating in a daring meteorological experiment to determine whether or not the colossal vortex that we call a hurricane can be broken by precipitating the thousands of tons of water it contains.”
Harnessing the power of a hurricane
In this
project, three planes intercepted Hurricane King and dropped several pounds of dry ice into the system “just to see what would happen.” They returned to base after the drop and checked on the storm the next day: “To their astonishment, the hurricane had made a 135-degree left turn and was now moving due west. On top of that, it was strengthening! By the afternoon of the 15th, Hurricane King struck Savannah, GA. One person died in the storm surge and US$2 million in damage was done to Georgia and South Carolina.”
The public was outraged, especially when General Electric’s Dr. Irving Langmuir said he was “99% sure” the swerve was caused by cloud seeding. However, the lawsuits slowly dissipated when U.S. Weather Bureau scientists published a similar case that showed that an unseeded hurricane could “swerve like that.”
Another project that the United States carried out was
Project Stormfury (1962-1983), which sought to manipulate hurricanes with cloud seeding. The hypothesis of this project “involved artificial stimulation of convection outside the eyewall through seeding with silver iodide.” Essentially, the introduction of silver iodide via cloud seeding would “invigorate” the convection of the eyewall, which would consequently “lead to reformation of the eyewall at a larger radius, and thus, through partial conservation of angular momentum, produce a decrease in the strongest winds.” In simpler terms, the force would be lessened if the hurricane’s structure were enlarged. The researchers sought to decrease the hurricane’s strongest winds by 10% or more to reduce the strongest winds’ potential destruction.
This project involved the modification of four hurricanes on eight different days, and the experiments did in fact produce positive results on four of the days. However, the results were deemed unsatisfactory because the experiment did not sufficiently “discriminate between the expected results of human intervention and the natural behavior of hurricanes.” They also concluded that cloud seeding would not successfully manipulate hurricanes because hurricanes have “too much natural ice and too little supercooled water.”
Try, try again
One of the longest-running projects was Project Skywater, which ran from 1961 to 1988. This
project, which coincided with others like Operation Popeye in Vietnam, was “part of a national attempt to collect systematically atmospheric data by testing cloud seeding technology on a local scale and evaluating it against broader patterns in weather behavior.” Essentially, Skywater was a national data-collection project that gave wide leverage to local operations, especially in the Western United States. It “directed most of its attention to augmenting the nation’s water supply,” but it never fully got off the ground nationally due to insufficient funding.
All of these projects showed that weather modification is possible. However, they also demonstrated that the weather is ultimately unpredictable and that weather modification may have potentially deadly consequences.
However, this project was also operationalized locally for some experiments and became especially interested in winter snowfall levels in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming mountain ranges, to name a few. “Skywater featured a series of pilot projects across the western states to study seeding in different environments at different times of the year.” Some locals in these areas worried about “impacts on snow levels and avalanches, damages from heavy snowfall, [and] costs of snow removal.” One Colorado miner even said, “If those weathermen screw up life around here, they may suddenly discover their equipment blown to bits.”
All of these projects showed that weather modification is possible. However, they also demonstrated that the weather is ultimately unpredictable and that weather modification may have potentially deadly consequences. When severe weather events occur in populated areas, and people or property are affected, scientists usually say they cannot attribute the damage to their experiments because weather is ultimately unpredictable. One
scenario of this disaster cycle, weather modification in the area, and a plea of plausible deniability by the scientists was the “torrential flood that ripped through South Dakota’s Rapid City in the summer of 1972,” which claimed 250 lives and caused $100 million in damages.
An outside
observer of weather modification at the University of Washington summed up this tension well: “When it gets to the point where there is a possibility of really catastrophic side effects, and when these catastrophic side effects are occurring close enough to the weather modification as to raise the possibility of a cause-and-effect relationship, there [are] serious questions in my mind as to whether we ought to be fooling around with it at all.”
Other weather modification programs?
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Now for some controversy. Colonel Douglas Macgregor
recently sat down with Dane Wigington of Geoengineering Watch to discuss weather modification in the wake of the most recent hurricanes on the Eastern Seaboard. There are two types of weather modification that are at issue here, and they need to be distinguished in order to get an accurate picture of the debate.
First, cloud seeding is understood as a process that can augment or suppress already-occurring weather systems. Historically, government projects like Project Cirrus or Project Stormfury have tried to either augment or disperse the strength of hurricane winds. In both cases, the results were skewed because no one could adequately distinguish the natural process from human intervention. However, the fact that there was human intervention itself is undeniable, and these projects seemed to yield strange results, such as Hurricane King’s 135-degree swerve in 1947.
However, Dane Wigington claims that there is a different type of weather modification at issue here. In the interview, he said: “The cyclones are being kept weakened over with manipulation of atmospheric pressure zones. And once they’re near enough to the land-based network of frequency transmitters, the NEXRAD network, they are steered, and that steering is incredibly inarguable.” He continued: “Climate engineering is the crown jewel weapon of the military-industrial complex because they can and are bringing populations to their knees without those populations ever knowing they’re under assault, and they blame it on nature.” He also mentioned HAARP’s Ionospheric Heater, which can allegedly manipulate the pressure zones in the atmosphere, causing them to bulge and then compress. He likened this to a “chain reaction” that does not immediately affect the weather but changes the atmospheric conditions.
For context, the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program is a
program based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks since 2015. Before the university assumed control in 2015, the United States Air Force had operational control of this program. Wigington refers to HAARP’s “Ionospheric Heater,” which is also known as the Ionospheric Research Instrument: ”a high power transmitter facility operating in the High Frequency range.” “The IRI can be used to temporarily excite a limited area of the ionosphere for scientific study.” This program and Dane Wigington, then, essentially agree on HAARP’s function while they disagree on the scope or degree of its impact. If you think about it, though, it seems highly unlikely that affecting one part of a system will not affect other parts of the system.
During the interview, this video overlay shows the frequency transmissions during Hurricane Helene. There is a noticeable lack of transmissions on the Eastern Seaboard. Wigington explains in the video that these transmissions have a “repelling effect” on weather systems, “especially if and when the air masses have been seeded with electrically conductive nanoparticles.” Silver iodide is very electrically conductive. While this is not enough evidence to conclude that people are “controlling” the weather, it could at least be said that there is a possibility of human influence based on what we know about the fragile balance of weather systems.
It isn’t necessary to just take Dane Wigington’s word for it, however. William S. Cohen, Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense, said at a 1997
conference, “Others are engaging even in an eco type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes, remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.” Two questions immediately arise: Who are these “others,” and does the U.S. do the same? Though this is somewhat vague, it is very interesting that he would state this at a public conference.
A common critique of these types of views — that the government controls the weather and can steer hurricanes and the like — is that the human influence could not possibly be strong enough to have a substantial impact on the weather system. This is certainly a fair argument, especially considering the overwhelming power of a hurricane. However, we know for a fact that cloud seeding has been around for close to 80 years and that there is a large amount of evidence that it does in fact influence the amount of precipitation.
A double-edged sword
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The well-known projects described earlier provide ample evidence of the unpredictability of human intervention on the weather. For example, Project Cirrus sought to dissipate a hurricane’s strength once it was far enough away from land. The effect, however, resulted in a stronger hurricane changing direction, making landfall, and ultimately killing someone and causing a large amount of property damage. One can, of course, accept the outcome of the lawsuits that granted the project plausible deniability due to a precedential instance. But at the same time, the government has been playing the same game for almost 80 years, pleading innocence when its interference with the weather wreaks havoc on a population.
Therefore, this accepted pattern should no longer put our doubts and scrutiny to rest. The scientists themselves were “astonished” by the behavior of this hurricane, meaning they could not possibly have expected what happened next. In short, if these operations say they are going to accomplish a certain task, there is
absolutely no guarantee that this task will be accomplished. What’s more, the actual effects may be as disastrous as they are unpredictable. Therefore, the people involved in geoengineering can’t have it both ways: The fact that the weather is unpredictable cannot continue to be both a shield from scrutiny and a justification to continue modifying the weather.
So does the government control the weather? It depends on what you mean by “control.” The government has a vast array of weather modification technologies, it has been experimenting with these technologies for nearly 80 years (at least), and the infrastructure is continuously being refined and developed. The government does not deny that HAARP is blasting radio waves into the atmosphere to heat up the ionosphere. It doesn’t deny Project Cirrus, Project Stormfury, Operation Popeye, or Project Skywater. No one who has done even a tiny bit of research denies that cloud seeding is real. Why are so many governments and private companies interested in this technology if it doesn’t work? However, the people wreaking havoc on populations with weather modification have always hidden behind a plea of plausible deniability that has shielded them from accountability. This cyclical trick has gone on for far too long. The cost of weather modification has always been far too high because of its unpredictable outcomes compared to its negligible benefits. No, the government doesn’t control the weather. And that is exactly why these operations are so dangerous.
Tech, Cloud seeding, Weather modification, Hurricanes, Weather control, Project cirrus, Project stormfury, Operation popeye
