History is checkered with stories of human weather manipulation for purposes both good and ill. To sate Tlaloc, the god of rain, Incan priests would climb mountains, fully in the nip and painted black from head to toe, to let blood from their thighs in what seems like a pretty decent bargain for a sunny summer. Soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars figured that firing cannonballs into the clouds would make them piss rain all over the enemy. Up until about a century ago it was considered a dodgy enterprise to take a Finn on a ship; everybody knows they’re a breed of wizards with occult control over the winds.
Climate or weather hacking, however, cuts out supernatural intermediaries and superstition and proposes a future where humans become the weather-gods. Ethical dilemmas abound: is weather modification untethered hubris or a last resort increasingly worth experimentation?
Technological advances, we know, tend to come from military mega-budgets. The US Air Force’s Vietnamese weather warfare program, Operation Popeye, was set up to extend monsoon season over the Ho Chi Minh trail (the ghastly operation’s slogan: “make mud, not war”). 1977’s Environmental Modification Convention banned climate hacking outright, pushing the nascent science into the fringes.
Of course, we’ve been accidentally hacking the climate on a global scale since the Industrial Revolution. While mainstream solutions to increasingly freakish weather revolve around the axes of the environmental movement and weather defense systems, their relative failures to date mean that the taboo on geoengineering has begun to be lifted.
Cloud seeding, despite the chagrin of chemtrail conspiracy theorists, is a commonly administered panacea across America and China for maximizing precipitation and preventing droughts. Here, planes (and now drones) sprinkle silver iodide along the top of cloud formations in the hope of encouraging drizzle.
One proposed method for correcting the off-kilter greenhouse gas equilibrium is through the injection of counteracting aerosols into the atmosphere, an experiment informed by natural processes, such as Pinatubo-scale volcanic explosions. Rough assessments price this at around 100 times cheaper than current carbon emissions plans – a sort of get-out-of-jail free for all the hairspray cans and SUVs we’ve gone through in the past. You can imagine all the things that could go wrong: the sky turns white, Biblical droughts replace Biblical floods, plants wither and we keep driving SUVs.
Mr. Burns’ sun blocker might have got him shot, but astronomer Roger Angel’s proposal of suspending enormous space reflectors around the earth has achieved some popularity. The drawbacks: they could be smashed to bits by asteroids and, short of Ray-Ban sponsoring them, are pretty unaffordable.
“These are just flights of fancy, they’re not realistic in the scale of the problem,” Met Eireann’s Head of Forecasting, Gerald Fleming says. “Weather modification occurs on local scales, it can’t happen globally. It’s got to be adaptation, there’s no other option.” Geoengineering lobbyists balk at this kind of conservatism, noting that should climate change come to crunch time that we’ll need an armageddon plan ready and tested. For now, however, we should perhaps defer to Einstein’s edict: “we can’t solve problems by using the same kinds of thinking we used when we created them”.
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Strange Weather @ Science Gallery Dublin
Running right up to October, the Science Gallery’s current program delves into human influence over and adaptation to our changing climates. As participative and enlightening as ever, you can even bet on the weather against Met Eireann.
Bristol University’s Dr. Matt Watson is not actually a geoengineer, but his work as on research projects involving climate hacking has led to his interest in the ethics and politics within the field. Published in the Guardian and a go-to talking head on such matters, his blog is a (reluctant) resource for ongoing conversations around geoengineering.
Released this month, Bong Joon-ho’s adaptation of climate apocalypse graphic novel Le Transperceneige is set in the aftermath of a geoengineering accident that wipes out any poor sucker without a ticket for the film’s eponymous mega-train. Evil science abounds.
Words: Daniel Gray / Illustration: Fuchsia MacAree
