Hi everyone, welcome back to Seeker Plus and our 3-parter series on the weather.
I’m your host Julian.
If you missed part one, we debunked the old notion that your weather forecast is always
wrong, so if you've given your meteorologist a hard time, maybe check that out, ease up on him a little bit.
I mean like it’s not like they control the weather right?
Or do they?
No, no they don’t... Or do they?
No, but today we are going to talk about controlling the weather.
You may have noticed higher temperatures, stronger storms, and more abnormal weather
events becoming less and less “abnormal” lately.
Well maybe the idea of actually controlling the weather is starting to seem like a pretty
useful option to have in our toolbox.
So is controlling the weather actually possible and if so, how could it be done?
Let’s get into it.
The idea of controlling the weather sounds like an evil plan hatched by a James Bond
villain, but it’s closer to reality than you might think.
Here’s a true story that once made headlines, but today, it's not well remembered: In the ‘60s,
war was raging in Vietnam and the U.S. military thought “Well this isn’t going our way;
maybe we should try something a little more unconventional?”, which usually doesn’t
end well.
Their bright idea was to start a clandestine operation to extend the monsoon season in
Vietnam by releasing silver and lead iodide into an existing storm.
By making more rain, the goal was to increase flooding, thereby disrupting troop movement
and the deliveries of supplies to the North Vietnamese.
The “enemy” would be destabilized and the U.S. would win the war.
So “make mud, not war” was even an unofficial catchphrase used by the pilots on these cloud-seeding
missions.
These missions were dubbed “Operation Popeye” I don’t know why.
I haven’t found a good explanation, but there you go. They went on for five years
before the public found out about them and the cloud seeding stopped.
While there's no confirmation that these missions had any real effect, we can confirm what was
happening in the skies based on atmospheric science and previous lab experiments.
Basically, water vapor condenses around particles in the atmosphere. These are called cloud condensation
nuclei and they’re the beginnings for every cloud droplet.
You can think of these little nuclei as like seeds from which fully developed raindrops
originate.
Silver iodide particles have a similar structure to these initial ice nuclei seeds, which allows
water droplets to condense around them, freeze, and then fall as either rain or snow, depending
on the air temperature.
Adding more and more of these seeds into clouds basically helps bring the precipitation faster
than it would come naturally, or so we think.
Now, I hope the term cloud seeding makes more sense.
In an ideal scenario, more cloud seeds equals more rain, which was the goal for “Operation
Popeye”.
Still can’t get over that name, so weird.
The U.S. isn’t the only country to dabble in weather modification, but it’s not always
used for nefarious purposes.
See, after Operation Popeye, weather modification was actually banned from being used in warfare.
However, it’s still allowed when it comes to peaceful purposes.
In 2020, the United Arab Emirates faced deadly heat waves.
To counter the arid climate, they ran about 200 cloud seeding operations in the
first six months of the year to bring more rain into the region.
Canada has used cloud seeding to limit the intensity of hail storms.
China has enthusiastically embraced cloud seeding, putting billions into the technology.
They’ve used it for everything from reducing air pollution in Beijing to even improving
weather conditions ahead of big events like the 2008 Olympics.
It would make sense to think that changing the weather on this large scale requires a
lot of starter particles, but sometimes that’s just not how it works.
Most of the time, cloud seeding doesn’t even require that much silver iodide to nudge
a storm to do its thing.
One gram of the stuff can create around ten trillion artificial ice crystals, so typical
cloud seeding operations only release small quantities of the particles.
That sounds almost like anyone can do it, but it’s not that simple.
First, silver iodide is pretty toxic stuff, so you’d want to handle it with care.
There’s also an important caveat to understand as well when it comes to cloud seeding.
And that is no one is entirely sure how effective the practice actually is.
If Joe Schmo wanted to release silver iodide into clouds over his next door neighbors house
because the neighbor had a barbecue and didn't invite Mr. Schmo, Schmo wouldn’t definitively
know how much rain his DIY seeding operation actually caused rain to fall and ruin his neighbors
day.
But I can see why his neighbor didn’t invite him if he’s willing to go to these extremes.
In other words, once a cloud is seeded, scientists don’t have a good way of figuring out how
much more rain or snow would’ve fallen compared to how much would’ve fallen naturally if
the cloud was just left alone.
So a quick refresher, for precipitation to occur, there needs to be clouds already in
the sky.
These clouds would’ve likely deposited rain or snow or hail anyway.
It then even gets more complicated because those atmospheric conditions happened once
and only once exactly that way.
How often do you know mother nature to play out the exact same scenario a second time,
on command just because it would be useful for gathering data?
So because it’s impossible to replicate atmospheric conditions in a natural setting, it gets
really hard to prove definitively how effective cloud seeding is outside of lab experiments.
Even during “Operation Popeye”, there were reports that the missions were successful,
but no one collected any data from Vietnam to really back up that claim.
Fast forward to today, and there’s still a lot of uncertainty when it comes to cloud
seeding’s effectiveness.
I’ve seen some reports suggest that it can bring on anywhere between 10-15% additional
precipitation if the conditions are right.
But I’ve also seen studies suggesting a negligible difference.
Now I’m not here to poo poo cloud seeding.
Without a doubt, something is happening as a result.
But it can get pretty murky and the history of weather modification has also been home
to its fair share of charlatans.
There’s something called the hail cannon, which basically looks like a blunderbuss someone
would use to shoot Zeus.
Some farmers today swear by it, but there’s no hard evidence that backs up its effectiveness.
There were salesmen during the 19th and 20th centuries who would travel through areas impacted
by drought and they would convince people who were desperate enough to pay them to “bring rain”.
I’m not even joking when I say that one of these guys even called himself the “moisture
accelerator”, which is a gross nickname.
You’ve got to wonder, is that his only job with a name like that?
Don’t think about it too much.
Now, we’ve talked a lot about using cloud seeding to increase precipitation, but is
there a way to stop it, you know if someone were to accidentally seed just too many clouds
and make it rain too much?
Well, actually we can use “Operation Popeye'' as an example again.
Between 1967 and 1972, the U.S. military ran over 2000 cloud seeding missions, and it probably
won’t come as a surprise to you that every now and again, they missed their target.
In an interview with the New York Times, one official once said, “We used to go out flying
around and looking for a certain cloud formation, and we made a lot of mistakes.”
One of those mistakes was pummeling a U.S. military camp with about 18 centimeters of
rain over the course of two hours.
Another mistake was reported in a memo between a couple of officials, which said “In one
instance, the rainfall continued as the cloud moved eastward across the Vietnam border and
inundated a U.S. Special Forces camp with nine inches of rain in four hours.”
A lot of rain in a short amount of time.
So as you can see, once a storm gets going, there's not a lot that can be done to stop it.
But that hasn’t stopped people from taking this idea even further.
See, when the first cloud seeding experiments were performed in the 40s, people were convinced
that our advancing science had the power to control the planet’s thermometer.
It was supposed to herald a new era where we could take a scalpel to the skies.
If we wanted rain, we got a downpour.
If we wanted a sunny, beautiful day, by golly we got clear skies.
If a hurricane was heading towards a populated area, we could divert the storm
like Hercules diverting the rivers.
But making it rain, so to speak, that's peanuts compared to controlling something
as large and powerful as an entire hurricane.
If we want to figure out how to stop a hurricane, it helps to know how they begin.
First you get two adult hurricanes that love each other and…
Wait no, that's something else.
I remember.
Typically, hurricanes first start over water when the surface temperature reaches at least
27 degrees Celsius.
Warm ocean air starts to rise and low pressure areas move in.
With this low pressure comes wind, which pushes in more warm air.
The warm air continues to rise until it cools off and forms clouds and storms.
So one idea would be to cool the sea surface temperature before it reaches that 27 degree
threshold.
This idea is called marine cloud-brightening and it uses cloud seeding as a way to increase
the number of droplets in a cloud, making them whiter and more reflective against the
sunlight.
A couple of scientists have proposed sending a fleet of autonomous ships to the Atlantic
Ocean before hurricane season begins where they would mill around seeding clouds with
cool saltwater.
That way, by the time the next hurricane season comes around, ocean currents have cooled to
the point where mega hurricanes just can’t form anymore.
There’s also an idea to increase bubbles on the water’s surface, kinda the same concept.
It would whiten water and reflect more sunlight.
There’s even more wild ideas like nuking hurricanes, but those are far fetched and
dangerous, to say the least.
We'll likely keep seeing these ideas popping up now and again as we continue to experience
more mega storms as the climate warms.
I probably don’t need to mention, but I will.
The vast majority of climate scientists believe that our climate is warming and it’s probably
going to lead to more frequent and more severe storms in the future.
Which might make you wonder, if the future we’re facing looks like that, maybe it makes
more sense to maybe alter the entire climate rather than just individual storms?
Will we have more success if we go down that route?
Messing with the Earth’s natural systems to combat climate change is called geoengineering.
Cloud seeding is a technique of geoengineering, but it’s often used to describe changing
single weather events.
What some people want to do is completely alter the climate over the long term, not
just on a case by case basis.
There’s one such technique that has been proposed and it’s been getting more attention
in recent years.
It’s called solar geoengineering.
Essentially this type of intervention means limiting the amount of sunlight that reaches
the Earth’s surface.
There’s a project at Harvard called SCoPEx, and it’s proposing to do just that.
The team behind the project plans to launch a balloon up into the atmosphere, where it
would release around 100 grams of calcium carbonate, a common ingredient in antacids,
and measure things like atmospheric chemistry and how well light scatters off of these particles.
The results would help determine if the project was a success and how it could be scaled up.
Now this project is still in the experimental phase and needs more reviews before getting
off the ground, no pun intended.
However, if everything works out, years down the road, we might be seeing this project,
or something like it, releasing particles into the atmosphere, so sunlight would reflect
back, and the planet would cool down theoretically.
Of course, the big concern with this or any geoengineering project is we don’t know
what the unintended consequences might be.
We talked about chaos theory in episode 1, how small changes can make big differences?
Well what will the planet look like if we make a sudden, really big change?
As of right now, there’s no need to get worked up just yet, this project hasn’t even launched
and is still being reviewed.
But it does provoke some interesting questions, like can we successfully change the climate
on a large scale like this?
If we did, is it too little too late?
Who would be in charge of such a far reaching global project?
Now there’s an almost endless number of questions about altering the climate on these large
scales that I can’t get to them all here.
But maybe Earth isn’t even the place to try out these modifications out anyway.
Yes, let’s talk about terraforming!
We’ll do that in our next episode.
Be sure to check back for that.
But for now, thanks for tuning in, don’t forget to subscribe, and I’ll see you next
time on Seeker Plus.