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Geoengineering : Artificial manipulation of weather


Tweaking the atmosphere to bring rain may seem so outlandish that it belongs to some dystopian future, like the difficult or even impossible to live, imaginary world described by Orwell in his work 1984. But in reality it is not new. The science of cloud seeding dates from the forties, and the work of US chemist Vincent Schaefer. In the post-war years experiments in rain creation were rife on either side of the Atlantic. They reached a zenith during the Vietnam war when the US government allegedly conducted their highly classified Operation Popeye, an attempt to extend the monsoon season by cloud seeding in the hope of flushing out the Viet Cong. John Thornes, professor emeritus of applied meteorology at the University of Birmingham, remembers these rain experiments of the 1960s. “There were lots of companies in North America,” he says, “and their intention was to make it rain. It often ended up with farmers suing companies – they had been promised rain and it never came. Eventually the US government were forced to carry out proper trials. They found out that there was actually a better chance of decreasing rainfall than increasing it.”

It turned out that scientists had misunderstood the effect of silver iodide. While it did induce the ice crystals, the drops of water that fell from seeded clouds were often so small that they evaporated before they reached earth. Instead of the anticipated deluge, the silver iodide was dispersing the rain drops. By the forties scientists already realized that the ability to prevent rain – was equally useful. For years the Russian government has made use of this science as part of its well-known weather control program. The Russians seed clouds to ensure bright skies for their three major celebrations of the year: Victory Day, City Day and Russia Day. The Chinese did so too. They fired 21 silver iodide rockets into the Beijing skies in 8 August 2008, four hours before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. The rain stayed away. Meanwhile the danger of tweaking with the weather raise some concerns related to ethic and domino effect. Man's attempt to engineer Earth's climate and life support systems is the most destructive and deadly endeavor ever launched by the military industrial complex and global governments. Geoengineering must be considered as weather and biological warfare due to the endless list of catastrophic downstream impacts and effects. Climate intervention programs are mathematically the greatest and most immediate threat we collectively face. A short of nuclear cataclysm. The ability to create rain always end up with deadly period of drought in some other part of the world since nature abhor imbalance. Heat reduction is currently more practical, since it can be done in several ways, and all of them involve either blocking the sun's heat from coming into Earth’s atmosphere, or allowing more of Earth's heat to radiate into space.

For blocking heat, sulfur injections are probably the most likely to work. "It scatters and reflects solar radiation back into space," says Ulrike Niemeier, a climate scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, and co-author of a paper discussing geoengineering technology and its risks. The concept comes from volcanic eruptions. Large volcanoes in eruption send gobs of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, triggering temporary global cooling events. After Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, scientists measured 17 million tons of additional sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere. The Northern Hemisphere cooled by about 0.5˚ to 0.6° C in the aftermath. Compared to carbon removal, sulfur injection isn't so hard. The basic technology already exists: High-flying jets capable of carrying tanks of sulfur into the stratosphere, have been accused to propagate chemtrail in the atmosphere to control weather. The flight of a plane from the American company Delta Airlines to St Martin while cyclone Irma was announced, despite the fact that the sky had been closed is confusing, was the aim of this plane to seed nearby clouds to make the storm stronger? Meanwhile, difficulties arises when one consider the scale at which you'd have to deploy those jets in order to get meaningful cooling. Niemeier and her co-author estimate that 1˚ C of cooling would require 6,700 flights a day. Over the course of a year, that would cost around $20 billion. That is why commercial airliners that are thousands to travel the planet every day are accused of taking part in this ploy.

The most common chemicals used for cloud seeding include silver iodide, potassium iodide and dry ice (solid carbon dioxide). Liquid propane, which expands into a gas, has also been used. This can produce ice crystals at higher temperatures than silver iodide. After promising research, the use of hygroscopic materials, such as table salt, is becoming more popular. When Cloud seeding is carried out successfully, increased snowfall takes place when temperatures within the clouds are between 19 and −4 °F (−7 and −20 °C). Introduction of a substance such as silver iodide, which has a crystalline structure similar to that of ice, will induce freezing nucleation In mid-altitude clouds, the usual seeding strategy has been based on the fact that the equilibrium vapor pressure is lower over ice than over water. The formation of ice particles in supercooled clouds allows those particles to grow at the expense of liquid droplets. If sufficient growth takes place, the particles become heavy enough to fall as precipitation from clouds that otherwise would produce no precipitation. This process is known as "static" seeding. Seeding of warm-season or tropical (convective) clouds seeks to exploit the latent heat released by freezing. This strategy of "dynamic" seeding assumes that the additional latent heat adds buoyancy, strengthens updrafts, ensures more low-level convergence, and ultimately causes rapid growth of properly selected clouds. Cloud seeding chemicals may be dispersed by aircraft or by dispersion devices located on the ground (generators or canisters fired from anti-aircraft guns or rockets). For release by aircraft, silver iodide flares are ignited and dispersed as an aircraft flies through the inflow of a cloud. When released by devices on the ground, the fine particles are carried downwind and upward by air currents after release. An electronic mechanism was tested in 2010, when infrared laser pulses were directed to the air above Berlin by researchers from the Geneva.

The experimenters posited that the pulses would encourage atmospheric sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide to form particles that would then act as seeds. Using the same process weapons as the HAARP project have been suspected to be used by western government. The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) was an ionospheric research program jointly funded by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), designed and built by BAE Advanced Technologies (BAEAT). Its purpose was to analyze the ionosphere and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance. The HAARP program operated a major sub-arctic facility, named the HAARP Research Station, on an Air Force-owned site near Gakona, Alaska. If officially the program was stopped in 2013 nothing prove that the result of its experiences are not used in the field of geoengineering. HAARP has been accused of redirecting radio waves strong enough to cause earthquakes and other nature disasters to any point and target on the Earth due to the phased array. If geoengineering can no more confined to the field of conspiracy, it’s relevant to note that things might go wrong for fathomable reasons. Suddenly cooling the planet could cause freaky weather all over the world. It could interrupt India's annual monsoon. The globe's wind patterns could change completely. keep flying planes into the stratosphere for a very long time will augment carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, releasing trapped heat, and poisoning the ocean as well.The technical challenges of geoengineering are minimal compared to the challenges governments face in deciding when, if, and how to deploy these technologies. The biggest worry of all is that some desperate country, or group of countries, might decide to do some geoengineering all on their own. "Imagine if somebody starts flying planes in the atmosphere full of sulfur dust, and then India's monsoons are late. This would be a geopolitical crisis, which would starve hundreds of millions of people " says Janos Pasztor, the executive director of the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative, and co-author of yet another Science paper, this one specifically addressing the policy implications raised by weather manipulation.There is also the question of local and regional risks—what happens if one part of the world bears more of the geoengineering side effects than everyone else? Then there's a thing called the termination effect: Once you start geoengineering, you can't stop. "If you stop quickly, the temperature will jump up to what it would have been, and that will be catastrophic," says Pasztor. And most urgent concerns ethic which implies, how to conduct research on geoengineering technologies. Because you basically have to use Earth as a laboratory.And worse to modify the vibrations that surround the earth by the processes like HAARP which affects the electromagnetic frequencies of the planet will undoubtedly affect humans who also emit frequencies which must match the natural frequencies of their environment that is why humans are able to live on Earth.In the 60 years and plus, following the first cloud-seeding demonstrations, substantial progress has been made in understanding the natural processes that account for our daily weather.In the United States, cloud seeding is used to increase precipitation in areas experiencing drought, to reduce the size of hailstones that form in thunderstorms, and to reduce the amount of fog in and around airports. In the summer of 1948, the usually humid city of Alexandria, Louisiana, under Mayor Carl B. Close, seeded a cloud with dry ice at the municipal airport during a drought; quickly 0.85 inches (21.59 millimeter) of rainfall occurred.Cloud seeding is occasionally used by major ski resorts to induce snowfall. Eleven western states and one Canadian province (Alberta) have ongoing weather modification operational programs. In January 2006, an $8.8 million cloud seeding project began in Wyoming to examine the effects of cloud seeding on snowfall over Wyoming's Medicine Bow, Sierra Madre, and Wind River mountain ranges. As of today, several commercial companies offer weather modification services focused on cloud seeding. They sell their service at gold prices to the emirs of the Middle East and to the Western bourgeois who want bright days during their marriage for example.The Soviet Union back in days created a specifically designed version of the Antonov An-30 aerial survey aircraft, the An-30M Sky Cleaner, with eight containers of solid carbon dioxide in the cargo area plus external pods containing meteorological cartridges that could be fired into clouds. Soviet military pilots seeded clouds over the Belorussian SSR after the Chernobyl disaster to remove radioactive particles from clouds heading toward Moscow.

Cloud seeding began in France during the 1950s with the intent of reducing hail damage to crops. The ANELFA project consists of local agencies acting within a non-profit organization. A similar project in Spain is managed by the Consorcio por la Lucha Antigranizo de Aragon. The success of the French program was supported by insurance data; that of the Spanish program in studies conducted by the Spanish Agricultural Ministry. In Africa, in Mali cloud seeding is also used on a national scale. In 1985 the Moroccan Government started with a Cloud seeding program called 'Al-Ghait'. The system was first used in Morocco in 1999, It has also been used between 1999 and 2002 in Burkina Faso and from 2005 in Senegal.


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