Tag Archives: weather modification and climate change

Mapping the Impossible: Extreme Weather Events

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The heatwave that struck parts of North America’s Pacific coast in 2021 propelled temperatures in Lytton, a village in British Columbia, to 49.6°C—4.6° higher than the previous record. On the fourth day of this torment the place erupted in flames and was almost completely destroyed. These events were so out of the ordinary that, in a press conference held some weeks later by climate modelers, they struggled to explain how circumstances had conjured them.

Climatologists reckon the North American heatwave of 2021 was one of the most extreme deviations from meteorological norms ever recorded, anywhere. But others have come close. As the world gets hotter, phenomena once considered rare are becoming common and others, believed impossible, are happening.

This shift in weather patterns has inspired modelers to pay more attention to the tails of the frequency distributions of meteorological possibility which their models generate (see chart), in search of such unprecedented extremes. One recent exercise, led by Erich Fischer at eth Zurich, a technology university in Switzerland, shows how the heatwave that destroyed Lytton could have been foreseen with data available at the time….The approach Dr Fischer used is one of several developed recently. Another, from Britain’s Met Office, is UNSEEN  (Unprecedented Simulation of Extremes with Ensembles)…Researchers in the UK are looking at another sort of extreme event—the risk of “wind droughts” which would wipe out a lot of the country’s wind-turbine-base electricity supply. It would be ironic indeed if Britain’s huge effort to combat climate change in this way were, itself, to fall victim to a changing climate.

The Paris Olympics, to be held in 2024, will take place during that city’s hottest weeks. A group of meteorologists from various French research institutes therefore wondered just how bad a heatwave manifesting itself then might be. Using yet another approach, they found a chance of temperatures being more than 4°C higher than they were during a catastrophic heatwave in 2003, in which tens of thousands died. Since that happened, France has built a “heat plan” which includes an early-warning system and provisions for opening cool spaces if needed.

Excerpts from How to predict record-shattering weather events, Economist, Feb. 11, 2023

Geo-engineering Wars and Termination Shock

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What if a country experiencing the bad effects of climate change—crop failures, perhaps, or serious flooding—were to begin, unilaterally and perhaps quietly, to try to modify the climate? Such a project, reckons DARPA, a research arm of America’s defence department, is possible. But it could trigger chaos, and not just of the meteorological sort. The agency, the overall objectives of which include preventing “strategic surprise”, has therefore recently begun to pay for research into how such an event might happen, and how to react to it.

DARPA’s assumption is that any attempt at unilateral geoengineering would use a technique called stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). This would employ aircraft to disperse sulfuric acid, or its precursor sulfur dioxide, into the upper atmosphere, to form tiny sulfate particles that would reflect sunlight back into space. This would probably work (big volcanic eruptions, which do something similar, have a measurable effect on global temperatures). The costs, though, could be considerable—and not just directly in dollars.

A poorly designed SAI program might break down ozone, a form of oxygen that shields organisms, people included, from harmful ultraviolet radiation. Patterns of precipitation would also change, for cooler air absorbs less moisture, and these effects would undoubtedly vary from region to region. Another problem is the acid rain that would result.

Perhaps most pertinent, though, is that SAI would serve only to mask the effects of greenhouse gases rather than ending them. That brings the risk of “termination shock”, for the injected sulfate is constantly washed out of the atmosphere in rain and snow. The closure of and SAI program, particularly a long-lasting one, might thus cause a sudden heat jolt more difficult to deal with than the existing, gradual, warming.

That is one reason why Joshua Elliott, head of DARPA’s AI-assisted Climate Tipping-point Modelling (ACTM) program, says “we do not want to be caught flat-footed”. Modelling how Earth’s various climactic subsystems might react to SAI is no easy matter. Dr Elliott, however, reckons that better computer simulations would help. They might even, he says, eventually highlight “signatures” in climate data that would suggest that such geoengineering is afoot.

Nor is the risk of someone doing something stupid a fantasy. In 2019 Massimo Tavoni, a game theorist at Milan Polytechnic who is unaffiliated with DARPA organized six games played by 144 students. Participants were given a variety of ideal climate outcomes and allowed to spend toy money they were given on geoengineering projects to achieve them…Some players tried to counter efforts at cooling which they deemed excessive with attempts to warm the planet, resulting in a chaotic outcome that Dr Tavoni calls “geoengineering wars”. In the end, he says, “everybody loses.”…

DARPA is also developing “early warning” code to detect people undertaking geoengineering mischief on the sly, and testing it by running pairs of parallel simulations, one of which has been tweaked to reflect an SAI program being under way…SAI could even, conceivably, be undertaken by “self-authorizing” billionaires.

Areas which suffer most from rising temperatures would have greater incentives to take the plunge…including Algeria, Australia, Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Thailand.

Excerpts from America’s defense department is looking for rogue geoengineers, Economist, Nov. 5, 2022

Addicted to Weather Modification: Make it Rain Now

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Attempts to modify the weather can be dangerous. They require pilots to head into the kind of clouds they would normally avoid. But officials claim that China’s efforts to trigger or boost precipitation by scattering chemicals in the sky, which began in the 1950s, have been hugely successful. Today the country spends at least $200m a year on the programme. In 2018 about 50,000 people were involved in it, most of them part-time or seasonal staff working from small offices in rural areas.

Among the 50 or so countries where cloud-seeding is practiced, China is the most enthusiastic promoter of it….Officials claim it can help to put out wildfires and reduce air pollution. State media report that cloud-seeding brings down about 50bn cubic metres of extra rain or snow across the country each year—equal to about 8% of total water demand. Officials in Beijing claim that in the parched capital, seeding can boost rainfall by 15%…

Recent advances in radar and computer modelling have made rigorous tests more possible. Scientists now generally agree that cloud-seeding can slightly augment snowfall from specific types of cloud that form on the slopes of mountains. Some of China’s weather-modification projects take place in such environments. But elsewhere, despite the lack of convincing proof that it works, farmers still want the government to try. And the government likes getting credit when rain does fall. Cloud-seeding creates employment in poor rural places, in particular for army veterans who believe that the government owes them a job.

Only a few of China’s rainmakers use planes. More commonly, they fire silver iodide into the sky from artillery pieces. But that can be dangerous, too. Locals are often advised to keep an eye out for unexploded shells, which occasionally land on people’s homes….

Excerpts from No silver lining: Cloud-seeding will not solve China’s water shortages, Economist, Mar. 27, 2021

Better than Gods: Can We Master the Climate?

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Given the urgency of the risks posed by climate change, the U.S. should pursue a research program for solar geoengineering — in coordination with other nations, subject to governance, and alongside a robust portfolio of climate mitigation and adaptation policies, says a 2021 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report emphasizes that solar geoengineering is not a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
 
Solar geoengineering refers to strategies designed to cool Earth either by adding small reflective particles to the upper atmosphere, by increasing reflective cloud cover in the lower atmosphere, or by thinning high-altitude clouds that can absorb heat. While such strategies have the potential to reduce global temperatures and thereby ameliorate some of the risks posed by climate change, they could also introduce an array of unknown or negative consequences…

Scientific understanding of many aspects of solar geoengineering technologies remains limited, including how they could affect weather extremes, agriculture, natural ecosystems, or human health. There currently is no coordinated national effort for solar geoengineering research. The report recommends a comprehensive plan for governing solar geoengineering research, designed to ensure it moves forward in a socially responsible manner. Researchers should follow a code of conduct, for example, and research should be catalogued in a public registry, be subject to regular program assessment and review, and allow for public engagement.

Deliberate outdoor experiments that involve releasing substances into the atmosphere should be considered only when they can provide critical observations that cannot be provided by laboratory study, modeling, or experiments of opportunity — such as volcanic eruptions. Outdoor experiments should be subject to appropriate governance including permitting and impact assessments, says the report…The report says the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) should lead the effort to establish and coordinate a solar geoengineering research program across federal agencies and scientific disciplines, with funding in the range of $100 million-$200 million over the first five years. USGCRP would enable oversight and governance of research activities, including ensuring peer review, coordinating budget proposals and requests, periodically assessing progress, and defining program goals. Funding should be set aside specifically for implementation of governance and public engagement efforts.

Excerpts from New Report Says U.S. Should Cautiously Pursue Solar Geoengineering Research to Better Understand Options for Responding to Climate Change Risks, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Press Release, Mar. 25, 2021

Weather Engineering and Climate Change

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Maharashtra is one of the largest and wealthiest of India’s 30 states, with 110 million residents. It encompasses Mumbai and other large cities, plus vast swaths of farmland. Like other agricultural regions of India, it’s in its third consecutive year of drought. More than 80 percent of its farms depend on rain for irrigation, and agriculture production has dropped by almost a third since 2013. The human impact has been severe—1,300 debt-trapped farmers have committed suicide in Maharashtra in just the past six months.In July, 2015 the state’s minister of revenue, Eknath Khadse, took a gamble: He hired Koliwad to carry out a $4.5 million cloud-seeding program over three months and across 100 square miles in the middle of the state, the largest campaign of this kind ever attempted in India.

So Koliwad called Weather Modification Inc., the world’s largest private aerial cloud-seeding company, based in Fargo, N.D. WMI’s chief executive, Patrick Sweeney, developed a five-year technology transfer program with Koliwad that’s now in its first year. Pederson and other WMI staff are training Indian pilots, meteorologists, and Doppler radar technicians to seed clouds.

Sweeney has seeded clouds all over the world for more than 20 years, but the Maharashtra project is unique in that the circumstances are so dire. “The hardest part is managing expectations,” he says. “People in Maharashtra are hoping for a cure-all to drought. They come out and dance in the streets when it rains, they hug our pilots and say, ‘Do it again.’ But we can’t guarantee that the clouds will be there—and willing to cooperate.”..

Despite the uncertainty, the industry is on the rise. According to the World Meteorological Organization, more than 52 countries have active cloud-seeding operations—up from 42 four years ago. In the U.S. last year, 55 cloud-seeding projects were reported to NOAA. There’s even a luxury cloud-seeding market emerging—one European company, for instance, charges a minimum of $150,000 to guarantee good wedding weather by forcing clouds to rain in the days before the event….

Sweeney also built ICE (Ice Crystal Engineering), a company that makes cloud-seeding chemicals and supplies flares to 25 countries. ICE adds a decent sidestream of income for Sweeney, with revenue of about $3 million a year. But the bigger advantage is that it helped WMI become the only aerial seeding company that “does a full turnkey,” says Neil Brackin, WMI’s president—meaning it customizes and operates the planes and radars, manufactures the flares, and flies the missions.

They do have competitors. There are 34 private companies worldwide that do weather modification, but there’s no bigger rival in aerial cloud seeding than the Chinese government, which spends hundreds of millions a year seeding clouds in 22 of its 23 provinces, both to clear pollution above cities and to enhance rainfall for farming. China has yet to allow private companies to enter its market, but Sweeney is making inroads; he sold his first cloud-seeding plane to Beijing last year.

Thailand’s government has a Bureau of Royal Rainmaking, with hundreds of employees that WMI helped train, though the program’s still using old technology—releasing mounds of table salt from trap doors in the bellies of its planes. And when the Argentine government took over the cloud-seeding program WMI built for the country, it cut costs. Soon after, two pilots died seeding clouds above a mountain, and the project was suspended…

Brackin adds that while scientists want to achieve a 99.99 percent probability that a technology consistently works, the industry doesn’t need that kind of certainty or consistency to succeed. He likens cloud seeding to a cutting-edge medication that’s still in development: “If you’re dealing with a serious ailment and you were offered a medicine that had a 60 percent chance of working, or even 20 percent, would you take it? You probably would.”

Excerpts from  Amanda Little, Weather on Demand: Making It Rain Is Now a Global Business, Bloomberg, Oct. 28, 2015