- by Justin Shilad
 
"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."  ~ Mark Twain
 
There’s something about rain that induces a certain fatalism in me. While other people gnash their teeth and curse the forces of meteorology, I tend to just pull a hood (or newspaper) over my head and shrug. After all, I’m already wet, and what can I do about the weather?
 
But maybe I’ve had the wrong attitude, because apparently some people have been quite proactively trying to do something about the weather. To ensure a cloud-free sky during the opening ceremony and the outdoor events, Chinese authorities have been firing cannons and missiles into the sky in an attempt at using various cloud seeding techniques to induce rain before the games start. This is not a new concept for the Chinese government: the Beijing Weather Modification Office has been around for years, and official government programs aimed at controlling the weather have been around for decades.
 
Are the Chinese the only ones imposing mandates on the heavens? As public acceptance of anthropologically-induced global warming finally becomes widespread, we hear more and more that not only did humans create the problem, but that they can also create the solution. And with technology and environmental consciousness both developing concurrently, the idea that humans can control earth’s natural functions seems to be gaining traction. Is there a definite line between reducing your carbon footprint to prevent glaciers from melting and firing artillery into the sky to make it rain, or is it just a matter of degrees?
 
Purple Rain, Crooked Rain, Man-Made Rain?
 
Although various cultures and religions have utilized prayers and dances for rain throughout history, humans have adopted a more scientific approach in recent history. A key part of this approach was Vincent Shaefer’s discovery of cloud-seeding technology in 1946. Using frozen CO2 (more commonly known as “dry ice”), Shaefer found that it was possible to induce rapid cooling within a cloud. This temperature change would in turn form ice crystals that would eventually fall from the cloud as rain or snow. Later on, silver iodide also came into widespread use in cloud seeding.
 
For China, the fortuitous timing of Dr. Shaefer’s discovery was perfect. About a decade later, Mao Zedong pioneered the “Great Leap Forward” to modernize China’s agricultural and industrial production. Gambling nothing on the whims of nature, Mao’s China initiated a program of cloud seeding to ensure reliable rainfall and a good harvest. But Mao was not content with merely wringing extra water out of the clouds; he prepared a full frontal assault against any natural threat to his ambitious agricultural goals. Chief among these threats were the “four great pests”: rats, mosquitoes, flies and sparrows. Mao’s campaign against the “pests” led to the infamous Great Sparrow Campaign, in which peasants were urged to destroy the sparrow population by terrifying the birds and destroying their nests in an attempt to systematically wipe out the entire population.
 
Mao’s interventionist approach towards the world of nature did not have a happy ending. Despite the best efforts of the would-be weather modifiers, the next few years brought droughts and flooding in abundance. On the other hand, the Great Sparrow Campaign was so effective that there were no more of the birds left to feed on the locust swarms that soon set upon the fields. These unsuccessful attempts at modifying nature and weather ultimately became footnotes in a larger, largely man-made catastrophe that resulted in tens of millions of starvation deaths over the next five years.
 
Yet while persecution of China’s erstwhile songbird population waned, the fascination with cloud seeding had only begun, and it soon seeped out into the rest of the world. Australia started its own forays into cloud seeding at around the same time, and while initial attempts were unsuccessful, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) was eventually able to increase rainfall over Tasmania by 30% during one autumn. CSIRO’s success was an inspiration for enterprising souls on the other side of the pond, and the North American Interstate Weather Modification Council was born in the drought-prone western U.S. states. India has gotten in on the act too, trying its hand at cloud seeding in the central regions of the country notorious for economic hardship and farmer suicides.
 
And in a somewhat ironic twist, cloud seeding has been used to counteract the disastrous results of other human attempts at manipulating the elements. After the Chernobyl disaster, Soviet pilots dropped silver iodide into contaminated clouds moving towards Moscow, so that their radioactivity would rain down on rural Belarus instead of the heart of the then-U.S.S.R. Tampering with the weather may raise eyebrows, but tampering with nature to offset the effects of…tampering with nature? What happens when we start to go down that road?
 
Anthropomorphic Solutions…or Problems
 
In a sense, we already started down that road a long time ago. Humans have been wrestling with nature ever since they perfected the spearhead and started cultivating fields, so it makes sense that sooner or later we’d start tinkering with the weather. The problem is, we started doing that before we even realized it. In the debate over global warming, the controversy mainly focuses on whether or not human beings are responsible for climate change, and whether we should significantly alter our lifestyles and economies to prevent an acceleration of the process. But of course, reducing our carbon footprints is also a way of tinkering with the weather, in the grand scheme of things: just like officials in Beijing fire cannons into the sky so that it won’t rain on the 100 meter dash, you take public transport and buy local so that Bangladesh won’t be submerged in a century.
 
And in fact, it might be too reductive to describe the Chinese Government’s efforts as just trying to avoid a shower. If they do seed the clouds so that it rains before the games, the skies would also be somewhat cleared of smog and dust. On that end, China has spared no effort as it is: already restrictions are in place to limit traffic and shut down factories to ensure smog-free skies. But shouldn’t someone have thought of that years ago, when all this industry was being built up in the first place? This seems to be the problem: we tinker with nature while remaining blithely unaware of any possible consequences. Maybe we wouldn’t have to try and wrestle with the clouds if we were a little more conscious to begin with.
 
After writing this, I have a lot more questions and no real answers. No matter how industrialized our societies become, we humans don’t live separately from nature, and now we are being forced to alter the weather, if indirectly, to avoid the fallout from our previous, unintentional actions. It’s impossible to predict the long term consequences for every action, and there isn’t any evidence so far that cloud seeding, even if rarely effective, causes any harm. But nonetheless, would it be a bad idea to stop and think before firing cannons into the sky?
 
Image from Flickr user borkur.net shared with a Creative Commons Attribution License.