Weaving together stories from elite science, cutting-edge technology, and popular culture, Fleming examines issues of health and navigation in the 1830s, drought in the 1890s, aircraft safety in the 1930s, and world conflict since the 1940s.

The weather on planet Earth is a vital and sometimes fatal force in human affairs. Efforts to control or reduce the harmful impacts of weather go back far in time. In this, the latest National Academies' assessment of weather modification, the committee was asked to assess the ability of current and proposed weather modification capabilities to provide beneficial impacts on water resource management and weather hazard mitigation. It examines new technologies, reviews advances in numerical modeling on the cloud and mesoscale, and considers how improvements in computer capabilities might be applied to weather modification. Critical Issues in Weather Modification Research examines the status of the science underlying weather modification in the United States. It calls for a coordinated national research program to answer fundamental questions about basic atmospheric processes and to address other issues that are impeding progress in weather modification.

Weather Modification by Cloud Seeding

In April 1997, United States Secretary of Defense William Cohen declared that there are terrorists at work who “... are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves...“ Weather modification in the form of cloud seeding to increase snow packs in the Sierras or suppress hail over Kansas is now an everyday affair. Hundreds of environmental and weather modifying technologies have been patented in the United States alone-and hundreds more are being developed in civilian, academic, military and quasi-military laboratories around the world at this moment! This book lays bare the grim facts of who is doing it and why. The earth and the sky have themselves been turned into weapons! Underground nuclear tests in Nevada have set off earthquakes. A Russian company has been offering to sell typhoons on demand since the 1990s. Scientists have been searching for ways to move hurricanes for over 50 years-the same timeframe that took us from the Wright Brothers to Neil Armstrong. In this book, Jerry E. Smith picks up where his 1998 book about the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) left off. He reports on recent developments at HAARP, including its possible connection to the crash of the Space Shuttle Columbia and what role, if any, it played in certain “natural” disasters, like Hurricane Katrina. Tackling the chemtrail controversy, Smith examines claims that particles called aerosols are being deliberately injected into the atmosphere. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, proposed putting up a “sun screen” of aerosols to save the earth from global warming-is someone actually doing it? Numerous ongoing military programs do inject aerosols at high altitude for communications and surveillance operations. Could these include mind control or population control applications? Smith puts these technologies into context by examining the geopolitical conflicts that are driving their development from Globalization to the rise of Neo-Con Neo-Fascism.

Weather control. Juxtaposing those two words is enough to raise eyebrows in a world where even the best weather models still fail to nail every forecast, and when the effects of climate change on sea level height, seasonal averages of weather phenomena, and biological behavior are being watched with interest by all, regardless of political or scientific persuasion. But between the late nineteenth century—when the United States first funded an attempt to “shock” rain out of clouds—and the late 1940s, rainmaking (as it had been known) became weather control. And then things got out of control. In Make It Rain, Kristine C. Harper tells the long and somewhat ludicrous history of state-funded attempts to manage, manipulate, and deploy the weather in America. Harper shows that governments from the federal to the local became helplessly captivated by the idea that weather control could promote agriculture, health, industrial output, and economic growth at home, or even be used as a military weapon and diplomatic tool abroad. Clear fog for landing aircraft? There’s a project for that. Gentle rain for strawberries? Let’s do it! Enhanced snowpacks for hydroelectric utilities? Check. The heyday of these weather control programs came during the Cold War, as the atmosphere came to be seen as something to be defended, weaponized, and manipulated. Yet Harper demonstrates that today there are clear implications for our attempts to solve the problems of climate change.