(BY HUGO)

Cloud seeding is a method of spraying chemical contaminants in clouds to induce rainfall. The spraying is usually done from airplanes but also from land based equipments. The contaminants, often silver iodine, act as magnets for water vapour in clouds, inducing the formation of water droplets heavy enough to fall to the ground.

This is an old technique. It has been developed in the 1950s in the U.S.A., and since then has been used in the American Midwest, during the Vietnam war (resulting in the ENMOD Convention), in Australia, in South Africa, and even in experimental programs over Alberta, Canada (circa 1980s?). In fact, there is even a statute in Québec regulating cloud seeding, the Act respecting the artificial inducement of rain.

Cloud seeding has remained a marginal activity for decades because of a black box problem. Basically, science is not advanced enough to establish satisfactory correlations between the seeding and rainfalls: it is impossible to track all the dynamic variables in the atmosphere and isolate seeding as the definitive causa causans for precipitations in the area around the seeding activity.

However, cloud seeding has been the object of renewed interest in recent years due to increased water scarcity. The FAO and African countries have looked at cloud seeding to secure water for crops, The Israelis are experimenting with new techniques to induce cloud formation by changing land cover...

Why this renewed interest? Cloud seeding essentially participates from the same process as rainwater harvesting. This is an 'escalation to the extremes' (borrowing from von Clausewitz) between competing users of a limited resource to secure access to water by getting ever closer to the ultimate upstream point of the hydrological cycle.

Legal doctrine (from authors like Edith Brown Weiss in international law and Ray Jay Davis in American law) has approached the legal issues raised by artificial rain inducement. Such studies might become very useful in a context of growing water scarcity and increased use of weather modification techniques.

For example, AlterNet reports of a small community in California that has passed an Ordinance to prohibit cloud seeding on its territory.

NOTE: This is completely off topic, but the article mentions that Coca-Cola extracts groundwater near that municipality but does not have to disclose the quantities withdrawn... because of the company's right to free speech!!! It's always surprising to see how far American law has gone to divorce the morally just from the legally right.

(BY HUGO)

The Utah Water Law and Water Rights Blog informs that the Utah Legislature passed a bill permitting the capture and storage of precipitations.

This seems to be part of a trend in water law towards regulating ever closer to the upstream reaches of the hydrologic cycle. Such a trend appears justified in areas traditionally left unregulated in order to avoid a "tragedy of the commons" given the increasing exploitation of and competition for a limited resource.

Salient points of the Utah legal provision are:

- Reliance on the doctrine of beneficial use tied to the parcel on which the water is captured and stored;

- Constraints on the volumes of rainwater that can be stored - 2 500 gallons if stored in an underground container, and 2 x 100 gallons covered containers if stored above ground. Question: if stored above ground in uncovered container, would there be no volume limit? If such is the case, would this be an indirect invitation to alter extensively overland run-offs by changing the morphology of one's parcel?

(BY HUGO)

Thanks to collegue BO, who pointed to this article from Karl Burkart from the Mother Nature Network, about manufacturing clouds to increase the albedo of the Earth's athmosphere and presumably reduce greenhouse effect by reflecting the Sun's energy back into space:

«Basically a fleet of ships equipped with screens & vacuums pump up millions of gallons of ocean water and using high-powered water canons introduce the water some 3000 feet in the air, where clouds are formed. The added moisture content would increase the thickness of the water vapor, making the clouds whiter and thus more reflective.»

The proposals for such experiments have been around for years and are part of a wider debate about geoengineering to fend off the anticipated damages resulting from global temperature increases. As reported by Ben Webster for the Times:

«The British and American scientists involved do not intend to wait for international rules on technology that deliberately alters the climate. They believe that the weak outcome of December’s climate summit in Copenhagen means that emissions will continue to rise unchecked and that the world urgently needs an alternative strategy to protect itself from global warming.»

Of course, the resulting alteration of precipitation patterns is completely unpredictable, adding to the increasing variability of water flows in the hydrologic cycle due to climate change.

Why invest massively into such magic-wand solutions rather than into concrete projects to counter green gas emissions? No clue. It just makes no sense, however you want to look at it. The point is, nobody knows the effect of such extreme measure; it's conjectures piled on conjectures,buttressed by conjectures.

Fortunatly, common sense has not entirely left the building. In the current discussions of the scientific advisory body to the Convention on Biodiversity, SWEDEN and ARGENTINA called for applying the precautionary principle to geoengineering. IISD provides some highlights to follow the action here.

It feels like humanity realised it will inevitably crash against a wall, but instead of breaking just decided to accelerate to reduce the damages. Depressingly, great environmentalists like the people at Legal Planet start considering geoengineering solutions as a reasonable possibility.