(BY HUGO)

Since this post, the signals in favour of geoengineering have become stronger - see an article here from John Vidal and another here from Pat Mooney in The Guardian, with a link to the UN preliminary drafts.

The Doctors Strangelove have decided that although we cannot predict what will happen with climate under current conditions, we are able to predict what will happen if we throw a few more variables into the climatic system. It also appears imperative to avoid any international legislation on the issue because that would not be desirable: See Keynote III.1 by Professor Redgewell in the UN preliminary drafts mentioned above.

It's difficult to imagine that efforts aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions will increase when we go down the road of climate engineering. Quite worrying is the fact that the impetus towards geoengineering comes not from the traditional right wing politicians but from the IPCC. Clive Hamilton might have a point with his book Requiem for a species as it looks more and more like human intelligence could become an evolutionary dead end: we blatantly disregard the only solution we know works - curbing emissions. Precaution is completely dismissed.

Will the countries with the will and the means to perform such operations, such as the US and the UK, make sure that any potential benefits as well as any adverse impacts are most equitably shared around the globe? Even more unlikely, will the private sector patenting geo-engineering technology act selflessly in the best interest of all? John Vidal in The Observer reports here on fears that manipulating weather patterns could have a calamitous effect on poorer countries...

(BY HUGO)

A discussion on cloud seeding in a recent post motivates the reporting of this news (in French - article in L'Essor by Sibiri Konaté) to illustrate the type of operations currently performed in Africa.

Mali is paying a total of around US $27 000 000 for cloud seeding to a consortium led by Weather Modification Incorporated, an American company. The rain enhancement programme was initiated in 2005. The increase in rainfall is reported to vary between 15% and 50% depending on the region. Analysis performed on provoked rainwater reportedly shows no alteration in water quality.

Interestingly, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Alberta are on the list of Weather Modification Incorporated's clients. The operations in Alberta are still going on and relate to hail suppression.

UPDATE: Another article from David Dembele in Journal du Mali (in French) provides additional details on the seeding campain.

(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.