Last year, New York Times Magazine ran a column that asks if it’s OK “to tinker with the environment to fight climate change.”
The piece, written by Jon Gertner, discusses a proposal made by Harvard Professor David Keith to use ten Gulfstream jets to spray 25,000 tons of liquid sulfur gas into the atmosphere in an attempt to combat global climate change.
While Professor Keith argues that this sort of solar engineering is technologically feasible, he admits to having a tough time trying to determine whether or not such a practice is ethical.
But according to a recently uncovered 784-page U.S. Senate report, the government has already been engaged in weather modification for over six decades since 1953.
“Weather modification projects have been operational for nearly 25 years and have been shown to have significant potential for preventing, diverting, moderating or ameliorating the adverse effects of such weather related disasters and hazards.”
In the letter, which was addressed to the Acting Director at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, Dr. Norman A. Beckman, Pearson goes on to say that his “greatest concern” is “regarding the lack of a coordinated Federal weather modification policy and a coordinated and comprehensive program for weather modification research and development.”
The report goes on to list off some of the ways in which the government has experimented with weather modification in recent years. The practice officially began in 1946 with the seeding of clouds through the use of dry ice and then silver iodide. By the 1950s, the government was looking for ways to have an impact on extreme storm effects.
By the time the report was officially published in 1978, weather modification practices included efforts to weaken storms and hurricanes, increasing the density of snowpack by seeding clouds to increase precipitation by 15 percent, and the opening of holes in winter clouds to increase the amount of sunshine in the northeast region of the United States, so as to decrease energy consumption.
In section five of the report, it alleges that global warming from human activity may also be playing a role in weather modification.
“…[T]he possibility exists that society may be changing the climate through its own actions by pushing on certain leverage points,” the report notes. While the report goes on to say that the concept of manmade global warming is still a controversial topic, it ultimately concludes that, “Nevertheless, a growing fraction of current evidence does point to the possibility of unprecedented impact on the global climate by human activities.”
Section eight of the report describes how weather modification has been used as a weapon of war.
It also makes it clear that weather warfare may very well become a reality in the near future as technology continues to advance.
The report concludes with a question posed by Dane Wigington of GeoengineeringWatch.org. “How big does the climate engineering elephant in the room need to be before it can no longer be hidden in plain site?” he asks. “How much more historical proof do we need…?”