People have tried to manipulate the weather for thousands of years, whether through magic, superstition, or science. In the 1840s, one schoolteacher suggested that the United States regulate the climate by setting massive, weekly forest fires. Fifty years later, researchers were trying to “shock” rain out clouds with cannon fire, and by 1989, one engineer proposed sending a 1,200-mile-wide glass parasol into space to reflect solar radiation and cool the planet.
Although many of the wilder ideas to control nature were eventually abandoned, what’s now known as geoengineering remains a strange, somewhat ad hoc field even today. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, found that the federal government still does not have sufficient oversight over weather modification activities and is also “not fully meeting its responsibilities to maintain and share weather modification reports.” The two problems are connected, the report says. The lack of supervision could allow harmful, rogue geoengineering operations to proceed largely unmonitored, while the lack of transparency could fuel m... Read more
