Where we place our blame, anger, and faith matters. We can't be casual and have knee-jerk reactions in these confusing times.
That's a small statement for a very big idea, so I’m going to use weather modification as the discussion foundation because why not? Everyone is a conspiracy theorist, so we should neither mock that label nor wear it as a badge of pride.
Recent weather, including hurricanes Helene and Milton, have filled social media with either rants about climate change or weather engineering accusations.
Regarding the latter, people sincerely asking about strange clouds, odd animal behavior, or other phenomena they aren't used to seeing or have no previous experience seeing are finding the responses supplied to them by people on social media are 5G, HAARP, dry ice, and the CIA. Any natural or scientific explanation is dismissed as quickly as a spiritual one (more on that later).
Even more amazingly, in a world where people read and write less and less and get their information from memes and quick videos, experts in complex subjects abound.
Somehow, based on what I've seen in the past two days, average social media users are simultaneously experts on physics and photography, and using only Google Earth and their gut hunch that the deep state is out to get them, have determined that the space station photos of the hurricane are fake. Flat earthers respond in encouragement that they should go further down the rabbit hole. This pours anger and exclusion onto people already struggling with fear and anxiety over a world that is steadily falling apart while still trying to process the seeming meaninglessness of pain and loss in a logical manner.
Pushing people towards conspiratorial answers for every bad thing does them an injustice and is also an insult to God.
Let’s just get started.
Is there such a thing as weather modification?
Yes.
The intrigue goes back to the 19th century, starting with meteorologist James P. Espy in 1830. He thought that lighting large fires in the Appalachian Mountains could trigger storms and increase rainfall because of his theory that convection was the primary cause of rain.
In the 1920s, electrified sand was used to dissipate clouds. But it wasn’t until the late 1940s that Vincent Shaefer and Berndt Vonnegut (yes, Kurt Vonnegut’s brother) took it to the next level, with a successful test in 1946. They submitted a patent in 1948 for their idea of forming ice crystals in an air mass supersaturated with ice.
Interest in weather modification exploded after World War 2, partly because cloud seeding got its start thanks to aviation. When planes fly through clouds, ice will sometimes build up on the wing. That impacted their ability to fly, and it was a significant challenge for American planes flying over the Himalayas from India to supply Chinese military forces. This led the General Electric Research Laboratory to do experiments on supercooled water that was below freezing temperature but still liquid. In 1946, the same lab used dry ice and silver iodide to make it snow near Mount Greylock in Western Massachusetts.
In 1947, the GE researchers were at it again with Project Cirrus. Their research started in February and led to their attempt to modify a hurricane for the first time on October 13 of that year. B-17 bombers dropped 180 pounds of crushed dry ice into the clouds at the western edge of a hurricane east of Jacksonville, Florida. They were hoping to weaken the hurricane, but instead, they disrupted its course, and it careened west into Savannah, Georgia. Project Cirrus lasted until 1952, laying the groundwork for future weather modification experiments, including STORMFURY a decade later.
In 1957, a congressionally created advisory committee reported that in the early 1950s, between $3-5M was spent on weather modification, affecting about 10% of the land (most of which was federal land in the west). At the time, the National Science Foundation took the lead in research, but it eventually shifted to NOAA, where reporting requirements took a backseat. Currently, a very basic one-page reporting form is all that’s required of people doing weather modification.1
In 1976, the Weather Modification Policy Act was passed in an attempt to create a national policy, but it did little.
Between 1962 and 1983, NOAA was involved with Project STORMFURY, research into hurricane modification using cloud seeding to try and form a new eyewall that would surround and strangle the original eyewall and reduce hurricane intensity. This didn’t seem to work, though some of the resulting data suggested that hurricane winds did decrease between 10-30%. Concentric eyewalls were happening already in some unmodified hurricanes, and most hurricanes seemed to lack the supercooled water required for cloud seeding to work.
Other techniques that STORMFURY considered seem bizarre, but typical output from brainstorming sessions, I guess:
Cooling the ocean with cryogenic material or icebergs (consider that 2024 had an incredibly hot ocean).
Reducing and slowing surface evaporation with monomolecular films.
Changing the radiational balance in the hurricane environment by absorption of sunlight with carbon black (ironic, considering carbon is our supposed climate change enemy).
Blowing the hurricane apart with hydrogen bombs (which never works out well in the movies).
Injecting air into the center with a huge tube to raise the central pressure.
Blowing the storm away from land with windmills.
In 2020, results from SNOWIE, an experiment based in the Payette Mountains of Idaho, suggested some promise in seeding for snow, but only under limited conditions (long-term buildup of snowpack) with the admission that snow did not occur after each seeding event.
All of this information and more are freely available to find.
While at the National Weather Service open house in Bismarck on September 14, 2024, one of the many display tents was literally dedicated to weather modification in terms of cloud seeding.2 It was probably one of the busier booths, indicating people are keyed into this topic. They were handing out information on cloud seeding in North Dakota.
North Dakota’s cloud seeding started in 1951, using ground-based generators and then switching to airplanes in the 1960s. The goal was to use cloud seeding from June through August to reduce terrible hail storms and increase rainfall in dry areas. Farmer and ag pilots Wilbur Brewer and Bill Fisher, from Bowman, North Dakota, started Weather Modification, Inc. in 1961, which has since expanded globally.
The success of weather modification in North Dakota has been questioned, and the entire program was controversial for many of the state's farmers, even though it was a group of farmers in the 50s that spearheaded the effort to try it. Different studies have suggested that cloud seeding has increased yields and reduced crop harm.3
Yet there are valid concerns.
Silver iodide, which is used in small amounts during cloud seeding and only remains active for about an hour, is relatively inert and supposedly doesn’t tend to convert to bioavailable forms of silver. Some studies haven’t shown a significant accumulation of it in the soil and water, though others suggest accumulation problems for aquatic life. Silver iodide is considered a hazardous substance, regulated under the Clean Water Act, and in 1965, the National Science Foundation put out a warning that the impact of weather modification needed to be studied. They also pointed out that cloud seeding doesn’t create water, it only redistributes it.
If there’s not enough moisture in the sky, no amount of cloud seeding can create rain, though in some places, not for lack of trying. There are currently about 50 different cloud-seeding projects going on in the United States, with Utah at the lead. In January 2022, the following states reported cloud-seeding activity: California, Colorado, Idaho, North Dakota, Texas, and Utah. State laws vary, with some having more control or regulation than others. The federal government doesn’t actually get all that involved in weather modification activities, other than providing funding for research.
The legal question of who owns the water in the sky and who is liable if things go wrong in another state makes states’ rights messy on this issue. That’s tough to swallow for some conservatives who are calling for federal regulation of weather modification.
China, India, Russia, Thailand, and the UAE also have robust cloud seeding programs and research. Iran has blamed Israel (and other nations) for stealing its rain. This is a global issue.
We can't forget to mention Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), which is our attempt to mimic what volcanoes do by filling the upper atmosphere with particles to reflect the sun and reduce the heat. This is not a new idea; in 1965 the LBJ administration formed a science advisory committee that warned we needed to increase reflectivity to counteract greenhouse gases. Their idea was to coat reflective particles across the oceans. SAI is related to this idea but involves spraying particles in the stratosphere. SAI is mostly tested in computer models with scientists extremely wary about what could happen.
We do have some idea of what might happen based on past volcanic explosions:
1815: Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted and was followed by the “Year Without a Summer” around the globe.
1883: Krakatoa erupted in Indonesia, injecting massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The entire globe cooled for several years, dropping by 1.2°C on average in the year after the eruption.
1991: Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines and dropped global temperatures by 0.5°C for about two years.
There are several periods in history where volcanic eruptions around the globe caused notable climate cooling events, such as the 540s, 1450s, and 1600s. It's reflected in the history of that time through art, wars, famine, and so forth.
So yes, weather modification exists.
There are likely methods being studied or experimented with that are not publicly known at this time. Some of what humans do is based on seeing what happens in nature and trying to mimic it.
Is weather modification to blame for all terrible weather or disasters?
Whenever humans are involved, we have to start with cui bono, or who benefits.
Hurricanes, for example, cause a lot of damage. Insurance companies would benefit if they could be steered away from land. Politicians would benefit in different ways, depending on what their objective was. But has weather modification proved successful in terms of fine-tuned control? Can we steer a hurricane or tornado directly toward a region for specific reasons?
Not exactly.
From 1967 to 1972, Operation Popeye was the U.S. Air Force’s attempt to use cloud seeding—using silver and lead iodide—to fight the Vietnam War.4 They wanted to extend the monsoon season and increase rainfall on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The goal was to soften roads, cause landslides along roads, wash out river crossings, and saturate the soil in order to slow troop and supply movements. Reportedly, 82% of seeded clouds produced rain.
Unfortunately, despite significant success in their goals, they also dumped lots of rain on U.S. soldiers because those clouds didn’t always stay put. One U.S. Special Forces camp was flooded with nine inches of rain in four hours.
So, is weather modification the same as controlling the weather? Are we only modifying, or are we controlling what’s there?
Weather modification is not a synonymous phrase for weather control.
Remember how I said that cloud seeding doesn’t create water, just redistributes it? This is part of the same idea: modification is neither control nor creation.
Not only are the health effects of cloud seeding uncertain but so is the question of whether we really control what happens. Cloud seeding in the United Arab Emirates led to wildly out-of-control flooding. A horrific blizzard in China was likely due to cloud seeding efforts. An English village was nearly destroyed in 1952, possibly due to cloud seeding. Unless you believe Project Cirrus really wanted to destroy Savannah, Georgia, it’s an example of attempting to modify the weather and losing control, not having control.
We can mess around with the weather, but can humans actually control it?
If the answer is no, then much of the conspiracy aspect falls away since those wanting to send a tornado to Donald Trump’s front door can’t really do that. As the line from Jurassic Park tells us, control is an illusion. It always is, particularly with God as part of the equation.
The lack of control is what worries me, not the idea that Dr. Evil is manipulating the weather for political gain. If weather modification was weather control, why does it go out of control? Why are there still weather disasters? Why does the rain still fall on good and evil alike?
Maybe there’s another reason.
There have always been horrific natural disasters.
Natural disasters have always been with us.
These disasters have taken down cities and empires long before we had the technology we fixate on today:
In 1816, there was a year "without summer", thanks to a volcano.
The Plague of Justinian, 541-549, significantly impacted the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires.
Some believe that weather and climate events between 100 BC and 800 AD helped take down the Roman Empire.
Some suggest that the Mediterranean civilizations collapsed during the Bronze Age (1250-1100) due to drought.
In 394 AD, a violent storm hit during battle between two opposing Roman forces, known as the Battle of Frigidus in Slovenia, which changed the direction of the Roman Empire, unifying it under Christian rule and becoming a significant turning point in European history.
The Mongols, led by Kublai Khan in 1274 and 1281, failed in their attempt to invade Japan thanks to two typhoons that destroyed their ships.
The Spanish Armada was unable to invade England in 1588 because of severe storms on the Atlantic that destroyed half the ships and killed 20,000 troops.
The Battle of Long Island would have been a much more serious defeat for the Continental Army had an incredibly dense fog not settled in to hide troop movements.
Twice, Russia was spared a severe invasion (Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941) thanks to brutal winter conditions.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s shifted the populations and changed the landscapes in America.
That's a very small list, coming nowhere near enough to show that before we had weather mod technology, the weather was still wild, unpredictable, and gave no quarter.
You can see the paths of tropical storms around the world at the Tropical Tidbits website, which lets you click on a year and see the storms for that year. Obviously, prior to radar and modern methods, the only storms and disasters people were aware of were the ones that impacted land. And the age-old discussion of whether or not we have an increase in natural disasters or if we’re just measuring them more accurately falls into the discussion here.5
We're a little more than arrogant to think we can assign control and message to a natural disaster in modern terms when it's been going on all the time. I can't imagine how today's weather conspiracists would respond to God pelting the enemy with hailstones and stopping the sun in the sky so the Israelite army could win.
Climate change and weather modification are phrases we throw around to make the great unknown seem like something we humans can solve. But low and high-pressure systems develop. The jet stream shifts. Unstable air rolls in. Bodies of water and swaths of paved cities reflect and absorb heat differently. The sun spits out solar flares.
A fallen world is a broken world. Disaster, on any scale, is its currency.
God does judge sin, and he uses his creation to do it sometimes.
No one likes to hear this. It sounds too Bible-thumper, too ignorant. It seems to give license for every crackpot to proclaim judgment on a people group hit by a disaster.
Setting modern sensibilities and clashing theological views aside, God has repeatedly used the earth and geopolitical events to respond to sin. (See also: Noah). Things get even more uncomfortable when someone starts to draw correlations between disasters and how nations treat Israel.
We don’t like to think our personal and national refusal to address sin and repent could accumulate and be responsible for someone going through a disaster. This idea doesn’t mesh with modern thoughts on fairness, control, how the world works, how we view God and sin, and “mother nature.”6
But if you’ll eagerly eat up every conspiracy theory, then you’d better take some time and make room for this theory also. If dropping a chunk of dry ice can send a hurricane into the quartz and lithium mines, maybe your little private, personal immorality can do the same, too. Maybe the Butterfly Effect is actually the sin effect.
What does that mean for the believer in Christ?
What in the world does all this have to do with our Christian faith?
For one thing, we shouldn’t be putting fearmongering content out that causes confusion and unwarranted rage in others. The fruit of the Spirit doesn’t include building up fear and anger in other people. I get that one wrong a lot, so believe me, I know the blowback.
Mainly, it’s a question of responsibility.
The roaring lion is prowling, sometimes using information to devour us.
Christians are to be people who seek true wisdom and are discerning, which means we are obligated to exercise our minds as much as we exercise anything else. Part of this is knowing how to ask questions and process information.
If those things were easy, this wouldn’t be a problem. But they are difficult and don’t come naturally. God tells us, in his Word, that we have to control our minds. It’s an active state, not a passive one.
Truth can be packaged in inflammatory ways. The delivery of information has as much to do with how people understand it as the information itself. Here’s an example from the article I previously shared about weather modification. I’ve told you much of the same information from that article but in a different way.
This section is written in all caps, with bold lettering. The forced emphasis impacts understanding. For people who skim instead of read (a modern disease), this assures the right message lands whether or not the full article is read.
There’s an emotional punch delivered in there, one that appeals to people who feel victimized, powerless, beaten down, or mocked.
There’s also a little writer trick at work.
Writers want to bring the reader to their conclusion so smoothly they’d swear it’s their own conclusion. It’s the heart of what frustrates us about media today: content is written with a thesis in mind, not with the goal of presenting information and letting you form a thesis.
We have to dissect what we read.
Christians are a people of the word, so it’s no surprise the enemy would like to make us poor at deciphering words. Let’s take a look at that screenshot and dig deeper into what the author did.
Red box: Start with “yes” to shut down any question the reader might have because it’s already answered. Apply that yes to two statements that are not actually saying the same thing (i.e. control vs. modification).
Green box: Put in a true statement. You must always have something that is true to carry all of the other statements if they are weak, misleading, or false.
Yellow box: Associate two different ideas so you can use them interchangeably. Here the author is defining terms for the reader, whether you agree or not. I saw this during the pipeline protest (i.e. temporary flight restrictions equated to closing down the airspace when, in fact, you could still fly but at a higher altitude to avoid protest drones and projectiles).
Weather modification is not exactly the same as geoengineering, though the two are often conflated. They have overlapping similarities (i.e., human intervention in weather), but weather modification is more localized for immediate issues, while geoengineering is about changing the entire global climate system, usually because of alleged climate change.
Geoengineering goes far beyond cloud seeding, addressing global temperatures and other issues.
Only God truly geoengineers. Humans can surely mess things up with their bright ideas, but God has the final say.
Yellow line: The author already mashed geoengineering and weather modification together, so they can make this statement. But weather modification started in the mid 20th century and wasn’t about climate change in the way we think of it today.
Purple line: The author is suggesting no journalist has done this, though ironically, much of the proof in the article links to…news articles of journalists questioning these methods full of critiques on weather modification. It's tempting to believe that "no one is talking about it!" whatever the issue is, but clearly, someone is talking about it because the information is out there.
But mostly, when I read that article, I question the underlying assumption of a secret because weather modification isn’t a secret. At its basic level, it’s not a conspiracy theory because you can find the information all over the place.
We have to control our immediate emotional response.
It's hard, but take a beat when you hear something that gets the emotion going. Your default question these days should be, "Is that true?"
“The sky just isn’t as blue as it was when I was a kid,” someone writes on social media, posting a photo of a pale blue sky with crisscross contrails. “It’s all the chemtrails.”
That hits our gut. When you feel powerless or beaten down, you’re primed to act emotionally. The idea of spraying particles into the air and them falling onto our soil and water, of politicians profiting off of such things—all the agony is tied together, and we nod our heads in anger.
The biggest difference I’ve noticed from childhood is a) the home farm isn’t blasted by fast and low-flying Air Force jets in Tiger North MOA anymore, so the house doesn’t shake, and b) the smoky air that fills the summer with air quality warnings. The latter, my guess, is partly due to recent decades of poor forest management that left the forests in North America in horrific shape.
But what do you do when someone shares information that pings your nostalgia, that sense that we think we had control of our lives in hindsight, which is so appealing when everything is out of control right now?
For the example of the contrail photo I mentioned, I would ask myself some questions:
Is it really less blue? I don’t think so, at least not where I am. Some days the sky is incredibly blue. How do I measure this alleged change against someone insisting there is one?
Where was the photo taken? Is it near an aviation waypoint that would explain the proliferation of contrails?
What altitude are those contrails? Dispersion and altitude go hand in hand. The words chemtrail and contrail are not interchangeable.
Is the airplane (or remnants of a past airplane) you’re seeing showing up on something like Flight Aware, and if so, what is the tail number?
Has anyone altered the photo by adjusting color, gamma, or contrast balance?
Is there any indication of AI involvement in that photo?
Until I know the answers to this list, I can’t in good conscience share the image or information. This applies elsewhere, too.
Whether it’s weather modification or something else, we have to stop creating idols out of humans. That’s what we do when we think human conspiracy and dark, hidden human evil is behind everything.
If you hate the idea of a dwindling earth or geoengineering now, just wait.
I want to tell both the climate change and the weather modification fanatic that a slow read through the book of Revelation is in order. I have no idea how they'll explain what's coming, but social media responses will be very interesting in the future. No amount of mucking about with the weather or posting accusations and conspiracy will protect people from the ultimate geoengineer (God) and how this earth will be ripped, shaken, twisted, flooded, killed, pelted, burned, frozen, and destroyed. The spiritual realm will become strangely and terrifyingly visible.
Our battle is always spiritual, not physical, and it’s hard enough to remember that without a daily bombardment of content suggesting that the right outrage, the right law, the right information, or the right enemy will provide the focus we need to make this world a heaven on earth.
That will happen, but by God and in His time.
1 American Bar Association. “We Will Miss Water if the Wells Run Dry.” Accessed October 8, 2024. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/environment_energy_resources/resources/natural-resources-environment/2014-2022/we-will-miss-water-if-wells-run-dry/.
2 I assume it was the Atmospheric Resource Board (the ND Weather Modification Board until 1975), but I did not take a photo of the tent and can’t be certain. The Atmospheric Resource Board is a part of the Aeronautics Commission.
3 An NDSU study suggested increased yields for wheat and barley. (Read here and here.) An increase in rainfall between 7-15% was experienced in downwind counties, with an increased wheat yield of almost 6%, a benefit-to-cost ratio of 35:1. When modeled scenarios were analyzed, there was a 5-10% increase in growing season rainfall because of cloud seeding, which translates into $21.2M to $41.9M increased crop production annually. However, farmers and residents in the area have said the cloud seeding has increased negative weather. The lack of studies to support that theory doesn’t mean it is or isn’t true, but possibly that there isn’t as much motivation to do such a study.
4 This conspiracy/military secret was quickly made public in the 1970s by journalists, an interesting quality of conspiracies, i.e., conspiracies don’t stay hidden long because people can’t keep their mouths shut when confronted with something wrong.
5 I am on the increase side of this discussion, i.e. that there are more things of this nature happening—and more violently in areas not always affected—as the world winds down, per what Jesus said would happen as we get closer to his return.
6 There is no mother nature. God is the Creator, period.
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