Cloud Seeding and the Water Wars of Tomorrow
Fueled by the climate crisis and El Niño, 2024 has been a year of global extreme temperatures. Australia suffered a string of heat waves through its summer months and, in February, parts of West Africa reported 50C temperatures that made “time stand still.” From March, heat waves hit Mexico, the southern United States and Central America, then India, southern Europe, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, where 1,300 people died during the Hajj pilgrimage. At the beginning of July, the temperatures in Antarctica were 28C higher than usual on some days in July.
The number of people exposed to extreme heat is growing exponentially due to climate change in all world regions. Heat-related mortality for people over 65 years of age increased by approximately 85% during 2000–2004 and 2017–2021.
From 2000–2019, studies show about 489,000 heat-related deaths occurred each year, with 45% of these in Asia and 36% in Europe. In Europe alone in the summer of 2022, an estimated 61,672 heat-related excess deaths occurred. High-intensity heat wave events can bring high acute mortality; in 2003, 70,000 people in Europe died as a result of the June–August event. In 2010, 56,000 excess deaths occurred during a 44–day heat wave in Russia.
Birds are falling out of the sky due to the heat. Reptiles come out seeking shade. Mammals and other wild animals are affected by a severe water shortage. Yet all of this less and less transforms into fresh news nowadays.
But with drought, one day comes food scarcity. Not only for the animals. And it will become a piece of news all the same.
Can humans do something with an immediate effect to prevent at least the food deficit?
Well, they already do it with cloud seeding.
A Brief History of Cloud Seeding
Some states manipulate clouds using a technique called ‘cloud seeding.’ The first cloud seeding techniques date back to the 1940s and involve making clouds merge and grow. This method has evolved into coalescing the particles inside clouds, which fall on the earth drawing down with them other particles encountered on the way, thus making rain or snow. To achieve this, substances had to be artificially introduced into the cloud, most often silver iodide, but various other techniques still exist. Some states also desalinate ocean or seawater, but it is a more expensive approach.
Cloud seeding before being elevated to a geo-engineering technique to combat climate change has gone through a reputation marring. The United States used the technique in the Vietnam War to slow the advance of opposing troops by causing flooding. In 1976, in response to the same use, the United Nations banned environmental modification techniques for military purposes with the ENMOD Convention. From that date onwards, it was forbidden to rain down clouds for ‘hostile’ purposes. However, the hostile nature of manipulation is sometimes difficult to demonstrate; in 1986, the USSR was said to have seeded clouds following the Chernobyl accident to make it rain over Belarus and thus protect Moscow from radioactive rain.
Later came the incidents of ‘stolen clouds.’ In 2011, Iran accused Europe that it had stolen its clouds and afterward in 2018, the story was repeated by an Iranian army general who blamed Israel. The latter case was more dramatic and approached a conflict situation because, in 2018, there was a severe drought in the country and the local farmers were protesting vehemently. Luckily, the head of the Iranian meteorology office intervened by denying the possibility of stolen clouds, which likely helped defuse the conflict. Nevertheless, Iran once again accused Turkey that it also was appropriating its clouds during a recent winter, as the mountain peaks on the Turkish side of their mutual border were snowy while the Iranian peaks on the opposite side were bare, allowing Turkey to attract more tourists.
Today, a country can do whatever it wants with the clouds that cross its airspace, and in many countries, research programs and experiments are multiplying. China has invested colossal sums of money into these techniques, to influence the weather during the Beijing Olympics in 2008, for example, or to combat drought. In 2020, it announced its intention to deploy its cloud seeding program, which until then had been tested on a very targeted basis, over half of its territory by 2025, with the aim of avoiding the droughts and hailstorms that can affect its agricultural production. The Gulf States are also applying seeding techniques using electric discharges in clouds. In France, an association called ANELFA is developing research in this field, with the aim of combating the hail that damages vineyards.
Not Without Its Controversies
In a podcast recorded for France Culture, the writer Mathieu Simonet and the climatologist Olivier Boucher point out that, for the time being, the effectiveness of cloud manipulating techniques remains highly controversial. For one, it is extremely difficult to know whether rain from a seeded cloud would not have existed without seeding.
The techniques raise two important questions for the future. The first concerns the ownership of water resources. While it may seem a trivial subject today, as water resources become scarce over time, there might be a risk of water conflict between neighboring countries over which ‘owns’ the rain. Indeed, if a country decides to ‘make it rain’ on its territory, it may be ‘stealing’ rain that would have fallen later in a neighboring country.
The second question concerns the environmental and health impacts of the substances being used to seed clouds. In large quantities, silver iodide is dangerous for biodiversity, particularly in aquatic environments. An English study carried out by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in the early 2000s revealed that silver iodide, below a certain concentration, is not toxic for the environment, but the substance is described as “extremely insoluble.” The risk is therefore that it accumulates and can be harmful over the long term. This obviously can make things more urgent than a creeping food deficit.
Today there are about 50 states which manipulate clouds to ensure ‘ordered’ rain. China has invested $1 billion only for five years in processing clouds. Experiments with cloud seeding are regularly made in the United States, Canada, Gulf countries, France, and Israel, just to name a few.
One proposed method to mitigate global warming with immediate effect is the making of something as a protective coat around the Earth. However, there are opinions that if it were to happen one day, a side effect of it would be nothing less than the disappearance of the blue sky. Here poetry and politics converge. But is that for a good reason when any hope for a prospective disrupting innovation is primarily precluded?
The Water Wars of Tomorrow
Looking 100 years into the future, technologies related to cloud seeding will be undoubtedly highly advanced and at that point, barring a global regime outlining their rightful use, the richest countries, would be able to invest most heavily and ultimately control the clouds.
Apart from everything else, a fundamental problem remains with cloud seeding. The technique works – to the extent that its effects can actually be set apart from natural processes – when there are clouds. But what about if there are no clouds in the sky? What will be squeezed then to make rain? And what can guarantee that the available clouds will always be able to deliver as much as is necessary for crops? Further, even if a cloud is seeded successfully, it does not mean that the rain or the snow will fall exactly on the spot where it is wanted.
And finally, with regard to the expensive process of desalinization, this establishes economic and political dependencies for countries that have no direct access to oceans and seas. How could cloud seeding thus be applied effectively and equitably in a world of growing politico-economic hostilities and fragmentation?
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