GEOENGINEERINGThe U.S. Barely Bothers to Track Geoengineering. What Could Go Wrong?
Whether it’s cloud seeding or covering the Arctic in tiny glass beads, there’s little standing in the way of weather modification.
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 misinformation and public confusion about these activities.
A better database of geoengineering operations that was easier for the public to navigate could go a long way toward dispelling that misinformation and improving oversight, said Karen Howard, the GAO’s director of science and technology assessment.
“If people had a place to be referred to, where they could see, ‘Oh, this place in Idaho, they’re cloud seeding to try to increase the snow for a ski area,’ it would address what is actually occurring, and not what people imagine is occurring,” Howard said. “I think it could help with that quite a bit.”
One of the main gaps in oversight is that state agencies or companies performing weather modification often aren’t even aware that they’re required to communicate their activities to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to Howard. Public outreach around geoengineering from the federal government has been patchy and insufficient, she said, and even when operators do take steps to document their efforts, the forms they’re required to fill out are confusing and outdated.
