Why Southern California’s New Cloud Seeding Project Is Putting Conspiracy Theorists into a Frenzy

While working as a researcher at General Electric, Schaefer modified clouds above Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains by seeding them with dry ice. But, according to the U.S. National Research Council, “the potential legal liability implications of the early experiments led the General Electric Company to discontinue field experiments, and in 1947 to negotiate a contract for further fieldwork to be carried out by the military.” (Schaefer, who received 14 patents over a 20-year period, would continue to study weather modification, publishing a paper two years later about his experiments modifying lightning storms in the northern Rockies.)

The shift of cloud seeding from private research to national defense helped fuel conspiracy theories that zeroed in on aircraft contrails, those line-shaped clouds that sometimes form behind aircraft flying several miles above the Earth’s surface. A product of water vapor condensing and freezing around small particles present in an aircraft’s exhaust, these contrails, conspiracy theorists argue, are actually “chemtrails” that indicate the military or some other governmental organization is spraying chemical or biological agents at a high altitude for some mysterious, top secret reason.

The theory galvanized with the release of a 1996 research paper by the U.S. Air Force about weather modification titled “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025.” The report’s authors were quite clear about how weather manipulation may one day become weaponized:

The ability to modify the weather may be desirable both for economic and defense reasons. … Assuming that in 2025 our national security strategy includes weather-modification, its use in our national military strategy will naturally follow. Besides the significant benefits an operational capability would provide, another motivation to pursue weather-modification is to deter and counter potential adversaries. In this paper we show that appropriate application of weather-modification can provide battlespace dominance to a degree never before imagined. In the future, such operations will enhance air and space superiority and provide new options for battlespace shaping and battlespace awareness. “The technology is there, waiting for us to pull it all together; in 2025 we can “Own the Weather.”

“So persistent is the chemtrail theory that U.S. government agencies regularly receive calls from irate citizens demanding an explanation,” writes Oliver Smith, digital travel editor at The Telegraph. “Pernilla Hagberg, a Swedish politician, even raised the issue. … Other proponents of the “chemtrails” theory say it is an attempt to control global warming, while some cite far more sinister goals, such as population control and military weapons testing.” In fact, contrails are believed to contribute to global warming by trapping radiation emitted by the Earth.

In 2014, Gawker’s weather blogger Dennis Mersereau offered his own debunking. He writes:

Chemtrail conspiracy theorists use cloud seeding as irrefutable proof that all of their theories are valid, because “look! they’re doing it here, so obviously they’re doing it everywhere and with other chemicals, too!” That’s a huge logical fallacy, but it’s their main fallback and argument, so they stick to it until the bitter end.

Contrails from a Qantas Boeing 747-400 at an altitude of 36,000 feet (image: Sergey Kustov/Wikipedia

Of course, these theories are regularly dismissed by the government, as well as aviation experts like pilot Patrick Smith, who writes in his book “Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel”:

Contrails are formed when humid jet exhaust condenses into ice crystals in the cold, dry, upper-level air ­ it’s not unlike the fog that results when you exhale on a cold day. In other words, contrails are clouds. Water vapor, strange as it might sound, is a by-product of the combustion within jet engines, which is where the humidity comes from. Whether a contrail forms is contingent on altitude and the ambient atmospheric makeup — mainly temperature and something known as vapor pressure.

Some have drawn the connection between contrail presence — though in this case they are “chemtrails” — and illness in certain communities. The vast online docket of photographs and eyewitness accounts does have a certain UFO-sightings tinge to it. If the idea sounds particularly cuckoo, I’ll mention that otherwise reasonable and skeptical people have taken to believing that something is going on, which is often a first sign that it is. That something, however, is probably no more villainous than standard military aircraft on maneuvers, albeit classified ones. If you live beneath one of these chemtrail-prone zones I’d recommend a good telephoto lens to identify what kinds of aircraft are involved. For the rest of us around major cities, all it takes is a decent pair of binoculars to realize the culprit is usually Lufthansa or Delta, and not some shadowy CIA spy plane.

The Los Angeles Department of Public Works actually helped stoke the conspiracy fire in late January, when they decided to notify local residents about their upcoming cloud seeding equipment installations by taking out a classified ad in the Pasadena Star News. Conspiracy theorists saw the move as a way for the government to be legally transparent, yet virtually conceal the news of their activity.

On March 12, the website Wakeup World (whose stated mission is to offer information and commentary pertaining to the “energetic organism we call Earth, the Universe and the Multiverse” to “help people … see through the lies) published a blog post claiming the American government “quietly” admitted to engaging in “weather modification” activities in a notice buried in the classifieds section of a small California newspaper:

… the level of propaganda and indoctrination that the average American must wade through in order to get the smallest amount of Truth is staggering. We have reached a point in which Americans are so overwhelmed with the current battle taking place between the Alternative News community and mainstream media, and its barrage of contradicting “Facts,” that most have simply chosen to completely remove themselves from any critical thinking. Even when the government itself reveals an age-old lie to be true, most are so indoctrinated with the idea of the “conspiracy” that they convince themselves that the revelation is just another trick of those deceptive “conspiracy theorists.” … A perfect example of this is weather modification.

Weather modification, geoengineering, chemtrails; these are all topics that if brought up in most circles today, would garner the speaker the telltale look that most Truthers have become all too familiar with. It is a look that has been ingrained into all who have opted to cast aside their critical thinking for their comforting daily lie. There is a herd mentality that has been established that causes even those on the fence or those interested in “outside the box” ideas, to fall in line while surrounded by the docile mass. So when the government recently released a “Notice of Intent” on page 11 of the Pasadena Star Classifieds, announcing their plan to carry out weather modification in Los Angeles County, it became clear that those blank stares should be turned inward, for some much needed self-reflection and re-evaluation.

Writing on Snopes.com, Kim LaCapria points out that the DPW actually “devoted an entire page to the activity (cloud seeding) mentioned in the classified advertisement [PDF]. That document explained cloud seeding was an anti-drought measure practiced intermittently for more than half a century in Los Angeles.”

The future is now

Even in the scientific community, cloud seeding has long been relegated to “fringe science,” with the Australian Federation of Meteorology dismissing a handful of so-called “rain making” weather modification experiments conducted throughout the early part of the 20th century. Even as recent as 2003, the United States National Research Council released a report stating that to date, there is still no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification as it only has 30 percent or less chance of success.

The report assessed the ability of current and proposed weather modification strategies meant to help with water resource management and weather hazard mitigation. The NRC noted the challenge of figuring out exactly how much rainfall would have happened if treated clouds had not been seeded:

[S]cience is unable to say with assurance which, if any, seeding techniques produce positive effects. In the 55 years following the first cloud-seeding demonstrations, substantial progress has been made in understanding the natural processes that account for our daily weather. Yet scientifically acceptable proof for significant seeding effects has not been achieved, and the scientific challenges have proved to be significantly more formidable and complex than perceived initially.

The 1996 Air Force report noted that it contained “fictional representations of future situations/scenarios.” With the increasing number of cloud seeding programs happening around the world, it’s clear that the future is now. In Maharashtra, for example, one of India’s largest and wealthiest states, a crippling drought now in it’s fourth year has not only crushed the region’s agriculture production, which has plummeted by nearly a third since 2013, but has taken a severe human toll, with some 1,300 debt-burdened farmers committing suicide during a six-month period in 2014 alone.

One official response to the Indian crisis has been cloud seeding. The state’s revenue ministry hired Koliwad, a Bangalore-based climate modification consultancy, to carry out a three-month-long, $4.5 million cloud seeding program covering a 100-square-mile area in what is the largest project of its kind ever attempted in the country. Koliwad, in turn, hired Weather Modification Inc. (WMI), the world’s largest private aerial cloud-seeding company, based in Fargo, North Dakota, to develop a five-year technology transfer program that includes training Indian pilots, meteorologists and Doppler radar technicians how to seed clouds.

Some witnesses of the ensuing storms are under the impression that humans have finally figured out a way to control the weather. But Mother Nature still holds most of the cards. “People in Maharashtra are hoping for a cure-all to drought,” said Patrick Sweeney, WMI’s chief executive. “They come out and dance in the streets when it rains, they hug our pilots and say, ‘Do it again.’ But we can’t guarantee that the clouds will be there — and willing to cooperate.”

It’s not just during severe drought situations that cloud seeding programs have been put to use. In France, cloud seeding has been used to reduce the damage to crops caused by hail. The strategy has been employed in Indonesia to help eliminate the pollution-heavy haze caused by the large swaths of open burning that are regularly started across the nation. And in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China launched an aggressive cloud seeding program to reduce air pollution.