Talk:Weather modification/Archive 1

Cleanup
First, does anybody know where the sources for this article could be found? Second, would it be possible to clean up this article by simply removing large sections which are apparently unsubstantiated nonsense (the bit about theories for the future, for instance)? Sophy&#39;s Duckling 20:01, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Regarding history, could the Roman/Greek animal sacrifices to their gods be included as some Classical rituals aimed at weather control? Perhaps include a bit about how ancient civilizations would often pray to/have faith in their deities to alter the weather to make it more desirable? I am also unsure about the "Modern Aspirations"; what do any of those things have to do with modern-day strong desires for weather control? And actually, on second thought, maybe it could be transformed into a "Practical Applications" topic. Anagram 21:34, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Meteorology relation
I'm not sure if this is entirely a meteorology-related article, but I'm tagging it as such for now as the article seems to focus on this and the page of Weather Modification redirects here (even though Weather modification redirects to cloud seeding). If anyone wants to dispute it, I'd be more than happy (and able) to give weather modification its own article. I'll probably do it anyway in a few weeks if no one says otherwise. WindRunner 02:39, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Russia makes no secret that they 'control weather'
Today in Russia is Victory Day. Today, and every year, a division of the Russian Army do something to ensure that there will be no clouds during the parade. This is widely reported in the media and is accepted as fact. I've heard several people tell me about this before.

I find it interesting and curious that Russia makes no secret of how they control the weather for events such as these, whereas in the US, whenever people claim that the US government is controlling the weather, the powers that be (or their spokespersons) denounce it as nothing more than nonsense.

Does anyone have anything to add on this? I'm really curious about this discrepancy.

81.200.13.1 09:12, 9 May 2006 (UTC)David Nitzsche-Bell


 * Similar Russian practices are indeed documented with references at Cloud seeding, at a recent G8 summit. That particular attempt to prevent rain failed.  It's scientifically dubious that such efforts are generally effective, though it may be factually accurate that the government does attempt to do so, and report to the public that it is successful.  That the government does this is somewhat disturbing, but then again the Russian government does a lot of disturbing things.  That some people believe that it is effective despite the lack of scientific evidence is mostly a sad commentary on public gullibility and lack of adequate science education. The American public is not much better at discerning fact from wishful thinking, but when the U.S. government promotes bogus scientific ideas, it seems to get browbeaten a bit more. I'm not sure if that's due to a more active scientific establishment, a more active media, less tolerance for disinformation, a stronger democratic tradition, cultural differences, or what. -- Beland 18:14, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Weather Control and Hurricane Katrina
I removed this section which reports undocumented and dubious theories as fact. One of those is a theory that the Dust Bowl is the result of a weather control weapon. The article Dust Bowl explains the causes more accurately, which interestingly does include human activity - farming. -- Beland 18:19, 30 March 2007 (UTC)


 * The editor who added that section has been previously blocked for vandalism, and I have reported him/her again, for adding nonsense to other articles as well as pure out-and-out vandalism to user pages. Removing the unsourced, dubious section was exactly the right thing to do.   -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 21:41, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Possible weather modification event near Juneau, Alaska (September 09, 2007, 20:00 EDT)
Please visit:

http://weather.unisys.com/satellite/sat_wv_hem_loop-12.html

ASAP, it's nearly midnight Sunday September 09, 2007.

Look near Juneau Alaska and you will see a fixed, persistent spot that appears to be sourcing moisture or causing condensation of moisture.

I have saved a copy of the animation but will not post it since it is copyrighted material. If you act quick, you can get a copy of it from the above website. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zachrey (talk • contribs) 06:01, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Weather control and Hurricane Katrina
Deleted again. Obvious nonsense. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 60.240.90.33 (talk) 06:07, 4 April 2007 (UTC).
 * Removed again. iKato 06:35, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
 * removed again, seeking page protection. Matthew Yeager 17:06, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree, page protection or at least semi-protection would be a good idea. --Alexc3 (talk) 19:04, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Cloudbuster
someone should mention Wilhelm Reich's cloudbuster in this article. I feel that it shuould deffinatly get a mention in any article about weather control.--99.246.171.239 (talk) 04:28, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Illegal
Does anybody want to mention that in the late 1940's the US government past a law that makes, experimenting and/or researching weather control devices ILLEGAL!!Gundam94 21:06, 27 June 2007 (UTC)


 * If you have a reliable source for that information, sure - just list the URL here, and I'm sure an editor (me or someone else) will be happy to add the info to the article. On the other hand, if this is simply something that someone said on a blog, then no, it's not worth mentioning. -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 20:19, 28 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Is your use of Caps and multiple exclamation points intended to suggest that such a law, if it exists, should be taken as evidence against the existence of weather modification programs? West world (talk) 01:14, 17 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Just off hand I'd suggest that this law might have been made in reaction to the work of Wilhelm Reich and his cloudbuster, it's around the right time period. I hadden't heard of this before though, so I would like a reference as well.--99.246.171.239 (talk) 04:31, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Texas state law lists weather modification as legal, but regulates its use. For insance, one must purcahse a $150/pa license, and a $75/per incident permit, among other restrictions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.176.77.101 (talk) 20:20, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Weather Control and Star Trek

 * The article mentions that Ferenginar lacks a weather control net, yet several episodes (such as The Magnificent Ferengi) imply that the Ferengi like torrential rain. Is it not then possible that they do have weather control, but just have it set to "rain"?194.150.177.249 (talk) 12:20, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Out of date info?
"The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is a congressionally initiated program jointly managed by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy. The HAARP complex is situated within a 23-acre lot in a relatively isolated region near the town of Gakona, Alaska. When the final phase of the project is completed in 1997"

Something is amiss here. 76.24.182.188 (talk) 20:55, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Elate Intelligence Technologies
Does anyone have anymore information regarding this Russian company. I'm not sure if they even exist. If i get some spare time i'll look into it but here is some info to get started:

The breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s ushered in brave new opportunities in weather modification. The New York Times reported on September 24, 1992, that a Russian company was openly selling electronic equipment to manipulate the weather in a specific area. The Times noted that certain Russian farmers used the weather-control technology to alter the climate for better crop yields. A little over a month later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Russian company Elate Intelligence Technologies Inc. was selling weather-control equipment using the slogan “Weather made to order.” The Journal quoted Igor Pirogoff as saying that Hurricane Andrew, which did an estimated $17 billion in damage, could have been turned “into a wimpy little squall” by his company. 

There's also some related info to Nikola Tesla's work on weather control and various others here

Something worth noting here is the United States' official stance on the matter with a bill titled Weather Modification Research and Technology Transfer Authorization Act of 2005 which can be found here

It's tough to tackle this subject without bordering on conspiracy theories. I'll gather what info i can.

--Fec 06:41:18, 2005-09-09 (UTC)

Some more info about Russian weather control from BBC News  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Infectoid (talk • contribs) 01:58, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

"In popular culture section"
I propose that this list be removed from the article per WP:TRIVIA, because it doesn't add any substantive content and is in fact a listing of vaguely related facts concerning weather control in fiction. The alternative to removing it is to condense it into a summarized piece of prose concerning weather control in fiction. Claritas § 09:11, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The latter is preferable as weather control does appear to have made an impact upon fiction, the list being evidence (somewhat) to back this up. Nohomers48 (talk) 10:58, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * In that case, however, it would still probably be appropriate to remove the list until someone gets round to writing the section, as it causes navigation issues, and adds very little to the article. Claritas § 11:00, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Right, if there are no attempts at a rewrite then the list should be taken down. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 23:22, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I'll give it a week or two before blanking. The content will be accessible if no-one rewrites it through the page history anyway, and I don't see what it adds to the article. Claritas § 22:44, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Nuclear weapons effect on weather?

 * Stupid question alert*

Anyone know what launching a large nuclear weapon at a tornado/hurricane/storm would do? Besides causing more damage to the ground than the storms themselves I mean. What would they do to the tornado/hurricane/storm?
 * I don't think they'd really do much of anything to a hurricane. It might do something to a tornado, but tornados don't last too terribly long, so it would be really really pointless to shoot a missile at one. Sophy&#39;s Duckling 04:17, 21 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Maxim magazine (questionable authenticity) recently fielded this question in their "Ask Us Anything" section -- The answer was "No"; nearly a half-ton of air would have to be added to every square meter of space in a Cat. 5 hurricane's eye to reduce it to Cat. 2. The numbers add up to about a half-billion tons of air required in total. Anagram 20:51, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

While I suppose it might be theoretically possible to disrupt a storm by the detonation of explosives (conventional or otherwise), the staggering volume of air the explosion would have to significantly (not momentarily) move in order for this scheme to even momentarily disrupt even a small storm renders the whole scheme highly impractical, if not impossible. Consider: A blast-wave effect would be insufficient. The explosion(s) would have to alter the air-flow of a significant-enough portion of the storm by channeling the direction of the winds into a new, desirable, direction. Not just for a few seconds either, or the forces that are driving the storm would re-assert themselves and the storm would resume it's usual pattern. And that's just one element to consider: To do what this scheme proposes to do would require a level of complexity that can't even begin to imagine. To my knowledge, no one has ever tried anything even remotely like this, not even in a mathematical model. I suppose with the powerful supercomputers that some meteorological researchers have access to these have these days, someone might have a computer model of such a scheme, but I can't say I've ever heard of any. Allthenamesarealreadytaken (talk) 09:20, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Storms
This article only discusses methods for decreasing certain weather conditions. Don't people try to increase a storm's violence or increase cloud cover or that sort of thing? Scorpionman 02:25, 14 March 2006 (UTC)


 * People generally only want to produce positive conditions; I suppose that a thunderstorm would be a useful thing during a drought or allergy season, but mostly people would try to reduce the damage as much as possible. Conspiracy theories suggest that organizations like HAARP would try to produce hurricanes and thunderstorms, but I really find this kind of ridiculous since there's no proof. Bug Eyed Monster 21:57, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

It's called Global Warming. More heat in the world-wide weather system means larger and more frequent storms. If you disagree, nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory would like a word with you about the second law of thermodynamics. Allthenamesarealreadytaken (talk) 09:32, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I think what he is getting at is that there is no proof of human weather control projects modifying the weather that way. Nohomers48 (talk) 03:46, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Scientific American resource ... hurricanes / tropical cyclones (not geoengineering)
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=halting-hurricanes Halting Hurricanes; Tropical cyclones are nature's most powerful storms. Can they be stopped?] by David Biello SciAm November 3, 2011 97.87.29.188 (talk) 22:17, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Excerpts ...
 * And ...
 * 99.181.138.228 (talk) 05:30, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Requested move to Weather modification

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: page moved -- JHunterJ (talk) 23:42, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Weather control → Weather modification – "Weather modification" is in far greater use than "Weather control", getting five times as many hits on Google Scholar, and the actual industry almost exclusively uses the term Weather Modification. The article itself used "modification" 50% more than "control", and renaming it would allow the standard form of "modification" to be used in the lede and other places for clarity. Oberono (talk) 03:03, 6 April 2012 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

"The theoretical efficacy of von Neumann's proposal remains to be examined".
Quite possibly. Sadly, our article doesn't tell us what von Neumann (which one?) proposed... AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:26, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

I saw this article for the first time today and this sentence confused me too; this is the first time von Neumann or "[his] proposal" are mentioned. I did a quick Google search and found this link on the American Institute of Physics (AIP) website: https://www.aip.org/history/climate/RainMake.htm. Whatever "[his] proposal" might be, it appears that the von Neumann being referenced is John von Neumann. From the AIP article: "In a 1955 Fortune magazine article, von Neumann himself explained that "Microscopic layers of colored matter spread on an icy surface, or in the atmosphere above one, could inhibit the reflection-radiation process, melt the ice, and change the local climate." The effects could be far-reaching, even world-wide. "What power over our environment, over all nature, is implied!" he exclaimed. Von Neumann foresaw "forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined," perhaps more dangerous than nuclear war itself. He hoped it would force humanity to take a new, global approach to its political problems." I can't say with certitude that this is what "[his] proposal" is, but I think it's a good candidate. Perhaps someone better versed in history/weather modification could investigate further. Philmac 14:09, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

The original entry read: "In the 1950's John von Neumann, an early speculator on weather control, surmised that if Earth were to enter another Ice Age, a preventative solution would be to dump dirt (or more efficiently, to spray soot from cropdusting planes) on the surface of the planet's glaciers. He noted that this would significantly change their reflectivity (albedo), and increase the solar energy the planet absorbed. Such a strategy would likely require repeated applications, as storms would cover some portion of the soot with new snow until their frequency and range would abate. It's theoretical efficacy remains to be examined by modern research." I use Wikiblame a lot from the history page (Revision history search). Dougweller (talk) 16:26, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Future aspirations
So that section mainly consists of FUD/speculation and a lot of [citation needed] tags. Is there a legitimate reason for those parts to still be there? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.58.236.108 (talk • contribs) 13:35, 23 May 2014


 * No, not that I can see. Unless someone is prepared to source it properly, it should probably be deleted. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:13, 23 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Given the lack of sourcing, I have now deleted this - moving the only sourced content elsewhere. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:50, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
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Stale link(s)
I did a Google of the title of the first missing 404 web error link and it looks like those guys operating the web site changed the document's location...

https://wrrc.arizona.edu/publications/arroyo-newsletter/weather-modification-water-resource-strategy-be-researched-tested-tri

Could somebody else update it? The document claims 1992. Oldspammer (talk) 21:43, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

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what the heck is HIPAS
??? Revelations 06:11, 14 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure. Anybody else? Bug Eyed Monster 21:58, 28 April 2006 (UTC)


 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIPAS_Observatory — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:C7F:A017:4D00:ACC5:7BB1:22C7:96D4 (talk) 19:54, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Proposed merge of Robert Saint George Dyrenforth into Weather modification
Little indication of independent notability. Eddie891 Talk Work 17:42, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Agree, could not find any significant coverage. Include as a mention in the history section of this article - Dumelow (talk) 19:10, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , I say be bold and go for it at this point. DocFreeman24 (talk) 06:40, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

The 'In Nature' section should be deleted.
I read the source provided for the 'In Nature' section and it's not exactly reputable. It seems to be a funding proposal for some kind of project. The source itself seems to be mainly speculative conjecture and doesn't argue its case well. Given that this section is a single sentence and now it looks like there are no good sources available, it seems better to delete this section for now and maybe add it in again at some future point when better sources are available. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.12.173.40 (talk) 07:22, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 October 2018 and 15 December 2018. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): P2innovates.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 12:47, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Four workers from the State Meteorological Agency confessed that planes are spreading lead dioxide, silver iodide and diatomite throughout Spain
The original source has been removed[1], however other sites have reposted and/or linked to it[2]. I have added links to archived copies of the original article from alertadigital.com[3].

[1] https://www.alertadigital.com/2021/09/28/cuatro-trabajadores-de-la-agencia-estatal-de-meteorologia-confesaron-que-aviones-estan-esparciendo-por-toda-espana-dioxido-de-plomo-yoduro-de-plata-y-diatomita/

[2] https://archive.ph/GKQiy https://archive.ph/SEFeq

[3] https://yandexwebcache.net/yandbtm?fmode=inject&tm=1655397509&tld=com&lang=es&la=1654784000&text=https%3A//www.alertadigital.com/2021/09/28/cuatro-trabajadores-de-la-agencia-estatal-de-meteorologia-confesaron-que-aviones-estan-esparciendo-por-toda-espana-dioxido-de-plomo-yoduro-de-plata-y-diatomita/&url=https%3A//www.alertadigital.com/2021/11/09/cuatro-trabajadores-de-la-agencia-estatal-de-meteorologia-confesaron-que-aviones-estan-esparciendo-por-toda-espana-dioxido-de-plomo-yoduro-de-plata-y-diatomita/&l10n=en&mime=html&sign=eaa07e339c7797a9596cd05bf9ef65be&keyno=0

https://archive.ph/20211016203040/https://www.alertadigital.com/2021/09/28/cuatro-trabajadores-de-la-agencia-estatal-de-meteorologia-confesaron-que-aviones-estan-esparciendo-por-toda-espana-dioxido-de-plomo-yoduro-de-plata-y-diatomita/

Family Guy Guy (talk) 16:42, 16 June 2022 (UTC)