What if we just made it rain? We know that at the heart of the Dust Bowl, the terrible drought that transformed the American plains into fields of dust in the 1930s, rainmakers, half-scholars, half-charlatans, undertook to dynamite the clouds hoping to cause showers. Despite the limited effectiveness – to put it mildly – of such methods, the desire to control the weather has never waned.
After World War II, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, Irving Langmuir, marveled at triggering precipitation by airdropping various substances into cumulus clouds. What is called the“cloud seeding” is now used all over the world, and especially in the Arabian Peninsula, so much so that some military experts fear for the future of real weather wars. In 2018, an Iranian general once accused Israel of “flights of clouds and snow”.
In France too, these methods have a history. In the 1960s and 1970s, in the heart of the Pyrenees, the physicist Henri Dessens installed a “Meteotron”, the operation of which sums up all the absurdity of the Anthropocene: hoping to create a cloud, thanks to the rise of a column of hot air and particles, he turns gigantic oil burners on the Lannemezan plateau. The experience was cut short, but not Henri Dessens’ dream, summarized in his book “La Maîtrise des climats”, published in 1968.. With “minimal energy input”, we can by
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