With global warming, we have already started to experience extreme weather events, from storms to droughts to floods. Phenomena which, according to climate specialists, are likely to increase, both in frequency and intensity. Could we avoid them? Use science and technology to make it rain when it’s too dry or deflect a cyclone before it devastates a city?
Even if we are only at the beginning of these technologies and that most of them are still at the stage of calculations or limited tests, the subject is very far from an assembly of eccentric theories. Weather control could very well be within our reach in the years to come, for better… and for worse?
What might seem easiest is to make it rain. There, we already have experiences that are firmly rooted in reality. If the doubt has long hovered over the effectiveness of cloud seeding, a study funded by the American National Science Foundation demonstrated in 2020 that injecting silver iodide into clouds caused a lot of rain and even snow in places where it would not have fallen.
The most advanced country in this area is China. If it had seeded clouds to try to control the weather a little before the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the operation was still only anecdotal. But as early as 2011, she launched its first rain program
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