We Are Manipulating the Weather Every Day

Throughout most of human history, the weather has resisted humanity’s desire to change it.

For thousands of years, we have sacrificed children, sung songs and danced, brewed alchemical concoctions, chanted prayers, fired cannons, and made many other futile efforts in the attempt to somehow change the weather a little more to our liking.

And then, with the Industrial Revolution, all that changed. Humans modified the weather on a planet-wide, unpredictable scale.

Climate change is an enormous accomplishment. From an engineering perspective, the ability to coordinate activities to modify the average temperatures of an entire planet, change the pH of deep oceans, and cause vast shifts in the distribution of arable land across continents is a realization of powers as considerable as anything humanity has achieved before. It rewrites the core story of our origins, in which we are powerless before the forces that have made us. The fact that this discovery of our powers—that we can modify the weather on a planetary scale—was more or less accidental only puts it more firmly in the canon of scientific revelations. We are also, as with our other emergent powers, quite apparently terrible at it.

The innumerable crises prompted by our moment—the desertification of arable land, increasingly catastrophic storms, the deadly rise in temperatures in previously habitable regions—are nothing if not urgent incentives to grasp hold of what we have already done. After millennia of reaching up toward the sky, the levers just out of reach, the consensus on climate change indicates that we are, in fact, already manipulating the weather every day.

All of which suggests a new question: Are we ever going to get good at it?

The rest of the piece is about efforts to “get good at” weather modification. (via longreads)

Tags: climate crisis · weather