In his 1931 book The Scientific Outlook, Lord Bertrand Arthur Russell, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, discussed manipulating the weather. “It may be that God made the world,” Russell proclaimed, “that is no reason why we should not make it over.”
Charles Galton Darwin, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, who was also the grandson of Charles Darwin, talked about gaining direct control over the climate in his 1952 book, The Next Million Years.
Weather modification is now possible. Attempts to modify the weather have been made since at least the late 1940s. In 1947 the US Navy, Army, and Air Force, working with General Electric Corporation, made the first attempt to modify a hurricane under Project Cirrus, by dropping about 80 pounds of dry ice into clouds.
Project Cumulus, carried out by the British Royal Air Force between 1949 and 1952, included cloud seeding experiments over southern England. It was allegedly responsible for the 1952 flood in the Devon village of Lynmouth, which resulted in 34 deaths and the destruction of multiple structures.
In the 1950s the US Forest Service carried out a project called Skyfire in which they experimented with cloud seeding techniques to decrease lightning in order to reduce forest fires. Then, under Project Stormfury from 1962 to 1983, the United States Government tried to disrupt the inner structure of hurricanes in the Atlantic by flying aircraft into them, and seeding them with silver iodide.
Weather modification involves three major categories: suppression of weather patterns, intensification of weather patterns, and in some cases the introduction of completely new weather patterns. The two basic methods to accomplish weather modification include cloud seeding and directed-energy.
Multiple countries, including the United States, are now modifying the weather. In November of 1997 the Wall Street Journal reported that in order to dissipate excess fog, the Malaysian government would be signing an agreement with Russian officials for use of technology which would allow them to create a cyclone.
The state-run Oklahoma Weather Modification Program conducts cloud seeding operations in Oklahoma to enhance the development of rain showers and thunderstorms. In October of 2005, Business Week reported that China, Russia, and Mexico are modifying the weather, with China spending about $40 million a year on a weather management program.
Since the early 1960s Weather Modification Incorporated of Fargo North Dakota has offered a professional weather modification service to insurance companies, water resource management groups, and federal and state government research organizations. They specialize in weather modification, cloud seeding, rain enhancement, and fog dispersion.
A Russian company called Elate Intelligent Technologies Incorporated has offered a professional weather modification service using directed-energy since at least 1992. The unit consists of a power supply which provides current to a series of antennas that focus an electrical charge into the air. The unit is connected to a computer and can tailor weather patterns over a distance of about 200 miles.