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Humans Have Intentionally Modified Weather for Military Purposes and Climate Control for Decades
Posted on January 5, 2011 by WashingtonsBlog

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Weather modification is a well-known endeavor. For example, governments have been seeding clouds for
decades to create more rain.
And during warfare to create mud to slow the enemys ability to use roads.
As the Guardian reported in 2001:
During the Vietnam war, the Americans launched Project Popeye, a secret mission to seed
the tops of monsoon clouds and trigger phenomenal downpours that would wash away
the Ho Chi Minh Trail used for ferrying supplies.
For five years Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were sprayed during the monsoons, and
military intelligence claimed that rainfall was increased by a third in some places. It only
came to an end in March 1971 when [Washington Post] journalist Jack Anderson exposed
the project and caused such a public furor that the UN general assembly approved a
universal treaty banning environmental warfare.
But the US air force planners recently came up with new proposals to launch new weather
weapons. Instead of silver-iodide, the idea is to shower fine particles of heat-absorbing
carbon over clouds to trigger localised flooding and bog down troops and their equipment.
Lasers on aircraft would also trigger lightning onto enemy aircraft, whilst other lasers
could be fired at fog to clear a path over enemy targets on the ground.
Whether or not they work, past experiences tell us to be wary of tampering with the
weather. In 1947, meteorologists tried to kill off a dying hurricane out at sea by seeding
the clouds. The following day, the hurricane suddenly gathered strength, swung round
and hit Savannah, Georgia causing extensive damage. The weather boffins were so rattled
by the disaster it was not until August 1969 that they dared try again.
When Hurricane Debbie was 700 miles out at sea, they flew three seeding missions around
its eye, where tropical storms are at their most intense, but the results were mixed with
each seeding the hurricanes winds were reduced and each time they picked up again.
Interestingly, U.S. weather modification efforts during the Vietnam war were revealed as part of the
Pentagon Papers.
As the Washington Post reported on July 2, 1972:
Indochina by the evidence of a long-ignored passage in the Pentagon Papers has been
a test battleground, the site of purposeful rain-making along the Ho Chi Minh trails.
***
Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) is prominent among members of Congress who believe it has
become a reality. There is very little doubt in my mind, he says. Rep. Gilbert Gude

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Washington's Blog
(R-Md.) states: Theres no doubt in my mind that its going on in Vietnam.

I think theres no doubt rain-making was used in Laos on the trail, says a Senate
committee aide wee versed in defense affairs.
***
It is a successful pre-1967 use which is documented in the senator Gravel version of the
Pentagon papers. In late February, 1967, this document discloses the Joint Chiefs of Staff
prepared a list of alternative strategies for President Johnson.
One, titled Laos Operations, read:
Continue at present plus Operation Pop Eye to reduce trafficability along infiltration
routes authorization required to implement phase of weather modification process
previously successfully tested and evaluated in same area. (Italics added)
In 1967 according to columnist Jack Anderson, who published the first allegation of
Indochina rain-making U.S. forces started secret Project Intermediary Compatriot to
hamper enemy logistics (with) claimed success in creating man-made cloudbursts
and flooding conditions along the Ho Chi Minh trails, making them impassable.
The Post makes clear that cloud-seeding wasnt limited to the Vietnam war theater:
The Defense Department freely reports that it has field capacities for making rain. It
used them in the Philippines in 1969, in a six-month precipitation augmentation project
at the Philippines request; in India in 1967, at a similar invitation; over Okinawa and
Midway Islands, and in June, July and August, 1971, over drought-stricken Texas, at the
urgent request of Gov. Preston Smith.
***
Navy rain-makers are currently involved in two long-range California programs one
over the Pacific off Santa Barbara, an attempt to increase rainfall over a national forest;
the other over the Central Sierras to try to increase the snow-pack for electric utilities that
depend on water power.
In 2008, the Denver Post noted the enormous scope of weather modification projects:
Scientists are monitoring more than 150 weather-modification projects in 40 countries,
including at least 60 in the Western United States. The projects include wringing
additional snow out of clouds for California hydropower and easing droughts in
sub-Saharan Africa.
Most of the current research on this inexact science is being conducted abroad .
In 2005, the Boston Globe provided an account of the early discovery of silver iodide as a tool for
modifying weather:
In 1946, over Mount Greylock in western Massachusetts, a General Electric research
chemist named Vincent Schaefer scattered three pounds of crushed dry ice out of an
airplane into a cloud and set off a snow flurry. It was the worlds first successful cloud
seeding-later that year, the meteorologist Bernard Vonnegut (brother to the novelist)
discovered that silver iodide smoke had a similar effect-and weather modification
emerged from the realm of con men and eccentrics. Most meteorologists remained
skeptical, but by 1951, 10 percent of the United States was under commercial cloud
seeding.

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Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters on any desired scale was only decades
away, predicted John von Neumann, the mathematician who helped invent and began
programming the first electronic computers to model the weather. Over the next 30 years,
the federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars on projects all over the
country to increase precipitation, to mitigate hailstorms (an age-old enemy of farmers),
and, most successfully, to clear the fog from around airports. Perhaps the eras most
ambitious endeavor was Project Stormfury, which sent up airplanes to seed the eye walls
of hurricanes with silver iodide to weaken the winds before landfall.
(And see this discussion by an MIT scientist regarding the use of weather modification to mitigate
hurricane damage.)
Moreover, the Post points out that even in 1972 weather modification has been tested for other
applications as well:
Among patterns that can be predictably be modified [Robert M. White, the current chief
of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ] said, are: cold fog (which can
be cleared from airfields) ; cumulus clouds (most common in the tropics In Florida,,
White said, we have been able almost at will to make them grow explosively);
orographic clouds (moist air moving up over mountains At the right temperature you
can begin thinking of milking them for water) and hailstorms (which can often be
suppressed, according to recent claims by the Russians, who fire silver iodide into them
from rockets and artillery).
And as the Post notes even in 1972, the government was studying the affect of weather modification
on climate:
ARPA Director Stephen J. Lukasik told the Senate Appropriations Committee in March:
Since it now appears highly probable that major world powers have the ability to create
modifications of climate that might be seriously detrimental to the security of this country,
Nile Blue [a computer simulation] was established in FY 70 to achieve a US capability to
(1) evaluate all consequences of of a variety of possible actions (2) detect trends in in the
global circulation which foretell changes and (3) determine if possible , means to
counter potentially deleterious climatic changes
What this means, Lukasik explains, is learning how much you have to tickle the
atmosphere to perturb the earths climate. I guess wed call it a threat assessment.
The Post also quoted high-level scientists warning that enemies could modify weather as a direct form of
warfare, for example, by flooding coastal areas where ones enemy resided.
Now, weather modification is so mainstream that the Chinese government and the State of Texas openly
discuss their cloud-seeding programs.
And U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas introduced the Weather Modification Research And
Technology Transfer Authorization Act in 2004, saying:
Weather modification is the general term that refers to any human attempt to alter the
weather. These efforts have been used in the U.S. for more than 50 years to reduce crop
and property damage, optimize useable precipitation during growing seasons and lessen
the impact of periodic, often severe droughts.
The weather modification projects in Texas and other States in the U.S. are much more
than well considered responses to drought. They are trying to use the latest technological
developments in the science to chemically squeeze more precipitation out of clouds.
Moisture that is needed to replenish fresh-water supplies in aquifers and reservoirs.
(The bill apparently didnt pass)

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Theres even a Journal of Weather Modification (heres a peek inside).

The Technology Has Advanced Far Beyond Seeding Clouds With Silver Iodide
The technology has advanced a long way since the early 1970s.

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For example, the Telegraph reported yesterday that Abu Dhabi creates man-made rainstorms by using
giant ionisers, shaped like giant lampshades, to generate fields of negatively charged particles, which
create cloud formation. There are many applications, Professor Hartmut Grassl, a former institute
director, is quoted by the Daily Mail as saying. One is getting water into a dry area. Maybe this is a most
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Alter the climate remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.

The Use of Sulfur Dioxide to Affect Climate?
Tom Wigley senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and former director of the
Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and current has proposed releasing sulfur
dioxide in the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight and reduce warming. And see this.
Wigley talks about this proposal in a Discovery channel special on weather modification.
Other scientists have suggested the same thing. See by way of example only this, this, this, this, this,
this, this, this, this and this.
More History and Complicated Issues to Consider for the Future
The above-described Boston Globe article pointed to the complexity of the issues involved in weather
modification:
In 2003 the National Academy of Sciences recommended a coordinated national
program to conduct a sustained research effort into weather modification.
Politicians in Western and Southwestern states are funding attempts to tickle more
moisture out of the clouds .
Last fall, a meteorologist named Ross Hoffman suggested in Scientific American that a
network of microwave-beaming satellites could literally take the wind out of hurricanes.

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In some of the driest parts of Mexico, a Bedford-based company called Ionogenics is

testing a rainmaking apparatus that uses an array of steel poles to ionize the air.
China, a country with widespread cloud seeding, has announced plans to engineer clear
weather in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.
Meanwhile, deepening concern over the possibly cataclysmic effects of climate change has
spurred a number of recent proposals, some sketched out in considerable detail, to
engineer a measure of counteractive cooling. John Latham, an atmospheric physicist at
the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., has proposed increasing
the reflectivity of the cloud cover by stirring up water vapor from the ocean with a fleet of
giant egg-beater-like turbines.
A few years ago, a team led by the late Edward Teller suggested creating a similar effect
by launching a million tons of tiny aluminum balloons into the atmosphere.

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***
As our ability to comprehend the weather improves and as the threat of climate change
looms larger, some scientists are ready to brave the uncertainty and tangled ethics of
tinkering with the skies. . . .
The US military, unsurprisingly, was intrigued by the possibility of a godlike
meteorological arsenal. According to Spencer Weart, a physicist and historian of science
at the American Institute of Physics, the thinking in the Defense Department was maybe
well give the Russians a real Cold War, or maybe theyll give us one, so we should be
ready. Pentagon money funded much of the eras climate research, helping to create the
weather models we now use in forecasting. War gamers dreamed up climatological
warfare scenarios like laying down a blanket of fog over an airfield or visiting drought
upon an enemys breadbasket.
***
But the grandest climate engineering schemes came from the Soviet Union. The most
Promethean among them was a late 1950s proposal to dam the Bering Strait and, by
pumping water from the Arctic Ocean into the Pacific, draw warm water northward from
the Atlantic to melt the polar ice pack, making the Arctic Ocean navigable and warming
Siberia. The leading Soviet climatologist, Mikhail I. Budyko, cautioned against it, arguing
that the ultimate effects were too difficult to predict (though he himself had played with the
idea of warming the Arctic by covering it in soot to decrease its reflectivity). John F.
Kennedy, as a presidential candidate, suggested the United States look into collaborating
on the project. While the two countries continued desultory discussions of the Bering Strait
plan into the 1970s, the American government was by then losing interest in the whole
field of weather modification.

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In 1972, a government cloud-seeding run in South Dakota was followed by a violent

deluge, and more than 200 people were killed in the ensuing flood. Meteorologists
disagreed over whether seeding was to blame, but the incident became an ominous symbol
for those who saw weather modifiers as latter-day Pandoras. . . . Boyles caution may be
merited, but scientists are better equipped today to understand and manipulate the
weather than they were 30 years ago.
***
Some scientists and engineers, such as Daniel Schrag, director of Harvards Laboratory
for Geochemical Oceanography, point out that, in light of the planets growing thirst and
rising temperature, even Soviet-scale climate modification is attracting real consideration.
Boyle, who spoke at a joint MIT-Cambridge University conference on the topic last year,
readily concedes, There are very prominent, serious scientists who are considering these
things.
***
A 1996 Air Force report entitled Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in
2025, argued that the tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field
are ignored at our own peril.
***
Even purely peaceful aims would lead to a cascade of seemingly zero-sum conflicts. In the
US, cloud seeding has set off several lawsuits in which, for example, downwind farmers
have accused a cloud-seeding neighbor of stealing their rain. Such issues only grow in

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complexity along with the scale.

***
According to Joe Kaplinsky, a technology analyst in London, To raise these things before
the technology has really gotten off the ground is to deprive us of the potential benefits of
any technology, because any technology can be misused. Of course some people will
benefit and some people will lose, Kaplinsky says, but there are social mechanisms for
solving disagreements, either through compensation or through democratic debate.

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Here is a copy of the Air Force study Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025.
The American Institute of Physics the organization mentioned in the Boston Globe article provides an
interesting overview of the history of weather modification:

National Security Notice

We are NOT calling for the overthrow of
the government. In fact, we are calling
for the reinstatement of our government.

From 1945 into the 1970s, much effort went into studies of weather modification.
American entrepreneurs tried cloud-seeding to enhance local rainfall, Russian scientists
offered fabulous schemes of planetary engineering, and military agencies secretly
explored climatological warfare.
***
In the mid 1970s Research turned instead to controversial geoengineering schemes for
interventions that might restrain global warming if it started to become unbearable.
***
At the close of the Second World War, a few American scientists brought up a troublesome
idea. If it were true, as some claimed, that humans were inadvertently changing their local
weather by cutting down forests and emitting pollution, why not try to modify the
weather on purpose? For generations there had been proposals for rainmaking, based on
folklore like the story that cannonades from big battles brought rain.
Now top experts began to take the question seriously. At the end of 1945 a brilliant
mathematician, John von Neumann, called other leading scientists to a meeting in
Princeton, where they agreed that modifying weather deliberately might be possible. They
expected that could make a great difference in the next war. Soviet harvests, for example,
might be ruined by creating a drought. Some scientists suspected that alongside the race
with the Soviet Union for ever more terrible nuclear weapons, they were entering an
equally fateful race to control the weather. As the Cold War got underway, U.S. military
agencies devoted significant funds to research on what came to be called climatological
warfare.

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***
In 1953 a Presidents Advisory Committee on Weather Control was established to pursue
the idea. In 1958, the U.S. Congress acted directly to fund expanded rainmaking research.
Large-scale experimentation was also underway, less openly, in the Soviet Union.

We are not copyright pirates. We do not

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Even the country's top copyright lawyers
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Military agencies in the U.S. (and presumably in the Soviet Union) supported research not
only on cloud seeding but on other ways that injecting materials into the atmosphere
might alter weather. Although much of this was buried in secrecy, the public learned that
climatological warfare might become possible. 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

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more dangerous than nuclear war itself. He hoped it would force humanity to take a new,
global approach to its political problems.

in receiving the included information for

research and educational purposes. For
more information go to:

***

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode
/17/107.shtml.

Around 1956, Soviet engineers began to speculate that they might be able to throw a dam
across the Bering Strait and pump water from the Arctic Ocean into the Pacific. This
would draw warm water up from the Atlantic. Their aim was to eliminate the ice pack,
make the Arctic Ocean navigable, and warm up Siberia. The idea attracted some notice in
the United States presidential candidate John F. Kennedy remarked that the idea was
worth exploring as a joint project with the Soviets, and the discussion continued into the
1970s.

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***
Beginning around 1961, Budyko and other scientists speculated about how humanity
might alter the global climate by strewing dark dust or soot across the Arctic snow and
ice. The soot would lower the albedo (reflection of sunlight), and the air would get
warmer. Spreading so much dust year after year would be prohibitively expensive. But
according to a well-known theory, warmer air should melt some snow and sea-ice and
thus expose the dark underlying soil and ocean water, which would absorb sunlight and
bring on more warming. So once dust destroyed the reflective cover, it might not re-form.
***
A 1972 U.S. government rain-making operation in South Dakota was followed by a
disastrous flood, and came under attack in a class-action lawsuit.
***
Already back in 1965, a Presidential advisory panel had suggested that if greenhouse
effect warming by carbon dioxide gas ever became a problem, the government might take
countervailing steps. The panel did not consider curbing the use of fossil fuels. They had in
mind geoengineering schemes spreading something across the ocean waters to reflect
more sunlight, perhaps, or sowing particles high in the atmosphere to encourage the
formation of reflective clouds. Some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic suggested such steps
were feasible, and indeed could cost less than many government programs. In 1974,
Budyko calculated that if global warming ever became a serious threat, we could counter
it with just a few airplane flights a day in the stratosphere, burning sulfur to make
aerosols that would reflect sunlight away.
For a few years in the early 1970s, new evidence and arguments led many scientists to
suspect that the greatest climate risk was not warming, but cooling. A new ice age seemed
to be approaching as part of the natural glacial cycle, perhaps hastened by human
pollution that blocked sunlight. Technological optimists suggested ways to counter this
threat too. We might spread soot from cargo aircraft to darken the Arctic snows, or even
shatter the Arctic ice pack with clean thermonuclear explosions. [For background, see
this and this.]
***

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The bitter fighting among communities over cloud-seeding would be as nothing compared
with conflicts over attempts to engineer global climate. Moreover, as Budyko and Western
scientists alike warned, scientists could not predict the consequences of such engineering
efforts. We might forestall global warming only to find we had triggered a new ice age.

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Truth (or Fiction?)

Such worries revived the U.S. militarys interest in artificial climate change on a global
scale. A group at the RAND corporation, a defense think tank near Los Angeles, had been

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working with a computer climate model that originated at the University of California,
Los Angeles.
***
The RAND group had to scramble to find support elsewhere. They turned to the Advanced
Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense.
***
When a National Academy of Sciences panel convened in 1991 to catalog the options, the
members got into a long and serious debate over whether to include the grand
geoengineering ideas. Might hopes of a future fix just encourage people to avoid the
work of restricting greenhouse gas emissions? The panel reluctantly voted to include every
idea, so that preparations could start in case the climate deteriorated so badly that radical
steps would be the lesser evil. Their fundamental problem was the one that had bedeviled
climate science from the start if you pushed on this intricate system, nobody could say
for sure what the final consequences might be.
What About Contrails?
The Environmental Protection Agency notes in a report entitled Aircraft Contrails Factsheet:
Persistent contrails can last for hours while growing to several kilometers in width and
200 to 400 meters in height.
***

Figure 2. Photograph of two contrail types. The contrail extending across the image is an
evolving persistent contrail. Shown just above it is a short-lived contrail. Short-lived
contrails evaporate soon after being formed due to low atmospheric humidity conditions.
The persistent contrail shown here was formed at a lower altitude where higher humidity
was present . (Photos: J. Holecek, NOAA Aeronomy Laboratory, Boulder, CO.)
***

Figure 3. Persistent contrails and contrails evolving and spreading into cirrus clouds.
Here, the humidity of the atmosphere is high, and the contrail ice particles continue to
grow by taking up water from the surrounding atmosphere. These contrails extend
for large distances and may last for hours. On other days when atmospheric
humidity is lower, the same aircraft passages might have left few or even no contrails.
(Photo: L. Chang, Office of Atmospheric Programs, U.S. EPA.)
***

Figure 5. Satellite photograph showing an example of contrails covering central Europe

on May 4, 1995. The average cover in a photograph is estimated by using a computer to
recognize and measure individual contrails over geographical regions of known size.
Photograph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-12
AVHRR satellite and processed by DLR (adapted from Mannstein et al., 1999).
(Reproduced with permission of DLR.)
***

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Persistent contrails are of interest to scientists because they increase the cloudiness of the
atmosphere. The increase happens in two ways. First, persistent contrails are line-shaped
clouds that would not have formed in the atmosphere without the passage of an aircraft.
Secondly, persistent contrails often evolve and spread into extensive cirrus
cloud cover that is indistinguishable from naturally occurring cloudiness (See
Figure 3). At present, it is unknown how much of this more extensive cloudiness would
have occurred without the passage of an aircraft. Not enough is known about how natural
clouds form in the atmosphere to answer this question. Changes in cloudiness are
important because clouds help control the temperature of the Earths atmosphere. Changes
in cloudiness resulting from human activities are important because they might contribute
to long-term changes in the Earths climate. Many other human activities also have the
potential of contributing to climate change. Our climate involves important parameters
such as air temperature, weather patterns, and rainfall. Changes in climate may have
important impacts on natural resources and human health. Contrails possible climate
effects are one component of aviations expected overall climate effect.
***
Persistent line-shaped contrails are estimated to cover, on average, about 0.1 percent of
the Earths surface .
As Nova notes:

The sheer number

of contrails generated on a typical day in busy air corridors can come as a shock. A NASA
satellite took this enhanced infrared image of the southeastern U.S. on January 29, 2004.
And CNN reported in 2002:
The thin wisps of condensation that trail jet airliners have a significant influence on
the climate, according to scientists who studied U.S. skies during a rare interruption in
national air traffic after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
During the three-day commercial flight hiatus, when the artificial clouds known as
contrails all but disappeared, the variations in high and low temperatures increased by 1.1
degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) each day, said meteorological researchers.
***
I think what weve shown are that contrails are capable of affecting temperatures, said
lead scientist David Travis of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. Which direction,
in terms of net heating or cooling, is still up in the air.

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In many ways, contrails behave in the same manner as cirrus clouds, thin high-altitude
floaters that block out solar energy from above and trap in heat below.
***
With air traffic growing and contrails becoming more prevalent, the natural variation
will further decline and could disrupt regional ecosystems, some scientists speculate.
***
In some ways, contrails differ from their natural brethren. Cirrus clouds let less heat out
than in overall, producing a net increase in the Earths temperatures, according to climate
scientists. With contrail clouds, they said they are not so sure.
Contrails are denser and block sunlight much more than natural cirrus
clouds, said Travis, who with colleagues reported the findings this week in the journal
Nature.
And contrails are much more prevalent when the sun is out, he said. When this
is factored in, there is a possibility that they offset global warming, and this is what we are
trying to determine now.
It is clear that persistent jet contrails can affect weather and climate. I have no idea whether persistent jet
contrails are an unintentional affect of airplanes interacting with the environment, or an intentional
attempt to affect the weather.
The articles quoted in the first part of this essay provide support for the possibility that at least some of
the affects might be intentional. And as a 2008 international workshop on weather modification noted:

It has been well established that successful implementation of Cloud Seeding resulting in
precipitation enhancement has significant positive beneficial impact in managing the issue
of global warming and climate change.
German television network RTL purportedly alleges that the German government has admitted testing
persistent jet contrails for military purposes as a high-tech form of chaff to disrupt enemy radar.
The EPA attributes formation of persistent jet contrails to altitude and humidity, as well as trace
impurities such as sulfur contained in jet fuel. On the other hand, some claim that very high
concentrations of chemicals like barium and sulfur have been found in groundwater after the incidence of
persistent jet contrails increased.
But whether or not persistent jet contrails are intentionally being created to affect climate or for military
purposes or are an unintentional byproduct of flying a modern airplane is beyond the scope of this essay.

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