{"id":512731,"date":"2026-03-09T09:35:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T09:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/512731\/"},"modified":"2026-03-09T09:35:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T09:35:08","slug":"the-us-barely-bothers-to-track-geoengineering-what-could-go-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/512731\/","title":{"rendered":"The US barely bothers to track geoengineering. What could go wrong?"},"content":{"rendered":"

People have tried to manipulate the weather for thousands of years, whether through magic, superstition, or science. In the 1840s, one schoolteacher suggested<\/a> that the United States regulate the climate by setting massive, weekly forest fires. Fifty years later, researchers were trying to \u201cshock\u201d rain out clouds<\/a> with cannon fire, and by 1989, one engineer proposed<\/a> sending a 1,200-mile-wide glass parasol into space to reflect solar radiation and cool the planet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although many of the wilder ideas to control nature were eventually abandoned, what\u2019s now known as geoengineering remains a strange, somewhat ad hoc field even today. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, found that the federal government still does not have sufficient oversight over weather modification activities and is also \u201cnot fully meeting its responsibilities to maintain and share weather modification reports.\u201d The two problems are connected, the report says. The lack of supervision could allow harmful, rogue geoengineering operations to proceed largely unmonitored, while the lack of transparency could fuel misinformation and public confusion about these activities.<\/p>\n

A better database of geoengineering operations that was easier for the public to navigate could go a long way toward dispelling that misinformation and improving oversight, said Karen Howard, the GAO\u2019s director of science and technology assessment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf people had a place to be referred to, where they could see, \u2018Oh, this place in Idaho, they\u2019re cloud seeding to try to increase the snow for a ski area,\u2019 it would address what is actually occurring, and not what people imagine is occurring,\u201d Howard said. \u201cI think it could help with that quite a bit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the main gaps in oversight is that state agencies or companies performing weather modification often aren\u2019t even aware that they\u2019re required to communicate their activities to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to Howard. Public outreach around geoengineering from the federal government has been patchy and insufficient, she said, and even when operators do take steps to document their efforts, the forms they\u2019re required to fill out are confusing and outdated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t always accommodate the newer, emerging technologies like solar geoengineering,\u201d Howard said. \u201cSo what submissions there are have errors or missing information, and there are a lot of missing reports that we know should be in there, but aren\u2019t.\u201d The forms, according to the report, \u201chave remained virtually unchanged since 1974,\u201d despite growing interest in solar geoengineering, and NOAA officials told the GAO that they make no effort to seek out unreported weather modification experiments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To further complicate matters, once the reports are filed, NOAA does essentially nothing with them. \u201cThey basically just throw them into the database as is,\u201d said Howard. \u201cThey don\u2019t check whether they\u2019re complete, whether they\u2019re accurate \u2014 anything along those lines.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The riskier and more ambitious geoengineering ideas to fight climate change tend to get the most media attention. Stratospheric aerosol injection, for instance, involves spraying small particles like sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight. Marine cloud brightening entails shooting sea salts into low-level clouds to cool a smaller area. Others have proposed covering<\/a> the Arctic in tiny glass beads to reflect sunlight and prevent glaciers from melting. Start-ups such as Make Sunsets \u2014 which sells cooling credits<\/a> to customers in exchange for releasing balloons filled with sulfur dioxide \u2014 are beginning to proliferate, but overall, solar geoengineering is still happening only on a very small scale. According to the GAO report, out of 1,084 reports in NOAA\u2019s public database as of February 2025, only four outline solar geoengineering activities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But small-scale cloud-seeding operations \u2014 which involve injecting small particles like silver iodide into clouds to induce rain or snow \u2014 have been going on for more than 80 years now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As drought intensifies<\/a> and water demand increases<\/a> across the West, states have been ramping up cloud-seeding efforts, as one way to work around the lack of water. Although cloud seeding is hardly a miracle cure, it is seen as a relatively simple way to increase rain by about 5 to 20 percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Conspiracy theories surrounding cloud seeding have gained a foothold in recent years, though. Most of them posit that the government is distributing harmful chemicals and trying to control the weather through chemtrails, which are nothing more than the water vapor left behind by planes that freezes in the cold air. After the deadly floods in Texas<\/a> this past July, false claims that the floods were caused<\/a> by a regional cloud-seeding operation days earlier spread widely, drawing the attention of politicians like then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Green, a Republican from Georgia, who introduced<\/a> a measure in the House of Representatives that would make weather modification a felony.<\/p>\n

Green\u2019s bill, which was called the \u201cClear Skies Act,\u201d ultimately died in committee, but as of last July, 30 states had introduced similar bills, with Tennessee, Florida, and Louisiana passing bans on the technology. Wyoming narrowly avoided such a ban in February, after state water managers explained that they were likely to face severe water restrictions as cuts to manage the Colorado River\u2019s dwindling supply<\/a> go into effect. Brad Brooks, director of Cheyenne, Wyoming\u2019s Board of Public utilities, spoke at a panel on cloud seeding last fall after legislation to stop the technology was introduced in the Wyoming House of Representatives. According to Wyoming Public Media, he warned<\/a> that the city would likely have to make due with half of its current water supply should the Colorado River cuts go into effect.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI have 70,000 plus people that we provide water to,\u201d Brooks said, \u201cand I\u2019ve got to find additional water resources to make up for that shortfall.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cloud seeding alone can\u2019t fix that. Another report from the GAO<\/a> last year found that the process still needs more research to determine how well it works and why. But as things stand, cloud seeding remains \u201ca tool for helping to augment precipitation,\u201d said Jeff French, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t come anywhere near solving the problem of water in the West, but any little bit of additional water that you can get into the system is helpful, especially in a situation where we have water that is well over-allocated above what the natural system can provide.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to Howard, establishing clearer guidelines and expectations for geoengineering operations could help clear up some of the confusion around this technology. The GAO recommended that NOAA establish written guidelines for reviewing reports, improve the forms given to operators, and establish a process for regularly informing state and local agencies about NOAA\u2019s role in geoengineering oversight.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

This transparency could prove critical as interest in solar engineering grows. This past July, a large-scale solar geoengineering experiment in the San Francisco Bay led by researchers from the University of Washington was shut down<\/a> by Alameda city officials who complained that that no one had informed them about the experiment ahead of time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there\u2019s understandable concern about [solar] geoengineering,\u201d Howard said. \u201cI\u2019m not saying it\u2019s hazardous. I\u2019m saying we need research to know a) whether it\u2019s effective, and b) whether there are unintended consequences that we might not be aware of. That research is not really occurring right now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People have tried to manipulate the weather for thousands of years, whether through magic, superstition, or science. In…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":512732,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,74381,3,6382,9107,21,19,22,20,25,24,6383],"class_list":["post-512731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-climate-energy","tag-news","tag-news-analysis","tag-regulation","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-yahoo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/512732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}