Develop technologies for weather management. This is the seventh entry in the “objectives” of Mission Mausam –a 2,000-crore behemoth recently announced by the Government of India. Seven seemingly harmless and innocuous words in a mission statement aiming to make India “weather ready” and “climate smart.”
These are undoubtedly noble, worthy, and urgent goals, given the ecological collapse we find ourselves in. Yet, this also marks India’s official foray into geoengineering – essentially, attempting to technocratically manipulate and alter climate patterns to engineer our way out of the climate crisis. Before I delve into my indictment of the deeper, potentially catastrophic implications, I must note that the Mission’s primary focus is to improve India’s weather forecasting through the deployment of new radars, satellites, AI/ML models, and expanded observation stations for better accuracy.
However, including “weather management” as one of the goals is dangerous and reeks of human supremacy forgetting that we are fallible in front of the Earth and a complex, interconnected, age old set of climate patters which have sustained and nourished us.
For starters, attempts at weather management, and emergency techno-fixes to engineer the climate, entrench the belief that the fossil-fuel guzzling economy can continue ramping up emissions unabated because a quick fix is just around the corner – one that could instantly cool our warming world.
Secondly, experiments in weather management currently operate in a legal vacuum – both internationally and domestically. In terms of criticality, these experiments are on par with those on nuclear energy, biological weapons, and eugenics – fields the global community has either halted or subjected to rigorous supervision through a sprawling framework of international and domestic legal mechanisms.
These technologies conveniently overlook a crucial fact: there is no single sovereign’s weather. Any experiments will not impact only India’s weather; they will have distributional consequences for neighbouring regions, and sometimes even beyond.
Lastly, these experiments – much to humanity’s dismay – won’t be conducted on an inert, unresponsive, or malleable Earth. We fail to acknowledge that our ecological system is alive, responsive, and not a passive object for extraction.
Whatever experiments are undertaken, the biosphere will be an active participant – a self-organising complex system that will, in all likelihood, not simply give way like an admonished puppy. In pursuing these interventions, we are dangerously advancing the belief that Earth can be a designer planet with our humanity’s collective hubris sitting in control of the remote and looking away from the climate crisis which we are very much in the throes off.
A brief history
The Mission specifically aims at interventions that will establish a cloud simulation chamber at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM). This chamber will conduct experiments such as cloud seeding to control rainfall patterns and even lightning. These methods are just a few in humanity’s growing arsenal of tentative technologies to engineer the planet, which include cloud brightening, spraying sulfate aerosols into the sky, ocean fertilisation, and more.
The origins of these experiments can be traced to a natural event in 1991: the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. The explosion released gargantuan amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. What followed was astounding – temperatures across the globe dropped by half a degree Celsius.
While half a degree may sound insignificant, consider this: since pre-industrial times, the world has warmed by about 1.2°C. That relatively small increase has already triggered severe consequences—record-breaking heatwaves, rising sea levels, and unprecedented wildfires. Now imagine cooling half of that. The Mount Pinatubo eruption temporarily offset nearly half of the warming we’ve caused over centuries of industrial activity, highlighting how impactful even a fraction of a degree can be.
However, this cooling was the result of complex, naturally occurring geological processes. Yet it sparked a sinister idea among certain groups: if events like Pinatubo could be artificially recreated, global warming – like turning on the AC to cool a room might be controlled.
Now Pinatubo naturally resulted in droplets being scattered in the stratosphere which blocked the full heat of the sun from reaching the earth. In effect it seeded the idea that it is possible to develop sun blocking technology also know as ‘Solar Radiation Management’ (SRM). Cloud seeding, which falls under the Mission’s aims, is not the same as SRM.
The former seeks to intervene in weather patterns, while the latter aims to reduce temperatures. Yet, both technologies are rooted in the same problematic idea of manipulating natural systems, assuming we can control complex, interconnected ecological processes without unintended consequences. Both approaches risk exacerbating environmental imbalances, disproportionately affecting vulnerable regions and people, and ignoring the deeper issue of reducing emissions. Therefore, the lessons from Pinatubo are crucial to bear in mind when fiddling with technocratic climate interventions like cloud seeding.
On one hand the explosion cooled global temperatures, but on the other hand it exacerbated drought in Africa and reduced close to fifteen percent rainfall in South Asia. The loss of lives and livelihoods were huge, but the message was simple.
Phenomenon like Pinatubo and phenomenon which will alter existing patterns of weather and climate, would most definitely have unpredictable effects on certain parts of the world resulting in a loss of lives. Even if actual lives are not lost, the mere fact that these technologies aren’t necessarily tied to human made borders are in itself a cause for concern.
Legal vacuum
Unlike a lab room experiment, tinkering with weather patterns would literally amount to attempts to alter the weather as it is. It is not a simulacrum of an experiment, meaning it will not be an “experiment” of geoengineering – it would be conducting actual geoengineering.
Given that we are already living through the impacts of climate change, and that these impacts will only worsen, these experiments, as a last-ditch effort to salvage what can be saved, will inevitably gain more traction. In fact, if one listens to the poster boy of geoengineering –David Keith –or looks at the amount of funding geoengineering and “planet hacking” projects have received from investors like Bill Gates, cogent efforts toward geoengineering are not far off.
All existing experiments, to the extent they can be labelled as such, are happening in a legal vacuum. Even in India, while we may have a newly minted “right against the adverse effects of climate change,” climate policies and regulatory authorities remain scattered, ad-hoc, and lack strategic coherence in terms of mitigation and adaptation. Geoengineering, with its potential to alter the Earth’s climate, urgently requires international regulation followed by municipal adaptation.
There is precedent for this: countries have previously come together to prevent the development of biological weapons and eugenics. In fact, similar weather modification as a weapon is already banned. Yet there is no robust framework to regulate geoengineering experiments, despite their potentially deleterious effects being comparable to those of biological weapons.
Given its potential to disrupt entire ecosystems and impact regions beyond national borders we risk a situation of the law playing catch up, and not catching up fast.
Ecological Amnesia
The question I grapple with is this: if I am in the midst of a climate apocalypse, and an Earth-modifying solution is presented to me, will I not take it? We are edging closer to mass species extinction, the obliteration of ecosystems, and losses of such colossal proportions that these questions are no longer pedantic.
They carry immense weight and require our leaders to confront the core of the problem – anthropogenic emissions. But we continue to look away. We assume that rational “science,” devoid of its politics and stripped of national allegiances, will soon conjure the solution to our peril. We forget that our science is a spark, while the wildfire of climate change is raging out of control.
Atreyo is a lawyer working at Agami, a nonprofit organisation advancing innovation in law and justice.
