Tags: weather modification; ENMOD 1976; (artificial?) droughts or floods in China, Russia, Iran; weather modification mentioned by Kennedy and Johnson in the early 1960s; self-censorship

Downpours at will?

My initial title for this blog entry was ‘Are they tinkering with the weather?’, but I opted for the current one because it offers a good lead-in to the title of my next entry, which is ‘It’s raining frogs, not cats and dogs’.

I had been wanting to write a blog post about the subject of weather modification by humans for two years. However, each time I was about to start, I would fear that this would cause me to become categorised into the much maligned group of ‘conspiracy theorists’, to the effect that I would invariably end up exercising self-censorship even before opening a word processor and starting to type*.

Nevertheless, late on Thursday 13^rd August of this year (2020), I managed to go so far as writing two draft paragraphs and a single sentence before being set off track by the same lingering concerns about the consequences of having an entry on such a topic posted on the Internet under my name... This is what I wrote:

At approximately a quarter to four Tuesday morning, an extraordinarily powerful bang pierced through my sleep and caused me to leap out of our bedroom. I rushed to my ‘study’ because I had left the windows wide open only a few hours earlier in the hope that I would be able to sit back in front of the computer a few hours later without feeling overwhelmed by the heat.

The bang was similar to the crashing noise made by thunder, except that it was louder and that there was no rumbling. Strangely, even though to me the bang seemed to have originated several kilometres away from our home, not only was the noise really sharp but it was rather overbearing.

It was not like the usual thunderclap one is accustomed to hear when a storm kindly manifests itself above the lake to refresh both the French and the Swiss shores during those sweltering August evenings or nights. No, no, no: this bang was more like the sound a gigantic paper bag puffed full of air would have made if two huge hands had burst it by coming together in a quick and resounding clap (part-thunder, part-detonation, I would say) over Lake Léman.

Had I not heard the exact same intriguing bang last summer, I might have paid little notice to it.

Even though I did not hear the same crashing noise on Monday morning (i.e. on 17^th August), some time after three, there was a heavy downpour of rain which lasted for about an hour – enough to fill up the containers we had left at various places on our balcony for the purpose of collecting water for my wife’s vegetable-growing efforts. There was a much lighter downpour on Saturday morning (22^nd August), even if it took place a couple of hours later and it lasted longer.

This should explain why I decided to take up this post again. At this point, however, I need to make the following clear: as I was privy to no ‘insider information’, be it in my professional life (and I am therefore no whistleblower) or from any other source I would be acquainted with, the associations, correlations or links made below are conjectural in nature. Some readers might deem them to be merely anecdotal. So be it, then, but, first, let me provide some of the (Internet-based) information that I have come across and that has led me to suspect that some governments (be it through their military or through any other state-controlled agency of theirs) have the ability to alter the weather.

Few people know this but a Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (the ENMOD convention) was negotiated at the UN’s Conference of the Disarmament Commission, was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10th December 1976 and came into force on 5th October 1978. A brief outline of the convention is available on the website of the Geneva (Switzerland)-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), owing to the latter’s involvement in humanitarian law, in particular because of the famous Geneva Conventions of 1949. Below are the second and tenth paragraphs of the ICRC’s outline of the ENMOD convention (based on the version of the outline I downloaded on 6^th July 2018):

The ENMOD Convention is specifically intended to prevent use of the environment as a means of warfare, by prohibiting the deliberate manipulation of natural processes that could produce phenomena such as hurricanes, tidal waves or changes in climate. [...]

As examples, the Understandings also include a non-exhaustive list of phenomena that could result from the use of environmental modification techniques: earthquakes and tsunamis; an upset in the ecological balance of a region; changes in weather patterns (clouds, precipitation, cyclones and tornadic storms); changes in climate patterns; changes in ocean currents; changes in the state of the ozone layer and changes in the state of the ionosphere.

[...]    https://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/1976_enmod.pdf

If I recall correctly, I had come across the above document on the Russian search engine Yandex [https://www.yandex.com/search/?text=artic%20ice%20sheet%20growing] while I was trying to retrieve a NASA headline about the expansion of the Antarctic ice sheet I had seen a couple of years earlier [NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses, 30 Oct. 2015

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses; available at https://web.archive.org/web/20200821093208/https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses/] following a discussion about climate change I had had on our balcony with my wife’s Australian cousin and her husband at the beginning of July 2018.

In turn, the outline of the ENMOD of 1976 brought back to my mind a headline I had seen on Russia Today (rt.com) in April of 2018 about a forthcoming attempt by China to create artificial rain over an area as large as Spain, France and Switzerland combined:

I then recalled a much more recent headline, also seen on RT.com in early July 2018:

Then, by slightly altering my string of keywords on Yandex, I retrieved two articles by the founder of the anti-globalisation and anti-war platform Global Research, Michel Chossudovsky, and published there, on globalresearch.ca:

*Incidentally, it was the same quasi apprehensive instinct which put me off from writing any entries altogether for a considerable amount of time...So have I now crossed my own little Rubicon?