Once confined to the realm of science fiction, the idea that scientists – and by extension the government – have the ability to control the weather has been gaining popularity in online circles and even among some conservative lawmakers in recent years. But do claims about “weather modification” hold water?

Weather modification most recently made headlines in late November when Republican Florida State Senator Ileana Garcia introduced the Weather Modification Activities bill. That legislation would ban “the injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of a chemical… for the express purpose of affecting the temperature, the weather, or the intensity of sunlight.”

Garcia is hardly alone in her concern about weather modification. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been one of the most outspoken voices at the federal level warning about the dangers of the government controlling the weather. “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done,” Greene posted on X in October.

Aside from elected officials, a scan of social media quickly reveals that plenty of Americans also believe that the government not only has the ability to control the weather, but also that it has been actively doing so for years. This past April, in a post that has garnered some 13 million views, conservative influencer Robby Starbuck blamed weather modification for mass flooding in Dubai. Another post with more than a million views shared by the account “Wall Street Apes” appears to show a jet with the words “weather modification international” emblazoned on it.

The federal government has denied that any weather control programs exist, while the corporate media and scientific “expert” class have been quick to dismiss claims about weather modification as nothing but baseless conspiracy theories. And indeed, the idea of shadowy government forces intentionally creating superstorms using secret technology seems a bit far-fetched on the surface. But as usual, there may be some middle ground in this debate that is at least worth considering.

While the U.S. government claims that it does not have the ability to control the weather, it is not for lack of trying. In fact, the government has spent more than 50 years trying to develop such technology.

One of the first high-profile public attempts at weather control was Project Cirrus, a joint venture between General Electric and the U.S. military. On October 13, 1947, an Air Force B-17 dropped nearly 200 pounds of crushed dry ice into a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean as part of a crude attempt at “cloud seeding,” or dispersing substances into the atmosphere to alter weather patterns.

Following the dry ice dispersal, instead of continuing out into the Atlantic, the hurricane suddenly turned and slammed into the Georgia coast, causing more than $2 million in damage. Outraged Georgians threatened to sue, causing General Electric to pull its support for the project.

Subsequent investigations showed that the hurricane in question was already turning westward before the cloud seeding operation, and that the amount of dry ice dropped by the B-17 was laughable compared to the size and power of a hurricane. Nonetheless, the public remained wary about the unintended consequences of attempts to control the weather.

Despite Project Cirrus’s failure, government dreams of controlling the weather persisted. In 1962, the U.S. Weather Bureau and Department of Defense reached a formal agreement to carry out Project STORMFURY and attempted to seed hurricanes again to reduce wind speeds. This time, scientists dropped silver iodide into the rainbands of storms. While those experiments initially seemed to show positive results, subsequent analysis in the 1980s suggested that the silver iodide seeding likely had no impact on hurricane wind speeds.

Nonetheless, officials concluded that Project STORMFURY’s working hypothesis was “accurate.” They theorized that more planes flying consistently would have succeeded in dissipating a hurricane entirely.

Project Cirrus and STORMFURY were far from the federal government’s only attempts to alter the weather in the 20th century. In 1967, with the Vietnam War raging, the Air Force initiated Operation Popeye, a highly classified effort to use cloud seeding to extend the monsoon season over specific areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to disrupt North Vietnamese military supply routes.

Then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger allegedly signed off on the operation without authorization from Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who had denied to Congress that a program existed. The existence of Operation Popeye was only revealed in 1972 through the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a classified U.S. Department of Defense study detailing the country’s political and military involvement in Vietnam.

Following significant public backlash, the United Nations banned military “environmental modification techniques” in 1977.

Today, however, cloud seeding using silver iodide is a shockingly common practice. The global cloud seeding market is experiencing growth, with projections indicating an increase from $406.4 million in 2024 to $684.2 million in investment by 2032. As of this year, cloud seeding programs are active in at least nine U.S. states, including California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. The technology is also becoming particularly popular in arid Middle Eastern nations like Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to enhance precipitation.

Despite the increasing popularity of the practice, some studies have shown that a build-up of silver iodide from cloud seeding could be harmful to aquatic life and microorganisms in the soil over areas where cloud seeding takes place. There have yet to be any long-term studies on the impact of heavy silver iodide exposure in humans.

Moreover, manipulating global weather patterns could already be having unintended consequences for the world’s ecological balance. The Amazon rainforest, for instance, relies on about 22,000 tons of sand blown across the Atlantic each year for vital nutrients. As more desert nations in Africa and the Middle East expand their cloud seeding operations, less of that sand will make it to the Amazon.

As much as the media and the “expert” class want to poke fun at figures like Ileana Garcia and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the reality is that virtually every developed nation in the world is now actively trying to modify the weather – and the continuing investment suggests there’s at least some reason to believe they are succeeding.

In light of this, it does not seem so “crazy” to at the very least seek more transparency about these efforts to manipulate our climate and environment. As the public learned from COVID-19, sometimes scientific experiments, even in the pursuit of a noble goal, can have disastrous unintended consequences.

Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.