Control weather to combat the climate crisis? We might have our heads in the clouds

The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency ARIA) has announced 56.8m to fund 21 geoengineering projects around the world over the next five years. As a cautious fan of science fiction, this news shook me to the core.

- CHRIS WRIGHT

A few years ago I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, and last week’s news brought me back to those pages. The announcement felt less of a scientific milestone and more like a plot point for that dystopian novel, which opens with catastrophic heatwaves I hope we never live to see, but increasingly fear we might.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, geoengineering refers to large-scale technological interventions in the Earth’s climate system, designed to counteract the effects of climate change. This can include techniques such as cloud seeding to increase rainfall, or more radical proposals such as injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet.

While last week’s announcement is among the most significant geoengineering experiments funded by a government ever, unfortunately these kinds of experiments to manipulate the weather are not new, and currently largely unregulated.

Australia has been experimenting with cloud seeding at different scales since 1947. This has involved releasing aerosols or silver iodide into clouds at different scales, hoping to induce rainfall. Saudi Arabia has been using silver iodide to induce rainfall for the past 20 years. Malaysia started cloud seeding in 2024 to combat drought, and earlier this year, Thailand began spraying dry ice into the air above Bangkok to disperse smog and encourage rain. But these efforts are relatively small-scale compared with China, which currently runs cloud-seeding projects to reduce drought risk across an area larger than India.