The recent flash floods that brought Dubai to its knees once again put the spotlight on cloud seeding and its effectiveness in controlling pollution or increasing rainfall. Worse still, there is a raging debate whether it was because of cloud seeding or climate change – one a desperate measure, and the other, majorly a fallout of human indiscretion. Raju Korti analyses.
You just do not tinker with Nature. It is simply what it is and not what it ought to be. For all its famed resilience, it has an uncanny knack of getting back at you hard, and though gradual, it can have disastrous consequences for the human race. The fact that Nature exists in all its myriad and multi-splendoured forms, is as much dangerous as it is fascinating.
In the guise of creativity and innovation, humans have been messing up with the genes and plants, and although most of us did not know that genes existed, we still had our brains figuring out that selective breeding could ensure that desirable traits would end up being prevalent in our crops and livestock. Tinkering with Nature, as in Environment, is a process that has started long back and it will be just a matter of time before its consequences are irreversible. One does not have to be a doomsday prophet to say this. The results are there to be seen. The cloud seeding experiment in Dubai is an example in point.
The Gulf country witnessed a downpour — a luxury in a parched desert — like it never did. There have been suggestions that the intense rains were triggered by cloud seeding, which is usually known to cause, at best, 25% extra rainfall. Cloud seeding, as it were, does not guarantee rains in the first place to the extent expected, but look at the magnitude of the havoc in Dubai (For Mumbai it is an annual phenomenon). The Nature returned with compound interest.
Nature is a universal force and can have far-reaching consequences in every sense of the word. Little wonder, experts are weighing in whether cloud seeding was the actual cause. A particularly remarkable perspective comes from Johan Jaques, a senior meteorologist at KISTERS, warning of “potential unintended consequences of meddling with weather patterns”. The Newsweek quoted him as saying that its ramifications can also have a “diplomatic fallout” leading to weather wars. As if other unethical forms of warfare like the biological and chemical warfare were not enough.
Jaques explains that although cloud seeding aims to enhance and accelerate the precipitation process — especially in areas which have seen very less rains, there is always the threat of excessive precipitation that can lead to excess infiltration flow with potential flash floods as result. He believes that the Dubai floods act as a stark warning of the unintended consequences we can unleash when we use such technology to alter the weather. For the record, there is no concrete evidence linking the Dubai rains to cloud seeding but the common chord is the tampering with natural weather process. Climate Physics, deserves to be a separate curriculum in our education and taught as such in universities. There cannot be any two opinions on Mr Jaques’ views.
Mr Jaques makes an irrefutable argument that anytime we interfere with natural precipitation patterns we set off a chain of events over which we have little control and “if we are not careful, unrestrained use of this technology could end up causing diplomatic instabilities with neighbouring countries engaging in tit-for-tat weather wars.” Nature does not recognise international borders.
High cost, less gain
Cloud seeding is a costly experiment with no lucrative returns. In a country like India where budgets struggle to meet populist and genuine needs, such steps are not even considered expedient. It costs almost Rs one lakh for every square km of cloud and involves spraying of salt mixtures in clouds from the air that would result in condensation of the cloud and eventually case rainfall. A fringe benefit comes as it also washes away pollutants in the atmosphere. Just like the natural rainfall that cleanses the air. Last December, Chief Minister Eknath Shinde had mulled artificial rains as a solution to tackle air pollution — a robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul solution. You tamper with the Nature to cause pollution and you also tamper with it to correct it. How self-defeating is that? There is more pain and less gain!
As much as it is touted, cloud seeding hasn’t actually been statistically proven to work. After the method was first tested 70 years ago, enthusiasm for cloud seeding led to experiments that claimed annual precipitation increases of 10% or more. But the studies lacked statistical rigor. It is not just about the financial implications of the experiment; it is also about being able to control its after-effects. Given the Nature’s vagaries, this can be a challenge: Once a cloud is treated, you can’t measure how much it would have rained or snowed if left unseeded. Even the basic mechanics underlying the crystallization of water molecules on seeding agents remains mysterious.
Even if cloud seeding does succeed at increasing precipitation, environmental activists are concerned about its impact. The flood havoc in Dubai is an example, and although, some experts are attributing it to climate change – a phenomenon that gets mere lip service by most nations, the timing of the experiment is bound to leave people confused about its efficacy. At present, making it rain is still more of an art than a science. With advanced countries increasingly spending hundreds of millions of dollars on weather modification, more research is needed to understand if the practice works and what its environmental, social, and governance impacts will be.
In India, cloud seeding technology has been mulled to clean poisonous smog with rain. Last year, the Delhi government considered it to wash away the deadly smog that engulfed it and threatened catastrophic health consequences. Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde too suggested artificial rains to control air and dust pollution and advised the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) accordingly but the hefty price tags attached to them was a dampener. As it is, the BMC used 1000 tankers of water to wash the city roads clean and the citizens, fearing an impending water crisis in the gruelling summer months, wondered it made sense under the circumstances. There is no authentic word about how much it helped in ridding the metro of its pollution.
When the experts themselves are not convinced about cloud seeding and its purported advantages, one can well understand the quandary of the common man who pays towards these as taxes. That environmental critics fear it as an expensive distraction from tackling root causes is quite another story.
The more man tries to exercise his control over the Nature, the more vengeance with which it bounces back. It is a complex algorithm which remains uncracked yet and your options as a researcher or a scientist remain restricted to studying patterns that are by no means fully conclusive. The very esoteric characteristic of Nature is to keep the trump card to itself and sometimes, it does not know itself when it will unleash it. You intrude/encroach upon one of its many parameters and you disturb the entire equation that has many imponderable unknowns whose value cannot be deduced correctly.
Humans will do a lot of damage, some irretrievable, before we ultimately destroy ourselves. In our infinite wisdom, we fail to discern that life will continue without humans. New forms of intelligence will emerge long after human experiments are over. And then who will remain to experiment what?
Raju Korti is a senior journalist with over four-decade experience of working in media institutions.