A researcher on climate at the University of Sussex, Or John Griffin, has said “Things will get worse, not better”. A decade of weather chaos awaits us. When not freezing and flooding there is the threat of scorching heatwaves and drought. We are he said heading into a mini ice age similar to the one Europe experienced in the 17th century.
He thinks that if we continue to burn enough fossil fuels, an accumulation of the carbon dioxide which warms up the atmosphere might bring about some climatic respite in about ten years time.
While we all know that nature is capricious, we must remember that a burden of responsibility for our crazy weather rests on scientists in particular and ordinary people in general.
The use of millions of aerosols has in the opinion of the scientists damaged the Van Allen belt, a layer of atmosphere which acts as a filter against the more dangerous rays of the sun - the gamma rays.
This same belt has almost certainly been damaged by the innumerable “punctures” caused by the hundreds of rockets which nations have thrust into outer space. A heavy price may yet be paid by humanity for all that ironmongery whizzing around up there.
Another factor is the enormous clouds of dust generated high in the atmosphere by the explosion of atomic bombs. These clouds drift around unpredictably, upsetting the weather balance wherever they go.
So who is monkeying with our weather? The fact is that for the last 40 years “weather control” for various reasons has been the subject of enormous research and experiment by the major nations of the world.
It was World War Two that elevated meteorology to the status of major war planning. Would planes get airborne, and stay so? Would army transportation be hampered by adverse weather. Should ships sail?
This led inevitably to experiments to control the weather, and by the immediate post war years such knowledge was being applied.
Even in the late forties the Royal Air Force was seeding clouds with sprayed silver iodide to produce rainfall, and in 1948 the Under-secretary of state for air was asked in the Commons to encourage research into “weather modification”
That same year Dr Irving Krick, President of the American Institute of Aerological Research and formally chief meteorologist to General Eisenhower told the Royal Society that “significant progress” in weather control had been made in the preceding eight years.
Dr Krick revealed that operations to make rain had taken 200,000 hours and been conducted in 18 American states, and 6 foreign countries, achieving success rates of up to 90%. His Water Resources Development Corp. had helped irrigation in Utah, Wyoming, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and been used to increase the water supply in Madrid.
A major research programme aimed at enabling men to control the weather was mooted in a report to President Kennedy in 1963.
But in recent years weather control for good purposes like irrigation or for the prevention of floods and droughts has taken a more sinister turn. And it is worth remembering that one subject discussed between President Carter and the Soviet Union was the need for restraint in weather “control”. In effect, both countries have been seeking ways of improving their own weather and mixing it for their enemies. Creating rain where and when it is not needed can produce disastrous flooding. Stopping rain where it might otherwise have fallen can produce drought - a block-busting way of starving enemies into submission.
This peril is further compounded by the space age technology. Direct a laser beam from space at the earth's surface and oceans would melt glaciers. The beam could even re-activate volcanoes.
Weather interference is a technique of offence as disastrous and deadly in it's potentialities as the atom bomb, poison gasses and biological warfare.
One thing is certain: That Britain's weather has changed utterly in the last decades. Once there were seasons - spring - summer - autumn - winter, merging into one another in reasonable and manageable sequence. Now we have less definable seasons - only weather. It's time the weather manipulators laid off.