The recent release of Environment Canada’s five-year “climate-engineering” plan has raised eyebrows across the country — but weather modification is actually not a new phenomenon. An American company has been seeding clouds and instigating weather events above Calgary since 1996, with Canada and the US signing a decades-old agreement called the Weather Modification Information Act that allows such activity as long as it is disclosed with the neighbouring country. .Science Strategy 2024 to 2029, the updated climate engineering plan published by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), pushes the urgency of spending taxpayer dollars on the researching “climate-altering” technologies and “mobilizing scientific insights toward meaningful action” to block the sun and tamper with the earth’s atmosphere. Officials hope the strategy, released earlier in February, will bring Canada’s climate agenda “to the next level” with “technologies that aim to deliberately alter the climate system.” It notes these climate-altering technologies are used “typically to counteract climate warming,” and gives examples of “solar radiation modification,” “marine geoengineering,” and “carbon dioxide removal techniques. Solar Radiation Modification technology “is designed to cool the planet” often by “stratospheric aerosol injection,” according to the UN Environment Programme. An example of this technology is stratospheric aerosol injection. This technology involves the “injecting (of) aerosols into the stratosphere, so a small amount of sunlight is deliberately reflected into space to cool the planet,” the UN website states. Science Direct describes marine cloud brightening as the “seeding of low marine clouds” to “enhance their albedo (the fraction of light that a surface reflects), thus reflecting more solar radiation back to space.”While many of these technologies are still in developmental stages, the weather modification technique of “cloud seeding” has been going on for decades. Cloud seeding was designed in 1946 by chemist Vincent Schaefer, and is the process of infusing clouds' particles with chemicals, or “nanoparticles” such as silver iodine to change naturally occurring weather patterns such as rain or hail, according to an article published in the CBC in February 2020. .At the time, scientists sent planes to map natural clouds and then another plane flew through the same clouds “using a series of flares to inject particles of silver iodide inside.”"We suddenly saw these zigzag lines,” atmospheric scientist Katja Friedrich said, “nature usually does not produce zigzag lines.” Fast forward a few years, and such “zigzag lines” have been raising concerns on social media. .In 1985 Canada and the US signed the Weather Modification Information Act, an agreement that requires companies on either side of the border to alert governments when undergoing weather modification activities such as cloud seeding. .Canadian lawyer Daniel Freiheit (Lion Advocacy on Twitter ("X"), pointed out in a 2022 article by AFP Fact Check where ECCC spokesperson Samantha Bayard confirmed in writing since 1996, a North Dakota-based company called Weather Modification Inc. has been “undertaking weather modification activities in Canada, in the form of cloud seeding to reduce hail damage."."The company seeds some developing thunderstorms in the Calgary, Red Deer areas between May and September of each year, and has provided the required reports to ECCC on a yearly basis,” wrote Bayard. .“The evidence of ECCC’s world-class science is all around us,” Environment Canada wrote in its five-year strategy. “It has provided the groundwork for Canada’s evolving environmental legislative landscape, which includes many acts that ECCC administers and enforces.”
The recent release of Environment Canada’s five-year “climate-engineering” plan has raised eyebrows across the country — but weather modification is actually not a new phenomenon. An American company has been seeding clouds and instigating weather events above Calgary since 1996, with Canada and the US signing a decades-old agreement called the Weather Modification Information Act that allows such activity as long as it is disclosed with the neighbouring country. .Science Strategy 2024 to 2029, the updated climate engineering plan published by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), pushes the urgency of spending taxpayer dollars on the researching “climate-altering” technologies and “mobilizing scientific insights toward meaningful action” to block the sun and tamper with the earth’s atmosphere. Officials hope the strategy, released earlier in February, will bring Canada’s climate agenda “to the next level” with “technologies that aim to deliberately alter the climate system.” It notes these climate-altering technologies are used “typically to counteract climate warming,” and gives examples of “solar radiation modification,” “marine geoengineering,” and “carbon dioxide removal techniques. Solar Radiation Modification technology “is designed to cool the planet” often by “stratospheric aerosol injection,” according to the UN Environment Programme. An example of this technology is stratospheric aerosol injection. This technology involves the “injecting (of) aerosols into the stratosphere, so a small amount of sunlight is deliberately reflected into space to cool the planet,” the UN website states. Science Direct describes marine cloud brightening as the “seeding of low marine clouds” to “enhance their albedo (the fraction of light that a surface reflects), thus reflecting more solar radiation back to space.”While many of these technologies are still in developmental stages, the weather modification technique of “cloud seeding” has been going on for decades. Cloud seeding was designed in 1946 by chemist Vincent Schaefer, and is the process of infusing clouds' particles with chemicals, or “nanoparticles” such as silver iodine to change naturally occurring weather patterns such as rain or hail, according to an article published in the CBC in February 2020. .At the time, scientists sent planes to map natural clouds and then another plane flew through the same clouds “using a series of flares to inject particles of silver iodide inside.”"We suddenly saw these zigzag lines,” atmospheric scientist Katja Friedrich said, “nature usually does not produce zigzag lines.” Fast forward a few years, and such “zigzag lines” have been raising concerns on social media. .In 1985 Canada and the US signed the Weather Modification Information Act, an agreement that requires companies on either side of the border to alert governments when undergoing weather modification activities such as cloud seeding. .Canadian lawyer Daniel Freiheit (Lion Advocacy on Twitter ("X"), pointed out in a 2022 article by AFP Fact Check where ECCC spokesperson Samantha Bayard confirmed in writing since 1996, a North Dakota-based company called Weather Modification Inc. has been “undertaking weather modification activities in Canada, in the form of cloud seeding to reduce hail damage."."The company seeds some developing thunderstorms in the Calgary, Red Deer areas between May and September of each year, and has provided the required reports to ECCC on a yearly basis,” wrote Bayard. .“The evidence of ECCC’s world-class science is all around us,” Environment Canada wrote in its five-year strategy. “It has provided the groundwork for Canada’s evolving environmental legislative landscape, which includes many acts that ECCC administers and enforces.”
