Israel vs. Iran: Geopolitics and Climate Warfare (Part 2)

The geopolitics of geoengineering

Pierre-Antoine Plaquevent explains why the struggle for control over the climate may become one of the defining geopolitical battlefields of the twenty-first century.

Read part one here.

In 2019, the official Xinhua news agency stated that “weather modification had contributed” to reducing hail damage by 70% in the western region of Xinjiang, a key agricultural area.

More recently, Chinese authorities explained that they had successfully modified the weather during the centenary anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, held in July 2021. The technique used during this ceremony was precisely cloud seeding. This method involves “sending silver iodide particles into the clouds in order to attract water droplets.”

In 2020, China additionally announced its intention to expand its experimental weather modification program by 2025 across a test area “of 5.5 million square kilometers (a surface larger than the entirety of India). However, carrying out such vast projects could create serious problems with China’s neighboring countries.”

We should also recall the statements from the White House, which announced on October 13, 2022, that it would finance a five-year research plan on geoengineering and the technologies and innovations that can be used to artificially modify the Earth’s climate.

This report focused on solar radiation modification (or management) (SRM), a technique that essentially consists of spraying fine aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth. The idea is that, once the radiation is reflected, there will be less heat and temperatures will fall. The research plan consists of modeling how SRM could impact the atmosphere and assessing its viability as a potential technique used to manage short-term climate risk.

It is nothing more and nothing less than artificially reproducing the process that occurs during major volcanic eruptions. These natural disasters eject large quantities of gas and debris into the atmosphere, which then block the sun. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1816 led to what became known as the “year without a summer” across Europe and North America, with temperatures dropping by three degrees Celsius.