Global Geographies of Weather Modification in an Era of Climate Change

As climate change impacts intensify, interest in the practice of cloud seeding to induce precipitation and otherwise modify the weather is on the rise around the world. It is also increasingly associated in the public imagination with solar radiation management, a highly controversial form of geoengineering that works at much larger spatial scales. Despite the importance of weather modification in the context of global heating, it has attracted little attention from geographers in recent decades. With its interdisciplinary and holistic approach, geography offers powerful analytical tools for understanding the practice of cloud seeding and the controversies it has created. I propose a few ways to think geographically about weather modification, including the hydrosocial cycle, the framing of the nonhuman world as resource, culture–nature binaries, the need to take indigenous world-making practices seriously, and volumetric geopolitics. I compare weather modification in the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and China, showing that their practices and rationales are shaped quite differently by political economic, institutional, and sociocultural contexts. Nevertheless, across these interconnected national contexts the promises, uncertainties, and problems of cloud seeding are similarly entangled with the effects of global heating.