Cloud seeding - so when a meteorologist discusses it, when does it stop becoming a conspiracy theory?
So according to those who say that it is exhaust gases, please explain this. Was the air so busy that they had to fly side by side? And do they now fly on fuel oil? You never saw this before!
Millions were in germ war tests
Sun 21 Apr 2002 10.23 BST, Antony Barnett
Much of Britain was exposed to bacteria sprayed in secret trials
The Ministry of Defence turned large parts of the country into a giant laboratory to conduct a series of secret germ warfare tests on the public.
A government report just released provides for the first time a comprehensive official history of Britain's biological weapons trials between 1940 and 1979.
Many of these tests involved releasing potentially dangerous chemicals and micro-organisms over vast swaths of the population without the public being told.
While details of some secret trials have emerged in recent years, the 60-page report reveals new information about more than 100 covert experiments.
The report reveals that military personnel were briefed to tell any 'inquisitive inquirer' the trials were part of research projects into weather and air pollution.
The tests, carried out by government scientists at Porton Down, were designed to help the MoD assess Britain's vulnerability if the Russians were to have released clouds of deadly germs over the country.
In most cases, the trials did not use biological weapons but alternatives which scientists believed would mimic germ warfare and which the MoD claimed were harmless. But families in certain areas of the country who have children with birth defects are demanding a public inquiry.
One chapter of the report, 'The Fluorescent Particle Trials', reveals how between 1955 and 1963 planes flew from north-east England to the tip of Cornwall along the south and west coasts, dropping huge amounts of zinc cadmium sulphide on the population. The chemical drifted miles inland, its fluorescence allowing the spread to be monitored. In another trial using zinc cadmium sulphide, a generator was towed along a road near Frome in Somerset where it spewed the chemical for an hour.
While the Government has insisted the chemical is safe, cadmium is recognised as a cause of lung cancer and during the Second World War was considered by the Allies as a chemical weapon.
In another chapter, 'Large Area Coverage Trials', the MoD describes how between 1961 and 1968 more than a million people along the south coast of England, from Torquay to the New Forest, were exposed to bacteria including e.coli and bacillus globigii , which mimics anthrax. These releases came from a military ship, the Icewhale, anchored off the Dorset coast, which sprayed the micro-organisms in a five to 10-mile radius.
The report also reveals details of the DICE trials in south Dorset between 1971 and 1975. These involved US and UK military scientists spraying into the air massive quantities of serratia marcescens bacteria, with an anthrax simulant and phenol.
Similar bacteria were released in 'The Sabotage Trials' between 1952 and 1964. These were tests to determine the vulnerability of large government buildings and public transport to attack. In 1956 bacteria were released on the London Underground at lunchtime along the Northern Line between Colliers Wood and Tooting Broadway. The results show that the organism dispersed about 10 miles. Similar tests were conducted in tunnels running under government buildings in Whitehall.
Experiments conducted between 1964 and 1973 involved attaching germs to the threads of spiders' webs in boxes to test how the germs would survive in different environments. These tests were carried out in a dozen locations across the country, including London's West End, Southampton and Swindon. The report also gives details of more than a dozen smaller field trials between 1968 and 1977.
In recent years, the MoD has commissioned two scientists to review the safety of these tests. Both reported that there was no risk to public health, although one suggested the elderly or people suffering from breathing illnesses may have been seriously harmed if they inhaled sufficient quantities of micro-organisms.
However, some families in areas which bore the brunt of the secret tests are convinced the experiments have led to their children suffering birth defects, physical handicaps and learning difficulties.
David Orman, an army officer from Bournemouth, is demanding a public inquiry. His wife, Janette, was born in East Lulworth in Dorset, close to where many of the trials took place. She had a miscarriage, then gave birth to a son with cerebral palsy. Janette's three sisters, also born in the village while the tests were being carried out, have also given birth to children with unexplained problems, as have a number of their neighbours.
The local health authority has denied there is a cluster, but Orman believes otherwise. He said: 'I am convinced something terrible has happened. The village was a close-knit community and to have so many birth defects over such a short space of time has to be more than coincidence.'
Successive governments have tried to keep details of the germ warfare tests secret. While reports of a number of the trials have emerged over the years through the Public Records Office, this latest MoD document - which was released to Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker - gives the fullest official version of the biological warfare trials yet.
Baker said: 'I welcome the fact that the Government has finally released this information, but question why it has taken so long. It is unacceptable that the public were treated as guinea pigs without their knowledge, and I want to be sure that the Ministry of Defence's claims that these chemicals and bacteria used were safe is true.'
The MoD report traces the history of the UK's research into germ warfare since the Second World War when Porton Down produced five million cattle cakes filled with deadly anthrax spores which would have been dropped in Germany to kill their livestock. It also gives details of the infamous anthrax experiments on Gruinard on the Scottish coast which left the island so contaminated it could not be inhabited until the late 1980s.
The report also confirms the use of anthrax and other deadly germs on tests aboard ships in the Caribbean and off the Scottish coast during the 1950s. The document states: 'Tacit approval for simulant trials where the public might be exposed was strongly influenced by defence security considerations aimed obviously at restricting public knowledge. An important corollary to this was the need to avoid public alarm and disquiet about the vulnerability of the civil population to BW [biological warfare] attack.'
Sue Ellison, spokeswoman for Porton Down, said: 'Independent reports by eminent scientists have shown there was no danger to public health from these releases which were carried out to protect the public.
'The results from these trials_ will save lives, should the country or our forces face an attack by chemical and biological weapons.'
Asked whether such tests are still being carried out, she said: 'It is not our policy to discuss ongoing research.'
At 850, Moscow Takes A Bow
Published: 17 August 1997
...Over the last 18 months, the capital has been sandblasted, scrubbed, repaved, repainted, replanted and rebuilt to sparkle like a shining theme park reinvention of itself -- Moscowland.
By Sept. 5, prostitutes, drunks, beggars and other undesirables will have been dragged off subways and street corners and deported beyond the city limits. So far this year, crime is down 20 percent, and Mr. Luzhkov has bullied all shop owners in the city center to clean their storefronts and put up red, blue and white anniversary displays. Cleaning crews will be scrubbing cement pavements until they sparkle like stone. To show he can even browbeat nature, Mr. Luzhkov has ordered that on each day of the anniversary, special military planes seed the clouds above Moscow to avert rain.
The most aggressively advertised special anniversary events are a light show by Jean-Michel Jarre and a concert by Pavarotti. But the real windfall for foreign tourists is a chance to see the city after a $50 million face lift...
Weather modification: The rain makers
Published: 30 April 2008
Whether it is the Chinese firing weapons into the sky to make it rain, or the Thai government setting up a "royal rainmaking project", the science of weather modification has always had a touch of the sci-fi about it.
So it is perhaps little surprise that the effectiveness of such an eccentric area of research has always been a little foggy. Indeed, no matter how hard you try – say, through launching silver-iodide particles into clouds to make them rain – it's hard to tell how influential you're actually being as it might have happened anyway.
But now, one of the world's leading weather experts thinks that the wind surrounding weather modification is set to change. Roelof Bruintjes, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, USA, believes that weather-monitoring technology is so hot nowadays that science fiction may soon become science fact. Speaking earlier this week, he said: "Now we can measure clouds so well – even from the inside – we can get many more answers as to what the effects of man-made intervention are, and separate them from what would have happened naturally...
...make the sun shine
According to Russian media reports, that nation's military has announced that up to 12 aircraft will "disperse clouds" to "ensure good weather" over Red Square during Victory Day celebrations in Moscow early next month. Last year, the Russian Air Force claimed to have nixed cloud formations by spraying them with potent concoctions including dry ice, silver iodide and cement powder. Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky said the Air Force's "most experienced crews" would be employed to guarantee blue skies over the Kremlin...
Letter From Belgorod
Published: 14 August 2015
On May 9, the shell-shocked Eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk celebrated. It was Victory Day, the annual commemoration of Germany’s surrender to the Soviet Union in 1945. Kiev, which is struggling to escape its Soviet past, no longer treats the day as a festive occasion; for the People’s Republic of Donetsk, or DNR, the holiday was yet another opportunity to side with Russia and the Soviet Union, and against Kiev. It had been a year since the DNR had declared its independence from Kiev, following the Maidan protests—which began with then-president Viktor Yanukovych’s decision not to sign an EU Association Agreement and ended with him fleeing the country after a series of armed clashes in the center of Kiev—and a year since Kiev’s prosecutor general had classified the DNR as a terrorist organization. Thousands of people have since been killed: fighters on both sides, and civilians caught in the middle. More than a million people have been displaced, in a horrible echo of the Second World War’s mass evacuations...
...It didn’t rain on Moscow’s Victory Day parade. The Kremlin spent millions of dollars to make sure of it: A few days before the holiday, a spokesman at Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency announced that a group of planes would be ready to “attack” any rain clouds with cement particles and silver iodide. When Vladimir Putin made his speech on Red Square, he was surrounded by veterans and foreign dignitaries from China, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and Egypt, as well as Winston Churchill’s grandson, a Tory MP. Most European leaders skipped the parade to protest Russia’s actions in Ukraine. For many Russians, it looked as though the once-Allied nations had forgotten that it was the Soviet Union that rescued them from Nazism, at the cost of tens of millions of Soviet lives. Putin thanked the Allied countries graciously for their help winning the Great Patriotic War, as it is known in Russia, but had harsh words for those who were violating the postwar principles of international cooperation. Intercontinental ballistic-missile carriers rolled through the streets, and fighter jets formed a huge “70” in the sky.
It didn’t rain on Moscow’s Victory Day parade. The Kremlin spent millions of dollars to make sure of it...
Victory Day: In Moscow, Bad Weather Rains on Putin's Parade
Published: 5 September 2017
It's no coincidence that the sun always shines over Moscow on Victory Day — the Kremlin pours millions of rubles into making it happen.
Every year Russia sends military cargo jets to "seed" incoming rain clouds before they reach Moscow, a process that involves chemicals either being shot from planes or shoveled out of hatches directly onto rain clouds.
The chemicals, which include silver iodide, dry ice or cement, cause the bad weather to hit outside of the city and make sure that there are blue skies over Moscow for the parade. Russian ecologists claim that because the exposure of clouds to the chemicals is short, there is little risk of lasting environmental damage.
This year in the build up to the holiday, the Russian air force deployed nine Antonov military cargo jets to take on the bad weather, scheduled to begin flyovers around the clock starting at midnight on Tuesday, and at a cost of some 98 million rubles ($1.67 million)...
RAF rainmakers 'caused 1952 flood'
Unearthed documents suggest experiment triggered torrent that killed 35 in Devon disaster
30 Aug 2001
On August 15, 1952, one of the worst flash floods ever to have occurred in Britain swept through the Devon village of Lynmouth. Thirty five people died as a torrent of 90m tons of water and thousands of tons of rock poured off saturated Exmoor and into the village destroying homes, bridges, shops and hotels.
The disaster was officially termed "the hand of God" but new evidence from previously classified government files suggests that a team of international scientists working with the RAF was experimenting with artificial rainmaking in southern Britain in the same week and could possibly be implicated.
Squadron Leader Len Otley, who was working on what was known as Operation Cumulus, has told the BBC that they jokingly referred to the rainmaking exercise as Operation Witch Doctor.
His navigator, Group Captain John Hart, remembers the success of these early experiments: "We flew straight through the top of the cloud, poured dry ice down into the cloud. We flew down to see if any rain came out of the cloud. And it did about 30 minutes later, and we all cheered."
The meteorological office has in the past denied there were any rainmaking experiments conducted before 1955, but a BBC Radio 4 history investigation, to be broadcast tonight, has unearthed documents recently released at the public record office showing that they were going on from 1949 to 1955. RAF logbooks and personnel corroborate the evidence.
Until now, the Ministry of Defence has categorically denied knowledge of any cloud-seeding experiments taking place in the UK during early August 1952. But documents suggest that Operation Cumulus was going on between August 4 and August 15 1952. The scientists were based at Cranfield school of aeronautics and worked in collaboration with the RAF and the MoD's meteorological research flight based at Farnborough. The chemicals were provided by ICI in Billingham.
Met office reports from these dates describe flights undertaken to collect data on cumulus cloud temperature, water content, icing rate, vertical motions and turbulence, and water droplet and ice crystal formation. There is no mention of cloud seeding.
But a 50-year-old radio broadcast unearthed by Radio 4 describes an aeronautical engineer and glider pilot, Alan Yates, working with Operation Cumulus at the time and flying over Bedfordshire, spraying quantities of salt. He was elated when the scientists told him this had led to a heavy downpour 50 miles away over Staines, in Middlesex.
"I was told that the rain had been the heaviest for several years - and all out of a sky which looked summery ... there was no disguising the fact that the seedsman had said he'd make it rain, and he did. Toasts were drunk to meteorology and it was not until the BBC news bulletin [about Lynmouth] was read later on, that a stony silence fell on the company," said Mr Yates at the time.
Operation Cumulus was put on hold indefinitely after the tragedy.
Declassified minutes from an air ministry meeting, held in the war office on November 3, 1953, show why the military were interested in increasing rain and snow by artificial means. The list of possible uses included "bogging down enemy movement", "incrementing the water flow in rivers and streams to hinder or stop enemy crossings", and clearing fog from airfields.
The documents also talk of rainmaking having a potential "to explode an atomic weapon in a seeded storm system or cloud. This would produce a far wider area of radioactive contamination than in a normal atomic explosion".
UK weather modification experiments at the time presaged current practice in the US. The idea was to target "super cool" clouds, and to increase the volume of freezing water vapour particles. Most methods involved firing particles of salt, dry ice, or silver iodide, into clouds, either from an aeroplane or from burners on the ground. The clouds would then precipitate, pulled down below freezing point by the extra weight of dense particles, thus making it rain sooner and heavier than it might have done. Significantly, it was claimed that silver iodide could cause a downpour up to 300 miles away.
Many countries now use the technology, which has considerably improved during the past 50 years.
But controversy still surrounds the efficacy of these early cloud-seeding experiments. In 1955 questions were asked in the Commons about the possibilites of liability and compensation claims. Documents seen by the BBC suggest that both the air ministry and the Treasury became very anxious and were aware that rainmaking could cause damage, not just to military targets and personnel, but also to civilians.
The British Geological Survey has recently examined soil sediments in the district of Lynmouth to see if any silver or iodide residues remain. The testing has been limited due to restrictions in place because of foot and mouth disease, and it is inconclusive. However, silver residue has been discovered in the catchment waters of the river Lyn. The BGS will investigate further over the next 18 months.
Survivors of the Lynmouth flood called for - but never got - a full investigation into the causes of the disaster. Rumours persist to this day of planes circling before the inundation.
Eyjafjallajoekull eruption plume
The 2010 eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano had a huge impact on air travel, changing the assessment of risk by the aviation sector and catalyzing new lines of scientific investigation. Ash advisories derived from dispersion-model output were issued by the London VAAC, depicting the presence of ash over large parts of Europe and the North Atlantic. Based on those advisories, over 300 airports in about two dozen countries, and a correspondingly large airspace, were closed in Europe during 15-21 April 2010. This resulted in massive impacts on air travel worldwide. Over 100,000 flights were cancelled over that week, affecting 7 million passengers, and resulting in $1.7 billion USD in lost revenue to airlines according to an analysis by Oxford Economics.
To reopen airspace, European aviation authorities endorsed the creation of a new type of concentration chart advisory product that delineated hazard zones based on dispersion model output of ash concentrations. So called 'low' ash concentrations were deemed to be defined as <2-4 mg/m3. The concentration charts were adopted by air traffic management and airlines with the expectation that zones of low density ash could be transited with no or minimal risk of immediate aircraft damage providing a regime of enhanced risk assessment by airlines, including more frequent aircraft inspections, was adopted. Currently, concentration charts have only been adopted for operational use in Europe and the North Atlantic region, as outlined in Volcanic Ash Contingency Plan EUR and NAT Regions. The scientific validity and operational utility of the ash concentration charts have been questioned by international experts and therefore have not been implemented outside Europe.
The 2009 Great Britain and Ireland floods were a weather event that affected parts of Great Britain and Ireland throughout November and into December 2009. November was the wettest month across the United Kingdom since records began in 1914 and had well above average temperatures. The worst affected area in Great Britain was the English county of Cumbria. The Irish counties of Clare, Cork, Galway and Westmeath were among the worst affected areas of Ireland.
European windstorms bringing heavy rain and gale-force winds caused damage and flooding to the south of Great Britain on 13–14 November. Unsettled weather continued across the south and later to the north. On 19–20 November, many towns and villages in Cumbria and Dumfries and Galloway were affected. A number of bridges collapsed, one of which led to the death of a police officer, who was standing on the bridge when it collapsed. Another death occurred on 21 November as a canoeist was trapped against a tree near Poundsgate, on Dartmoor in Devon. In Powys, there were two deaths, at Newtown and Talybont-on-Usk.
Among the many places severely flooded was the Republic of Ireland's second largest city, Cork. For more than ten days, 40 per cent of its population were without running water after a treatment plant was affected by several metres of flood water. University College Cork was damaged and at least a week of lectures was cancelled. Courts were also disrupted, with some eventually being moved to a hotel. At the time, Taoiseach Brian Cowen described the situation in Ireland as an "ongoing emergency" that was going to get worse.
----------Abstract:
Perceived failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has prompted interest in avoiding the harms of climate change via geoengineering, that is, the intentional manipulation of Earth system processes. Perhaps, the most promising geoengineering technique is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), which reflects incoming solar radiation, thereby lowering surface temperatures. This paper analyzes a scenario in which SAI brings great harm on its own. The scenario is based on the issue of SAI intermittency, in which aerosol injection is halted, sending temperatures rapidly back toward where they would have been without SAI. The rapid temperature increase could be quite damaging, which in turn creates a strong incentive to avoid intermittency. In the scenario, a catastrophic societal collapse eliminates society's ability to continue SAI, despite the incentive. The collapse could be caused by a pandemic, nuclear war, or other global catastrophe. The ensuing intermittency hits a population that is already vulnerable from the initial collapse, making for a double catastrophe. While the outcomes of the double catastrophe are difficult to predict, plausible worst-case scenarios include human extinction. The decision to implement SAI is found to depend on whether global catastrophe is more likely from double catastrophe or from climate change alone. The SAI double catastrophe scenario also strengthens arguments for greenhouse gas emissions reductions and against SAI, as well as for building communities that could be self-sufficient during global catastrophes. Finally, the paper demonstrates the value of integrative, systems-based global catastrophic risk analysis.
System diagram of the double catastrophe scenario
6 May 2015
Researchers looking to capture the acoustic signature of thunder had to make their own lighting. A rocket fit with a grounded copper wire trail was blasted into a thundercloud so the wire could conduct an easily traceable shaft of lighting electricity.
Full Story on Live Science: http://goo.gl/4d59P9