S2:E2 - Who owns the weather?
Tom proposed the topic of geoengineering and weather modification, thinking that it sat at an interesting convergence of environment, technology, and truth. Asim agreed. And then Tom panicked, because he realised he had no idea where he actually stood on the issue.
That uncertainty turns out to be the most honest starting point imaginable. Because geoengineering sits at the exact intersection of two things that should make any reasonable person feel unsettled: a technology with the potential to reshape planetary systems, and a political class that has repeatedly shown it cannot be trusted with far less power than that.
It’s Always Been a Thing
Before getting into the science and the politics, the conversation begins somewhere unexpected — with a shaman on a clifftop in Sedona, Arizona.
Tom describes a ritual he witnessed there: a group in the desert, a shamanic drum, a man calling upon the forces of the universe. And then, on an absolutely still day, the wind arriving on cue. Tom still can’t fully explain it. Maybe coincidence. Maybe, he suggests, something more interesting: that collective focused intention — when humans gather and really mean something together — can have effects on the world that we don’t fully understand.
It sounds strange. But it’s a useful frame for what follows, because the desire to influence weather isn’t some fringe modern obsession. It’s ancient. Indigenous cultures around the world developed rituals for it. It seems, as Asim puts it, “baked into our psyche.” The question was never really whether humans would try to control the weather. It was always how, and who would be in charge.
Geoengineering as a Climate Pill
Asim arrives at what becomes the episode’s most useful metaphor early on: geoengineering is the pharmaceutical drug of climate change.
The analogy holds up with uncomfortable precision. We have a chronic condition — not an acute one — caused by deep structural problems in how we produce energy, grow food, and organise industrial society. The responsible thing to do is the hard thing: address the root causes, change behaviour, do the difficult work. Instead, geoengineering offers a pill. Take this and carry on. No lifestyle changes required.
And like pharmaceuticals in chronic disease management, it has unintended side effects. It partially solves one problem while potentially creating several others. And perhaps most importantly, it gives everyone a convenient excuse not to have the harder conversation. The fossil fuel industry can get behind it because it means they don’t have to change. Environmentalists can tentatively support it because at least it’s something. Everyone avoids the actual problem. Geoengineering is the culture of 18 pills every morning, applied to a planet.
What Has Actually Worked?
There’s a blunt question underneath all the theory: has any of this ever succeeded?
When Asim went looking for examples of geoengineering that had genuinely worked at scale, he found essentially one: the recovery of the ozone layer. But as both Tom and Asim quickly agree, that doesn’t really count. We didn’t engineer a solution — we just stopped doing the thing that was causing the damage. We removed CFCs and the planet healed itself. It was a root cause fix, not a technological patch.
Almost everything else in the historical record, from Mao’s catastrophic campaign to eliminate sparrows (which wiped out the main predator for locusts, triggering a massive locust plague that killed millions) to botched cloud seeding experiments to redirected hurricanes, sits somewhere between “inconclusive” and “disaster.”
Cloud seeding is the small-scale version that is already common — about 50 countries regularly use it to try and make it rain. China does it. Dubai does it. Skiers in the Alps want it. And even at that modest level, it comes with its own troubling question: if you trigger rain here, do you steal it from somewhere else? “Rain theft” is apparently a well known concept among rural communities in China who are downstream from the cloud seeding that benefits cities.
Contrails and the 9/11 Study
One of the episode’s more quietly startling moments comes when Asim mentions the research that followed the grounding of all US commercial flights after the September 11 attacks. With no planes in the sky for three days, researchers found measurable changes in the diurnal temperature range across America — around two degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 1.1°C). The contrails from normal air traffic, it turned out, were meaningfully affecting the climate in ways nobody had been paying close attention to.
This was before anyone invented the term “geoengineering.” Planes had been inadvertently modifying the weather for decades — not through deliberate spraying of anything, but simply by being there. The water vapor in jet engine exhaust creates a greenhouse effect high in the atmosphere that cools the daytime and warms the night time, reducing the day to night temperature variation. It doesn’t last long, but there are now vastly more planes than there were fifty years ago. The effect scales.
Airlines are now running trials to see if they can modify flight paths to reduce contrail formation. Which is, in a quiet way, a form of intentional geoengineering — in reverse.
Chemtrails, Distrust, and the Liar’s Paradox
This is where the conversation gets more uncomfortable, because it asks a harder question: why do 40% of Americans at least partially believe in chemtrails (the idea that governments are spraying toxic chemicals from aeroplanes)? And why does this suspicion seem to be growing even in the UK and Europe?
Tom’s answer: conspiracy theories are not the cause of distrust in institutions. They’re a symptom of it.
If your government had always been transparent, had always done what it said, had always put the public interest first — most people would just get on with their lives and not worry about what’s coming out of aeroplanes. But the historical record is not like that. It’s full of documented cases of governments conducting experiments without consent, lying about the results, and then only acknowledging the truth decades later when there was no one left to sue.
The 1952 Lynmouth flood in Devon killed 35 people. The rain was described as biblical. Local communities knew the RAF had been running cloud seeding experiments nearby that week. The RAF denied it. It later emerged they had been running those experiments. The two things were never conclusively connected, but the denial had already happened. The project, incidentally, was called Operation Witch Doctor.
In 1947, the US government tried to redirect a hurricane through a project called Project Cirrus. The hurricane made a sharp left turn and devastated Georgia instead. The official position was that it had nothing to do with the cloud seeding. A scientist on the project said he had 99% confidence that it did. The government couldn’t admit it, because admitting it meant liability for the deaths and destruction.
Then there’s the US military’s use of weather modification in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos — operations designed to extend the monsoon season and flood supply routes. This was real, documented, and militarily intentional. It eventually led, in 1977, to the United Nations Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD), in which countries including the US, UK, and Russia agreed never to use weather modification as a weapon of war. An acknowledgement, if nothing else, that the technology was serious enough to need a treaty.
As Asim notes, a healthy distrust of any institution means that as soon as they sign a treaty saying “we won’t do this,” your main response is probably: so you were doing this.
Climate Global Control Trading LLC
The episode’s most surreal moment arrives with Tom’s deep dive into a Dubai-based company called Climate Global Control Trading LLC — a name he repeatedly admits he cannot say without laughing.
The website design is terrible [https://climateglobal.net/]but the content on it is intriguing. There are news clips, case studies, and even a notarised multi-million dollar contract with the government of Balochistan. The company claims it is not doing cloud seeding. It claims instead to have an energy-based technology — a series of antenna deployed around the Indian Ocean that can beam energy into the upper atmosphere and both generate and direct storms.
And they take credit for Cyclone Ashooba.
Their account, as Tom reads it, is that they were hired by the UAE government to reduce temperatures and bring rain. So they created a cyclone in the Indian Ocean, directed it towards Oman where it burned off its worst energy, then steered the gentler remnants over the UAE, where it delivered precipitation and cooling without significant damage. They describe this as a successful delivery of their contract.
Tom is genuinely unsure whether to laugh or be horrified. Probably both. His spidey-sense tells him that this might be an elaborate scam and the technology not really exist, but he wonders how we can be sure.
It matters because it connects to something that does exist. HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, in Alaska is a vast array of antenna used to beam energy into the ionosphere. The US government has always said it’s purely for scientific research but conspiracy theories have long claimed that it has other applications, including weather modification. The point isn’t whether that’s true. The point is that when a company in Dubai is openly advertising an energy-based antenna system for generating and steering storms, and the US military has the largest ionosphere research antenna array in the world, and a 1996 US Army paper is titled Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025 [https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA333462] — the connective tissue becomes very hard to ignore.
Who Has the Means, Motive, and Opportunity?
Tom runs through the classic investigative framework.
Means: Military fleets of aircraft, balloons, drones, antenna arrays, classified research budgets. Yes.
Opportunity: The ability to act in secret, within black projects, outside the reach of civilian oversight or commercial law. Yes.
Motive: This is where it gets interesting. If you could trigger a drought in a region that supplies a key commodity, then bet against that commodity in financial markets, you would make extraordinary amounts of money for a relatively modest investment. Asim puts it even more directly: you don’t even need to run the operation yourself. You just need to know someone who is, and place the trade accordingly. Insider trading of the most extreme kind, at planetary scale.
And then there is the simpler motive of geopolitical power. Imagine, as Asim suggests, weather modification as a tariff negotiation tool. Give us what we want, or your harvest fails.
The Rules-Based Order, Such As It Was
The episode ends in the broader landscape of institutional collapse, because geoengineering cannot be understood apart from it.
Mark Carney, now Prime Minister of Canada, recently gave a speech at Davos [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flsgJe8mN-A] in which he suggested, with unusual candour, that the rules-based international order has effectively ended. Once one major actor starts openly breaking the rules, the logic of compliance unravels everywhere. Countries do what they need to do. And ultimately, Tom argues, individuals do what they need to do — and we shouldn’t be surprised when the slow erosion of faith in institutions shows up in people’s daily behaviour.
Asim’s conclusion, and perhaps the most honest one the episode offers, is that the answer to institutional failure isn’t a better institution. It’s decentralisation. Smaller communities. Local accountability. Less reliance on systems that can be captured, corrupted, or weaponised by a single powerful actor. Not libertarianism in the loaded political sense, but something more pragmatic: if you can’t trust centralised power with this much leverage over human life, then the answer is to distribute it more evenly.
It’s not an optimistic conclusion exactly. But it might be a realistic one.
As ever, we’d love to hear your thoughts.
* Should anyone be allowed to manipulate the weather, and under what circumstances?
* Do you think there’s legitimate reason to believe governments (or other groups) are conducting undisclosed atmospheric experiments?
* Does the history of weather modification change how you think about chemtrail theories?
* And what would it actually mean to decentralise the kind of decisions that currently get made in the dark?
Leave us a comment — and if you found this episode thought-provoking, please do share it with someone who might too.
Thanks for tuning in!
— Tom and Asim
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