What if we make it rain? We know that in the heart of the Dust Bowl, the terrible drought that turned the American plains into dust fields in the 1930s, rain makers, half-scientists, half-charlatans, vowed to dynamit clouds in the hope of causing showers. Despite the limited – to put it mildly – effectiveness of such methods, the desire to control the weather never diminished.
After World War II, Nobel laureate in chemistry Irving Langmuir marveled at the excitement of precipitation by dropping various substances into cumulonimbus clouds. the so-calledcloud seeding It is now used around the world, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, to the point where some military experts fear for the future of true weather warfare. In 2018, an Iranian general once accused Israel “Flights of clouds and snow”.
In France, too, these methods have a history. In the 1960s and 1970s, in the heart of the Pyrenees, the physicist Henri Dessens installed a “meteotron”, the operation of which sums up all the absurdities of the Anthropocene: hoping to create a cloud, thanks to the rise of a column of hot air and particles, he turns giant oil burners on the plateau of Lannemezan. The experience was cut short, but not Henri Dessens’ dream, which was summed up in his book La Maîtrise des climats, published in 1968.. with “minimum power input”And We can
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