The US barely bothers to track geoengineering. What could go wrong?
People have been trying to manipulate the weather for thousands of years, whether through magic, superstition, or science. In the 1840s, a school teacher suggested that the United States regulate the climate by starting massive, weekly wildfires. Fifty years later, researchers tried to “shock” the clouds with cannon fire, and in 1989 an engineer proposed sending a 1,200-mile-wide glass parasol into space to reflect solar radiation and cool the planet.
Although many of the craziest ideas for controlling nature were eventually abandoned, what we now call geoengineering remains a strange, somewhat ad hoc field to this day. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, found that the federal government still does not have sufficient oversight over weather modification activities, nor is it “fully meeting its responsibilities for maintaining and sharing weather modification reports.” The two problems are linked, the report said. Lack of oversight could allow malicious and harmful geoengineering operations to proceed largely unsupervised, while lack of transparency could fuel public misinformation and confusion about these activities.
A better database on geoengineering operations that is easier for the public to view could go a long way toward dispelling this misinformation and improving oversight, said Karen Howard, GAO’s director of science and technology assessment.
“If people had a place they could refer to, where they could see, ‘Oh, this place in Idaho, they’re seeding clouds to try to increase the snow at a ski resort,’ that would address what’s actually happening, not what people are imagining,” Howard said. “I think it could help a lot.”
One of the biggest oversight gaps is that state agencies or companies conducting weather modifications often don’t even know they are required to report their activities to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to Howard. Public awareness around geoengineering by the federal government has been patchy and insufficient, she said, and even when operators take steps to document their efforts, the forms they must fill out are confusing and outdated.
“They don’t always adapt to the newer, emerging technologies like solar geoengineering,” Howard said. “So the submissions have errors or missing information, and there are a lot of missing reports that we know should be in there but aren’t.” The shapes, the report said, “have remained virtually unchanged since 1974” despite growing interest in solar geoengineering, and NOAA officials told the GAO they make no effort to search for unreported weather modification experiments.
To complicate matters further, once the reports are filed, NOAA does virtually nothing with them. “They basically throw them as is into the database,” Howard said. “They don’t check if they’re complete, if they’re accurate, anything like that.”
The riskiest and most ambitious geoengineering ideas to combat climate change tend to get the most media attention. Stratospheric aerosol injection, for example, involves spraying small particles like sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight. Marine cloud brightening involves projecting sea salts into low-lying clouds to cool a smaller area. Others have proposed covering the Arctic with tiny glass beads to reflect sunlight and prevent glaciers from melting. Startups such as Make Sunsets — which sells cooling credits to its customers in exchange for releasing balloons filled with sulfur dioxide — are beginning to proliferate, but overall, solar geoengineering is still only happening on a very small scale. According to the GAO report, out of 1,084 reports in NOAA’s public database as of February 2025, only four describe solar geoengineering activities.
But small-scale cloud seeding operations – which involve injecting small particles like silver iodide into clouds to cause rain or snow – have been going on for more than 80 years now.
As drought intensifies and water demand increases in the West, states have ramped up cloud seeding efforts as a way to get around water shortages. Although cloud seeding is not a miracle cure, it is considered a relatively simple way to increase precipitation by about 5 to 20 percent.
Conspiracy theories around cloud seeding have gained a foothold in recent years, however. Most of them claim that the government is distributing harmful chemicals and trying to control the weather with chemtrails, which are nothing more than water vapor left behind by planes that freezes in the cold air. After deadly flooding in Texas last July, false claims that the flooding was caused by a regional cloud-seeding operation days earlier spread widely, attracting the attention of politicians like then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Green, a Republican from Georgia, who introduced a measure in the House of Representatives that would make weather modification a crime.
Green’s bill, called the Clear Skies Act, ultimately died in committee, but as of last July, 30 states had introduced similar bills, with Tennessee, Florida and Louisiana banning the technology. Wyoming narrowly avoided such a ban in February, after state water managers explained they risked facing severe water restrictions as reductions aimed at managing dwindling supplies from the Colorado River took effect. Brad Brooks, director of Cheyenne, Wyoming’s Public Utilities Board, spoke on a panel on cloud seeding last fall after legislation to stop the technology was introduced in the Wyoming House of Representatives. According to Wyoming Public Media, he warned that the city would likely have to pay for half of its current water supply if the Colorado River cuts take effect.
“We provide water to over 70,000 people,” Brooks said, “and I need to find additional water resources to make up for that deficit.” »
Cloud seeding alone cannot solve this problem. Another GAO report last year found that the process still requires additional research to determine how well it works and why. But as it stands, cloud seeding remains “a tool to increase precipitation,” said Jeff French, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wyoming. “It’s not going to solve the water problem in the West at all, but any little bit of extra water you can inject into the system is helpful, especially in a situation where we have water way overused beyond what the natural system can provide.”
Establishing clearer guidelines and expectations around geoengineering operations could help clear up some of the confusion around the technology, Howard said. GAO recommended that NOAA establish written guidelines for reviewing reports, improve the forms provided to operators, and establish a process to regularly inform state and local agencies about NOAA’s role in geoengineering oversight.
This transparency could prove essential as interest in solar engineering increases. Last July, a large-scale solar geoengineering experiment in the San Francisco Bay by University of Washington researchers was shut down by Alameda city officials, who complained that no one had informed them about the experiment in advance.
“I think there is understandable concern about [solar] geoengineering,” Howard said. “I’m not saying it’s dangerous. I’m saying we need research to know a) if it’s effective and b) if there are unintended consequences that we may not be aware of. This research is not really underway at the moment.
