Report Date: 1996 Jul 01
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA333462
In 2025, US aerospace forces can own the weather by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. It provides opportunities to impact operations across the full spectrum of conflict and is pertinent to all possible futures. The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for the use of a future weather modification system to achieve military objectives rather than to provide a detailed technical road map. A high risk, high reward endeavor, weather modification offers a dilemma not unlike the splitting of the atom While some segments of society will always be reluctant to examine controversial issues such as weather modification, the tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our own peril. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather modification offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary. Some of the potential capabilities a weather modification system could provide to a war fighting commander in chief CINC are listed in table 1. Technology advancements in five major areas are necessary for an integrated weather modification capability 1 advanced nonlinear modeling techniques, 2 computational capability, 3 information gathering and transmission, 4 a global sensor array, and 5 weather intervention techniques. Some intervention tools exist today and others may be developed and refined in the future.
Cool to find your response!
I agree overall on your deforestation point, being a Forest Thing myself...but the bigger question in my mind is, how did swidden agriculture work so well for so many thousands of years--with cycles of reforestation built into the system--but then didn't work (apparently) elsewhere/other systems? What is the force/set of conditions that lets a Forest heal/restore? Can Forest/soil die of despair? Is there something external, like say the electric potential of the clearcut changes things so badly that it can't restore itself?
I think about this a lot, living in the middle of the Clearcut MonocropTree Farm Belt (PNW).
Lerner's book--I didn't see it till the '00s. Just prior to that, I was working at an NGO that had an AGW program area, among others. I started asking questions about solar climate forcing; they were hellbent on the IPCC model and on setting up a global regime of carbon taxation.
Solar forcing was something my father, uncle, and grandfather had discussed (from their youths in the 1930s-40s, when so much amazing science was happening, prior to the Big Standard Model Academic/Media/Foundation Shutdown).
I was too young to connect much with all that, but it stayed with me. Especially remember them talking about Arrhenius and his lab and students, which today I assume would have included Hannes Alfven (Lerner's topic's proponent) and later Alfven's student Anthony Peratt?
Point being, this was a discussed topic by just regular smart people, prior to the 1960s or so. A bit of it stuck with me. In that job I started asking those questions ("What role does the sun play in climate forcing? How can that be characterized alongside human activity forcing?"). MAN was I shut down hard and fast.
I moved on.
One of the most profoundly formative moments in my EU awakening was that video from I think around 2005, "Peratt and Petroglyphs." In laying out his talk, Peratt notes that when he was approached by Dave Talbott, who showed him photos of petroglyphs Talbott and others thought might be atmospheric plasma phenomena recorded by our (probably terrified) ancestors. Peratt said he was astonished because he hadn't seen those petroglyphs in an unclassified setting and asked "what vault did you get these from?" Talbott replied that there were millions of them everywhere on earth.
Peratt in my view thus quietly acknowledged that there were Awakened scientists within the government plasma program, using "war technology" as a cover to continue to do research that academia would not allow by then.
Sometime when I have time I'd like to find an online archive of Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and smiliar publications from the 1950s and see what was published on these topics then. My recollection is that "high energy particles/fields" were bigly studied then, and talked about in general media. But then the Standard Model took over.
Thanks for meeting on this topic; wish we saw more of it here.