Page 202 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

dealt only with intentionally hostile environmental modification. Moreover, it
did not prohibit research and development in the field and applied only to par-
ties that had ratified or acceded to the convention. Jozef Goldblat, vice president
of the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, commented: “Evidently,
certain powers preferred not to foreswear altogether the possibility of using envi-
62
ronmental methods of warfare and sought to keep future options open.” This
was precisely what the U.S. military wanted. The Air Weather Service was of the
opinion that the treaty’s language was so vague that it did not affect its program
in weather modification at all, and the Military Airlift Command was instructed
to retain its capabilities in this area. For the military, the deciding factor was
not the ENMoD convention but the fact that weather modification technol-
ogy had “little utility” or “military payoff ” as a weapon of war. Federal funding
for all weather modification programs was collapsing by this time, and by 1978
the Department of Defense claimed that its operational programs were directed
solely at fog and cloud dispersal, while military research funding continued in
cloud physics, computer modeling, and new observational systems. Dan Golden,
a senior scientist with the National oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NoAA) and an alumnus of Project Stormfury, observed in a 2008 interview
that ever since ENMoD, “our defense department has, at least to my knowledge,
not engaged in weather modification activities, and if you ever ask them if they
are supporting weather modification activities, they strongly deny it. However,
there have been recent workshops sponsored by the defense department on vari-
ous types of weather modification.” 63
Two conferences reviewing ENMoD have been held since its ratification, one
in 1984 and one in 1992. The 1984 review conference pushed, without success, to
expand the scope of the treaty and to reduce the threshold for violations. The
1992 meeting was influenced by the first Persian Gulf War, which included bel-
ligerent environmental acts such as torching oil wells. This conference expanded
the convention to cover herbicides and various “low-tech” interventions such as
using fire for military purposes. As of this writing, however, the ENMoD treaty
has not been used formally to accuse a country of a violation. 64
of relevance to climate engineering, ENMoD prohibits environmental
modification techniques that change “through the deliberate manipulation of
natural processes—the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, includ-
65
ing its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.”
This restriction would be relevant on the scale of climate or ocean engineering.
Today’s climate engineers emphasize the altruistic aspects of their work—saving
the world from global warming, while also declaring “war” on global warming.
They are fully aware, however, of the military implications of the techniques they

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