Large-scale weather manipulation to start in Hungary

As Index.hu notes, from the spring on, Hungary will subjugate hail. Weather will be manipulated a little, but it will be for everyone’s benefit of tens of billions of forints per year, at least the promise is so. Sounds like sci-fi? Testing had been going on in a factory in Southern Transdanubia for 25 years.

In the May of 2018, the national system for restraining damage done by hailstone will be launched. Hungarian agriculture will save tens of millions of forints yearly with it, declared the competent Secretary of State last year.

In practice, this means that 984 generators will be installed around the country, which will evaporate silver-iodide into the air, preventing hail and the damage it causes.

The chemical will fall with the rain and will merely be absorbed in the ground. It will cost 1.8 billion HUF plus one and a half billion on a yearly basis for upkeep.

It all started with Vonnegut – not the famous writer, but his brother, dr. Bernard Vonnegut, researcher of the atmosphere. He was the first with his research team to evoke and observe the phenomenon of cloud seeding in the GE laboratory in 1946. This means they brought forth rain and snow from an artificial cloud using different substances such as salt or silver-iodide.  Contemporary American press created a sensation from Vonnegut’s scientific results, but it soon turned out that realising the theory is not as easy as completing in a laboratory. Some also voiced doubts about intervening the course of nature.

Experiments have continued and at the end of the sixties, CIA used cloud seeding as a weapon in the Vietnam war.

It was called the Popeye operation. Americans tried to manipulate the monsoon to make rains longer and stronger, making it harder to move for the Vietnamese. Documents disengaged from encryption prove that the attempt was successful. In 1977, an international agreement abolished weather manipulation for military purpose.

Civil cloud seeding has grown into an industry ever since. According to Bloomberg’s synopsis, 52 countries are occupied with it.

China is the most important country involved, where cloud seeding is government coordinated and hundreds of millions are spent on bolstering the agriculture with watering brought about this way and cleaning big cities’ polluted air with huge rainfalls.

There has been a scientific debate on the measure of the effectiveness of the method, but beyond dispute, it works. Hail subjugating is a by-product of cloud seeding.