Intelligence agencies may be funding research into climate change to see if any new technologies that control weather could be used as potential weapons, a U.S. scientist is claiming.
Government agencies should be open about any interest in radical research into possibilities of altering the world's climate, says Rutgers University climate scientist Alan Robock.
Robock, who has studied how stratospheric aerosols might be used to cool the planet down in the way massive volcanic eruptions do, is expressing concern about who or what would be in control of such climate-altering technologies if they were to prove effective. He made his statements at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, Calif.
Last week, the National Academy of Sciences published a report on a number of approaches to tackling climate change. The report grew out of a $600,000 study partly funded by American intelligence services, which, according to Robock, have not fully explained why they have an interest in the work.
"The CIA was a major funder of the National Academies report so that makes me really worried who is going to be in control," he says.
Robock says he first became alarmed three years ago when two men who said they were with the CIA called him for an opinion about whether experts would be able to detect if forces hostile to the U.S. were attempting to manipulate the weather in the U.S.
Robock says he suspects the true purpose of the call was to get a scientific opinion on the possibility of the U.S. meddling with the weather in other countries.
The approach by the CIA made him apprehensive, he stated at the AAAS meeting.
"I'd learned of lots of other things the CIA had done that haven't followed the rules and I thought that wasn't how I wanted my tax money spent," he said. "I think this research has to be in the open and international so there isn't any question of it being used for hostile purposes."
The CIA established a Center on Climate Change and National Security in 2009, but it was closed down in 2012 amid congressional criticism.
However, the agency has said it would continue to monitor the humanitarian consequences of climate change and the impact on U.S. economic security.
The Unites States has employed weather modification before. During the war in Vietnam clouds over the Ho Chi Minh trail were seeded to extend the monsoon season in hopes of making the major supply route used by the North Vietnamese too muddy for troops and supplies to flow south. The practice was banned in 1977.
