Climate nd
Climate policy | Cloudseeding against forest fires: a technical act of desperation
Kurt Stenger on measures against the forest fires in Indonesia
Deutsch (original) ·Auto-translated to English
Fire in a peat bog area on Sumatra Photo: dpa/AP/Muhammad Hatta Devastating vegetation fires have been raging in Indonesia for months and, despite the tireless efforts of disaster control, they simply cannot be brought under control due to the lack of rain. Now the government wants to ensure rainfall through a decades-old technical process called cloud seeding. Clouds are “vaccinated” with dry ice and sodium chloride from airplanes.
However, physicists consider the benefit to be small. The amount of water obtained is small, and the targeted triggering of precipitation in one region means that less water arrives elsewhere, which can harbor considerable potential for conflict. And then the rainwater is also contaminated with the vaccine substance. In the best case scenario, the procedure can support extinguishing work in individual places.
Crucially, cloud seeding does not change the weather conditions that cause rain to form. Only an intensified fight against climate change worldwide would be truly effective. And there needs to be local political decisions, legal action, economic decisions and environmental protection priorities, as can be seen in Indonesia. The main trigger for the fires here is a dangerous mix of extreme drought and slash-and-burn agriculture to create new cash crop plantations.
The trend is going in the other direction. As climate change worsens, technical measures are increasingly being used. According to the UN, around 50 countries are experimenting with cloud seeding alone, especially China and Russia. But as we can now see in Indonesia, this is nothing more than an act of desperation.
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