Should we play weather god?

CALL it the fear of technology not proven yet or being plain cautious, but delegates from 193 countries voted to ban geoengineering. The technology aims to change the planet’s climate through manipulation. One example is to install mirrors in space to reflect solar radiation away from earth to reduce global warming.

The agreement reached at the 10th Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya in Japan in the last week of October read countries should ensure to ban geoengineering researches “until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities and appropriate consideration of the associated risks”. It is expected to be in force by 2012 and is not legally binding.

Environmental activists and scientists have hailed the moratorium as a way to keep individual actors from altering the climate. “Any private or public experimentation or adventurism intended to manipulate the planetary thermostat will be in violation of this carefully crafted UN consensus,” said Silvia Ribeiro, director of ETC Group, a grassroots advocacy organisation that lobbied for the ban.

CBD’s stance comes at a time when several governments and research groups are exploring ways to make geoengineering feasible. But with too few successful experiments to back it, sceptics say the technology is fraught with controversies.

Opinion sharply divided

There is no risk involved in geoengineering like cloud seeding, said Ajit Tyagi, director general of the India Meteorological Department. Cloud seeding is the oldest and most commonly used form of geoengineering. The government has allocated Rs 50 crore for experiments to increase the potential of rainfall in rain shadow areas of Maharashtra and Karnataka through cloud seeding. Tyagi’s office is conducting the experiments along with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Earth Sciences. The project which started in 2007 will finish in 2012. “There are certain false claims saying that cloud seeding procedure increases pollution which are untrue and not proven scientifically,” Tyagi added.