‘To Prostitute the Elements’: Weather Control and Weaponisation by US Department of Defense

Pincus, R.

doi:10.1080/07292473.2017.1295539

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…In the case of solar geoengineering, peaceful intent can be questioned or be hard to establish ex ante, as has been the case with many environmental modification interventions. 76 As such, a role for the military in any future deployment of solar geoengineering, as well as in real or suspected attempts at its weaponization, would need to be a core focus of prohibitions. 77 Prohibiting the retrofitting of military fighter aircraft to inject aerosols into the stratosphere has already been discussed above.…”

Section: Prohibitions On Military Usementioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Non-Use Regime on Solar Geoengineering: Lessons from International Law and Governance

Gupta,

Biermann,

van Driel

et al. 2024

TEL

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In recent years, some scientists have called for research into and potential development of ‘solar geoengineering’ technologies as an option to counter global warming. Solar geoengineering refers to a set of speculative techniques to reflect some incoming sunlight back into space, for example, by continuously spraying reflective sulphur aerosols into the stratosphere over several generations. Because of the significant ecological, social, and political risks posed by such technologies, many scholars and civil society organizations have urged governments to take action to prohibit the development and deployment of solar geoengineering techniques. In this article we take such calls for a prohibitory or a non-use regime on solar geoengineering as a starting point to examine existing international law and governance precedents that could guide the development of such a regime. The precedents we examine include international prohibitory and restrictive regimes that impose bans or restrictions on chemical weapons, biological weapons, weather modification technologies, anti-personnel landmines, substances that deplete the ozone layer, trade in hazardous wastes, deep seabed mining, and mining in Antarctica. We also assess emerging norms and soft law in anticipatory governance of novel technologies, such as human cloning and gene editing. While there is no blueprint for a solar geoengineering non-use regime in international law, our analysis points to numerous specific elements on which governments could draw to constrain or impose an outright prohibition on the development of technologies for solar geoengineering, should they opt to do so.

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Section: Prohibitions On Military Usementioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Non-Use Regime on Solar Geoengineering: Lessons from International Law and Governance

Gupta,

Biermann,

van Driel

et al. 2024

TEL

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“…Reinarz (2014: 7) notes that even ‘the biological and chemical nature of this denigrated sense remains to be worked out entirely’. Moreover, the movements of various plumes of molecules through unruly atmospheres, winds and temperatures are not well understood, notwithstanding some developments in the field of military climatology or ‘black meteorology’ – the study of toxic clouds of gas, their movements and dissolution – that accompanied the emergence of chemical ‘atmosterrorism’ in the 20th century (Pincus, 2017; Sloterdijk, 2009).…”

Section: Olfactory Regimes Of Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sensate regimes of war: Smell, tracing and violence

McSorley

2020

Security Dialogue

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This article explores the fabrication of ‘sensate regimes of war’, concentrating on the typically under-analysed sense of smell. Smell is a sensory mode capable of apprehending potential threat and enmity in ways that are orthogonal to other ways of sensing. Accordingly, the organization and interpretation of olfactory sensation occupies a distinctive place in war. The article details a particular genealogy of martial olfaction, exploring the olfactory capacities of soldiers and their augmentation through various non-human and technological means in specific milieus of combat. It notes how the distinctive affordances of smell have underpinned numerous wartime practices, from tracing improvised explosive devices to militarized manhunting. These developments supplement and trouble ocularcentric accounts of martial sensation and power that concentrate on the increasingly abstracted co-production of vision and violence in wartime. They highlight rather the significance of an alternative ontology of the signature or trace of enmity, and emphasize how in particular warscapes to smell is to kill. The article concludes by arguing that critical inquiry into war would benefit from a broader theorization of all its sensate regimes right across a sensorium that is itself being continuously transformed through war.

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“…Weather monitoring is not only the domain of civilian services and institutions but also of military ones. Such interest was accelerated after the Second World War [6]. From the current point of view, military weather stations should among others often meet the requirement of an enhanced device mobility, which led to the development of so-called field or tactical weather stations (e.g., TACMET [7]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the Quality of Non-Professional Meteorological Data for Operational Purposes

Sládek,

Kolář

2023

AiMT

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Non-professional weather stations are often omitted from the networks of standard/professional stations at various spatial scales. Nevertheless, there are many tasks when such non-professional datasets can serve as the only or the most relevant available source respectively. Its acquisition costs, sufficient quality and capacity together with its moveability represent properties that should be taken into consideration when planning operational usage of various meteorological data. In this paper, we focus on the datasets of air temperatures and relative humidities measured both with professional and nonprofessional devices at nearly the same location. Four years of almost continual measurements (2016-2019) ensure robust sample of mutual comparison, which we analyze in the paper more in detail in order to assess the potential of non-professional datasets for utilization in aviation meteorology. Particular issues such as value difference patterns, large errors occurrence, temporal signal stability and seasonality are elaborated as well.

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‘To Prostitute the Elements’: Weather Control and Weaponisation by US Department of Defense

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Towards a Non-Use Regime on Solar Geoengineering: Lessons from International Law and Governance

Towards a Non-Use Regime on Solar Geoengineering: Lessons from International Law and Governance

Sensate regimes of war: Smell, tracing and violence

Assessing the Quality of Non-Professional Meteorological Data for Operational Purposes

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