WHO CONTROLS CLIMATE CHANGE?

There is a “belief” among villagers in rural KwaZulu Natal, particularly women, that mining companies control the weather. I learnt of this belief during a recent visit to some of the communities affected by open coal mining. When questions were raised about where this belief stems from, villagers replied that they have observed over time that often when it is meant to rain, a plane flies overhead and after that plane has flown past the clouds that were beginning to form disappear and there is no more rain. Others said they noticed this phenomena while bridges were being built in the area. A similar thing would happen, a plane will fly past and soon after the bridge was finished it would rain again. Even more villagers linked the long draught experienced in many parts of rural KwaZulu Natal to mining activities. But how could this be? The idea itself sounded outlandish, even preposterous. I was not sure how to respond to these assertions which were presented as a matter of fact by those living in the mining communities.

The Sunshine Project: Knowledge vs Beliefs

“Since the mining companies arrived the sun has been beaming…constantly” Said the women as if advertising sunshine D margarine. Perhaps these villagers, these women were confused I thought. Maybe they conflated the idea of Climate Change with the effects of mining activities..But even then, it appeared as if they were making a highly tenuous links to activities which were not, as it were directly related to each other at best. Why would they attribute a lack of rain to opencast coal mining activities in the area? These “beliefs” sounded as convincing as the scary voodooesque rituals or mysterious cultural beliefs of rain-making with drums. My immediate assumption when I heard this was to think Climate Change and that perhaps there was a misunderstanding. While mining activities contribute to climate change via deforestration, soil erosion, water contamination (acid mine drainage) including at some mines the production of carbon dioxide or methane gas, greenhouse gases widely blamed for climate change, one could not as it were, directly attribute this exact activity to changing weather patterns in a localized area. Or at least that’s what my 8 years of environmental/climate change reporting had taught me, a fact which made explaining the difference between climate change vs changing weather patterns more difficult to explain.

Time: What difference does it make?

It was easy for me to immediately conclude that they were mistaken, until it occurred to me that I needed to change my patterns of thinking. And that perhaps it was advisable for me to suspend my own “knowledge” of the known (media) causes of climate change or the changing weather patterns and resist the temptation to dismiss their "beliefs" out of hand. As I allowed my mind to wonder freely I remembered something which made the villagers “beliefs” not as outrageous as they first sounded when I heard them. I remembered something I had heard in the news about Chinese authorities employing weather modification tactics in order to prevent the rain from spoiling the 2008 Olympic Games. In fact, it turns out that Beijing has a whole office dedicated to weather manipulation called the Beijing Weather Modification office which employs close to 40 thousand people nationwide who “seed” clouds by firing rockets and shells loaded with silver iodide in them.

Making rain: Cloud Seeding

Cloud Seeding is a relatively well known form of weather modification. The aim is to change the amount or type of rain (precipitation) that falls from clouds by dispersing substances into the air that serve as cloud condensation or ice nuclei which alter the microphysical processes within the cloud. The usual intent is to increase precipitation (rain or snow) but hail and fog suppression are also widely practiced in airports. The Chinese government’s weather modification practices are primarily aimed at hail storm prevention or making rain to end draughts. In 2008 they enlisted the office to make sure that the 2008 Summer Olympics were free of rain, by breaking up clouds heading to the stadium and forcing them to drop rain in outlying areas instead. China used 30 airplanes, 4 thousand rocket launchers and 7 thousand anti-aircraft guns in an attempt to stop the rain. But this was not the first or only country to use weather modification techniques to achieve certain goal, Russia, America and some European countries have been using weather modification techniques for different reasons of course.

Make Mud Not War: Truth is stranger than Fiction

In fact in 1977, ten years after America launched its cloud seeding operation during the Vietnam War called operation popeye from March 1967 to July 1972 which prolonged rain in the region as a way of interdicting enemy traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the United Nations launched the Environmental Modification Convention (EMOD) or the Convention on the Prohibition of military or any other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, which has been ratified by 77 countries in the world with the exception of 99.9 percent of African countries. South Africa is not a signatory to this treaty. This treaty was followed 12 years later by the universarly accepted Kyoto protocol a legal instrument under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which requires industrialized countries to cut green house gas emissions by 2 degrees based on 1992 levels. The United States of America has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, even though it is party to the UNFCCC.

Throw us into the Sea

Climate change is defined as a large-scale, long term shift in the planet’s weather patterns or average temperatures. Mind you, long term here refers to billions of years ( 4.5 Billion years to be exact). It’s a process that occurs naturally in the earths’ ecological cycle, but scientists “believe” that anthropogenic greenhouses gases or the impact of human activities such as the use of Technology, Agriculture, Manufacturing, Energy Production, mining and war have contributed to unnatural amounts of greehouse gases in the earth's atmopshere causing rapid changes in the earths climate such as: prolonged draughts, the arctic melt, floods, famine and frequent and extreme weather conditions. Climate Change has long been understood and communicated as the unintended consequence of global industrialization and or economic development, but perhaps some of it is, has been planned, strategic manipulation of weather / climatic conditions for a defined purpose and not just the unintendent by-product of industrial development, making the "belief" by villagers in rural KwaZulu Natal that mining companies control the weather not such a far feched idea at all. Or perhaps it is all as one might suspect, a fantastic coincidence.

#ClimateChange