Rain-making act of 1967

During the last few weeks I noticed quite persistently skies above Melbourne that didn't look normal to me. Strange shapes, sometimes iridescent rings around the sun and moon, plenty of high altitude haze, clouds that seemed to fall from the sky while I was observing them.

I upset at least a couple of people by tweeting out my observations about what's nowadays called stratospheric aerial geo-engineering, carefully avoiding the term chemtrail. I avoided this term not only because of the association with conspiracy theory, and like every properly conditioned citizen will know, a conspiracy theory can only be fantasy, but mainly because I didn't see any blatantly obvious trails in the sky.

Colours, the structure (or lack thereof), shapes and movement were the give aways for my assumption that Melbourne gets quite persistently sprayed lately, so I investigated a bit more about what could happen here. Geo-engineering, also known as solar radiation management or climate remediation, is a topic not very publicly discussed.

While nearly everyone has heard nowadays about climate change, especially after the introduction of a carbon tax to ostensibly fight it, the nice sounding terms like solar radiation management or climate remediation disguise discussions and research focussing on alternatives to a reduction of CO2 emission into the atmosphere.

In times when markets go crazy, the idea that a market instrument like the carbon tax can save our planet needs multiple leaps of faith to become credible. Especially considering the fact that Australia (or rather some industries) makes some seizable amount of money with carbon-based fuels and are exempt from this tax anyway.

It took a long time to make the illusion of climate change sufficiently real and threatening to call for 'global solutions', and once a momentum of fear is created it can be used in different ways as well. The concept of solar remediation management reminds a little bit of Mr. Burns plans to withdraw sunlight from the hometown of the Simpsons, Springfield, and potentially bears as many good intentions as this cartoon story.

With less sunlight reaching the planet, less heat will be produced, hence the planet cools down. Precipitation (clouds) achieve this effect naturally, so what could possibly go wrong when we put more clouds in the sky to reflect the sun back before it heats the planet up? Only several things....

While the cloud cover reflects some of the sunlight back, it also keeps the heat that's already there in. It also requires a lot of planes bringing the artificial clouds out, which delivers the currently accepted culprit for global warming to a place where it's most effective. Last but not least, water vapour alone wouldn't be sufficient to create artificial clouds, so an interesting mix of nano-particles (according to existing patents) does the job.

The whole picture behind geo-engineering gets really spooky, feel free to go through this rabbit hole yourself. As I can't really tell what in the world are they spraying (which is the title of a good documentary available on the youtubes), I rather focus on what can potentially be done to find out what's already happening.

I don't believe that any entity would claim: Hey, I know how to stop global warming, shall we give it a go? Experiments on that scale happen usually in secret, as no one can anticipate consequences of newly introduced technology. Controlling nature in our favour often yields more problems than solutions, cane toads and GMO might serve as example here.

Once facts have been created, the marketing machinery starts to retroactively justify what already has happened. As I've seen chemtrails not only in Australia, but also many years ago in Germany, and as they are observed at least in the US, Europe and here I happily conclude that the planetary 'rescue' by climate remediation is already in full swing.

The case of Wikileaks has shown to the world that governments do a lot without asking their citizens, and taking away 'a little bit of sunlight' might not find consent, but a lot of opposition. In 2010, the Brumby government financed a conference about Geoengineering in California. Doing this far away from home fits into the secrecy about this topic, and the willingness to create facts without letting the affected citizens even know.

During this Asilomar conference, Brumby stated that he wanted to attract geo-engineering research to Victoria, not too surprising considering the amount of energy generated by brown coal in this state. As many decisions in parliament are taken without even being discussed beforehand, or being noticed by media afterwards, exposing Victorians to aerial spraying could already happen, even quite legally.

Section 2 of the Rain-making control act 1967 defines rain-making wide enough to cover geo-engineering:

rain-making operation means the seeding or nucleating of clouds by artificial means from a manned aircraft.

Section 3 fully fits into the scope of geo-engineering:

Whenever it appears to the Minister to be desirable in the public   interest to promote rainfall or otherwise modify natural cloud      processes in any part of Victoria-

(a)  for improving primary production either generally or locally and
        whether with respect to one or more than one primary product;
   (b)  for improving water storages either generally or locally;
   (c)  for reducing fire-danger in a forest area; or
   (d)  for any other sufficient purpose-
the Minister may authorise the carrying out of rain-making          operations in respect of the area or areas concerned.

OMG, global warming is coming, and we can't stop our power plants to prevent it - so when taking the climate change paradigm as reality, geo-engineering as prevention certainly fits the 'other sufficient purpose' catch-all phrase.

The act further describes that the Victorian PM can grant away the authority for 'rain-making acts' in a way that would allow daily spraying, and informing some other ministers. (Section 5)

(3) The Minister shall cause a copy of every authority issued under this Act
to be forwarded to Minister administering the Water Act 1989, the Minister
administering the Conservation, Forests and Lands Act 1987 and the Minister
administering Part 9 of the Local Government Act 1989.

So whatever happens above us, might already have left bureaucratic traces. I have no clue which divisions of the corporation Victoria handle above mentioned acts. Yet all three acts referred to have been recently amended (within the last two years), yet my duress for legalese is depleted for now, so I will stop my research here for today.

If all the spraying isn't officially permitted by the PM, the fines for 'unauthorised' rain-making are quite mild: $1000 a day. I wonder which path to go for Freedom of Information Acts to figure out who is spraying what so obviously and persistently over our heads.