I think the honest answer is that we're weak where it looks dramatic and strong where it looks boring.
A single mature hurricane releases heat at around 6×10¹⁴ watts, according to NOAA. All of humanity's energy use is roughly 20 terawatts. So one storm runs on about thirty times everything we burn, which is why nobody has ever steered one. Project Stormfury tried for twenty years and mostly learned that the clouds didn't have enough supercooled water for seeding to matter.
Cloud seeding does work a little, in narrow conditions. The SNOWIE project in Idaho tracked seeded snow all the way to the ground, but only in supercooled winter clouds over mountains, and the extra snow was modest and local. Nobody can make rain fall out of a blue sky.
Where we really do move the atmosphere is the boring part: changing what the air absorbs and reflects. The IPCC puts human radiative forcing at about 2.7 watts per square metre. Spread over the whole planet that's around 1,400 terawatts, seventy times our entire energy use, and the sun pays for all of it. Pinatubo showed it works the other way too. Its sulphur dioxide cooled the planet by about half a degree for a year or two.
So we have no control over weather events, small nudges on local rain and snow, and a huge influence on climate that nobody can aim. If anyone really had a weather machine, it would be a lot quieter and a lot less useful than the Rothschild story suggests.
I think the honest answer is that we're weak where it looks dramatic and strong where it looks boring.
A single mature hurricane releases heat at around 6×10¹⁴ watts, according to NOAA. All of humanity's energy use is roughly 20 terawatts. So one storm runs on about thirty times everything we burn, which is why nobody has ever steered one. Project Stormfury tried for twenty years and mostly learned that the clouds didn't have enough supercooled water for seeding to matter.
Cloud seeding does work a little, in narrow conditions. The SNOWIE project in Idaho tracked seeded snow all the way to the ground, but only in supercooled winter clouds over mountains, and the extra snow was modest and local. Nobody can make rain fall out of a blue sky.
Where we really do move the atmosphere is the boring part: changing what the air absorbs and reflects. The IPCC puts human radiative forcing at about 2.7 watts per square metre. Spread over the whole planet that's around 1,400 terawatts, seventy times our entire energy use, and the sun pays for all of it. Pinatubo showed it works the other way too. Its sulphur dioxide cooled the planet by about half a degree for a year or two.
So we have no control over weather events, small nudges on local rain and snow, and a huge influence on climate that nobody can aim. If anyone really had a weather machine, it would be a lot quieter and a lot less useful than the Rothschild story suggests.