TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – A Florida law that bans people from trying to modify the weather is set to officially take effect on Tuesday.
The bill (SB 56) aims to prohibit “geoengineering and weather modification activities” in the state.
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This includes releasing chemicals or substances into the atmosphere with the intent to affect factors like temperature, weather, climate or sunlight intensity.
During a Senate committee meeting earlier this year, the bill’s sponsor — Sen. Ileana Garcia, R-Miami — said the law would also repeal “outdated” statutes under state law.
“The bill repeals several sections of Florida law related to outdated weather modification licensing and reporting requirements,” Garcia explained. “These statutes were originally enacted in an era where weather modification was seen as a potential scientific tool. But they no longer serve a practical purpose.”
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Since 1957, the state has required a license for weather modification activities, with penalties for not following the law including a fine of up to $500.
However, this law prohibits those sorts of activities altogether, ramping up the fine to a maximum of $100,000. Any funds collected from these fines would then go toward addressing air pollution.
But in response to the legislation, Sen. Lori Berman, D-Boynton Beach, probed Garcia on whether these sorts of activities have actually taken place in Florida.
“Have there been any documented cases in Florida of the type of activities described in the bill?” she asked.
“We had a method in place for permitting for weather modification, but there has not been any request in the past 10 years,” Garcia responded. “Yet, there are many of us senators who receive concerns and complaints on a regular basis regarding (chemtrails). There’s a lot of skepticism in regards to this, and basically, what I wanted to do with this is try to look for a way to separate fact from fiction.”
News 6 meteorologist Jonathan Kegges explained that chemtrails do not exist.
“What people are actually seeing are contrails from commercial jet air craft.
“Contrails or condensation trails form when hot and humid air from jet exhaust mixes with environmental air of low vapor pressure and low temperature. Vapor pressure is the amount of pressure exerted by water vapor itself. If condensation occurs, conversion to liquid from gas, the contrails will become visible. Since air temperatures are very cold, only a small amount of liquid is needed for condensation to occur. Water is a normal byproduct for combustion engines.
“This is also known as a mixing cloud and is the same process as how you sometimes see your breath on a very cold winter day.
“When the air is very dry in the upper atmosphere you won’t see these contrails. However when there is at least limited moisture in the upper levels of the atmosphere, contrails from jet aircraft will form and linger. These contrails linger because of the very cold temperatures,” Kegges said.
Garcia added that the law is meant to make Florida residents more “comfortable” in the knowledge that geoengineering will not be allowed to happen in the state.
During the same meeting, though, Augustus Doricko — CEO of Rainmaker, a cloud-seeding geoengineering startup — touted the potential benefits of cloud seeding.
“We’re a cloud-seeding company that is enhancing precipitation via advanced radar and also drones for the sake of supplementing water supplies for farms, cities, reservoirs and wildlife throughout the United States,” he said.
While Doricko said he wasn’t there to oppose the “spirit of the bill,” he claimed it could get in the way of movements like his that seek to make water more available in places that have a tough time getting enough.
The bill was ultimately approved and signed into law earlier this month.
Now, it’s set to take effect on July 1, alongside over 120 other laws.
WHAT IS GEOENGINEERING?
According to Legislative analysts, examples of geoengineering are as follows:
- Cloud Seeding — A process using tiny particles like silver iodide to trigger the formation of ice crystals in clouds, causing precipitation
- Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) — Deliberate, large-scale actions aimed at lowering global average surface temperatures by increasing the reflection of sunlight away from the Earth.
- Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) — A strategy that involves injecting small reflective aerosols like sulfate into the stratosphere to increase the reflection of incoming sunlight.
- Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) — A strategy for adding aerosol to the lower atmosphere over ocean regions to increase the reflectivity of low-lying marine clouds.
- Cirrus Cloud Thinning — A strategy for modifying the properties of high-altitude ice clouds to increase the transmission of outgoing terrestrial radiation to space.
- Surface Albedo Enhancement — Increasing the reflectivity of surfaces through things like white roofs or land-cover changes.
- Space-Based Methods — Proposed methods have considered large “mirrors” in space to reflect sunlight.
The analysis notes that federal officials researched SRM in 2023 as a means to possibly address climate change, specifically the SAI and MCB methods.
Meanwhile, cloud seeding has been used primarily to prompt snowfall over mountainous areas. However, the technique has been explored historically in the hopes of potentially weakening major storms and hurricanes.
“If successfully deployed, cloud seeding can potentially replenish reservoirs and aquifers, and improve agricultural productivity,” the analysis reads. “However, several challenges hinder the development and effective implementation of cloud seeding, including limited scientific understanding, uncertain environmental impacts, and inadequate data collection.”
Per legislative analysts, silver iodide doesn’t pose a threat at current levels, but a more widespread use could potentially have other environmental or health concerns.
IS GEOENGINEERING HAPPENING?
According to the NOAA, there have been claims that the government has been pursuing weather modification activities to strengthen or steer hurricanes into specific parts of the country.
However, the NOAA declared last year that the technology to create, destroy or modify a hurricane doesn’t yet exist, meaning these claims are largely inaccurate.
Furthermore, the NOAA announced that SRM is not happening at scale anywhere in the world.
As for cloud seeding, the agency reports that it is often practiced privately to help generate snow in some areas or replenish water reservoirs in desert regions of the U.S.
The NOAA supported research to determine whether cloud seeding could modify the intensity of hurricanes between 1962 and 1982, though the research was unsuccessful, and the project was ultimately discontinued.
“NOAA has not attempted to modify hurricane intensity and participate in cloud seeding since,” the agency’s website reads.
The NOAA is continuing to perform research on what potential impacts geoengineering may have. For more information, visit the NOAA’s website here.