Is the Artificial Rain Project a joke?

At a time when 11 million people are facing starvation in the worst drought in 60 years in Northern Kenya and the Horn of Africa, a group of scientists now say they can make rain.
The scientists say they can use weather modification technology to halt the devastating drought and bring rain in northern Kenya, Somali and Ethiopia, within 90 days.
"Aquiess Global Rain Project is offering its rainfall technology to break the drought by bringing gentle soaking rain to the region within the next 90 days," says Mr David Miles, the director of operations and planning at Aquiess Global Rain Project.
He says they plan to do this as part of their humanitarian support for the region.
"We can not just sit and pretend that all is well, we have decided to come and see how we can help in alleviating the situation in this region," said Mr Miles.
So, how will they make rain?
Mr Miles says an experiment on weather modification by Aquiess revealed that "small amounts of electromagnetic energy, applied intelligently," could force change in the weather.
"This research culminated in the development of an atmospheric resonance technology that can adjust the path of rain bearing clouds," said Mr Miles.
Last week, the company met UN agencies in Rome to discuss ways of applying their weather modification technology to break the drought in the Horn of Africa.
Mahendra Shah, the Director for International Policy and Communications at Aquiess Global said the Horn of Africa project will not be the first in the world. He said they had held successful rain making projects in Australia, Qatar and the US.
"We used our rain making technology in Australia in 2005 to draw rains into Murray Darling Basin, Eastern Australia, which ended their drought within five months," says Mr Shah.
He says 50 years of research had enhanced their knowledge on the dynamics of rain making and that the world cannot watch as human beings die without doing anything.
"Aquiess is doing this project on humanitarian grounds and the project will cost $10 million (Sh900 million), which we would request the donor community to fund for the sake of ending the drought," said Mr Shah.
Mr Bill Pollock, the chairman of Aquiess Global, said whereas the top priority in the region is emergency relief aid, there can be no end to the humanitarian crisis until the rains come and the drought is broken.
"The weathermen are saying the soonest the region can get rains is in October, until then the world would have used billions of shillings in addressing the situation, but rain will be a cost-cutting measure because we can have people go back to their normal lives," said Mr Pollock.
He said that there has been a decline in the support for weather modification research in recent years because of skeptics who doubt the technology.
Mr Miles said 70 per cent of the world's rain falls into the oceans, and they were interested in diverting part of these rains to the semi-arid lands in the region.
The Weather Meteorological Organisation says the rain making technology dates back to the late 1940s. According to organisation, there are currently a dozens of nations operating hundreds of weather modification projects, particularly in arid and semi-arid regions all over the world. Kenya Meteorological Department's deputy director, Peter Ambenje, said weather modification was not new in Kenya and that it was part of Vision 2030.He said the ministry of the Environment and Mineral Resources plans to the establish a cloud chamber laboratory for rainfall enhancement and hailstone suppression.
"As a country we cannot overlook the project, we would have liked to pursue it but the problem is the cost. It is expensive to create rain, but it is part of our vision 2030," said Mr Ambenje.
Mr Ambenje said there was a complete department on the weather modification at the Metrological Department.

Anybody who lives in this region knows our rain patterns; under normal circumstances, we expect a change by October-November.
These scientists were even talking about the entire greater Horn of Africa, including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, and even Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.
These proposals, coming at a desperate time in the middle of one of the worst droughts in 60 years, was bound to appeal to the desperate governments of the region.
Weather modification technology is being discussed by scientists around the world, but it is strictly still experimental.
It raises the suspicion that developed countries, unwilling to pay the big sums of money being discussed at climate change meetings, like the forthcoming COP 17 in South Africa later this year, want to create a diversion by putting on the table an alternative to the reduction of green house gases, which have been agreed at the various COPs, including those at Cancun in Mexico at the end of 2010.
It is true that for more than 50 years, there have been efforts to control the weather without much success, even here in Kenya.
In Kericho, with silver iodide crystals, Kenyan scientists used small rockets to seed cumulonimbus clouds to reduce hail damage to the tea crop, only to shift the hail damage a few kilometres down wing to small-scale farms maize farms in nearby locations. After some years, these cloud seeding efforts were abandoned.
The country with the most extensive experiments on cloud seeding is China, but even there the results are disappointing.
Therefore the much touted Aquiess Project is a mere experiment.
If their system works so well for Qatar, or the dry areas of Australia, why not use it to bring rain to the desert before coming to offer the technology to the poor countries of East Africa?

The truth is, they want to use our region for experiments, and to offer their results, if successful, to the planned COP in South Africa later this year.

Is it not curious that the consortium should come from a major coal exporting country, namely, Australia, and an oil exporting country, namely, Qatar?
Why are they requesting the donors to bankroll their experiment?
And how do they explain to the donors how at the height of the Monsoon season in South Asia, they are going to "coax the rain clouds" to move in the opposite direction, to the Horn of Africa rather than carry their rain to India and Pakistan?
If indeed the scientists have such a forceful project, why are they afraid to take their results to the World Meteorological Organisation, and to its World Climate Research Programme, or when they were in Nairobi, why did they not go to the UNEP?
Incidentally, these two bodies are the parents of the Nobel Peace Prize winning Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.

The behaviour of weather systems in GHA countries is well understood, thanks to ICPAC and the international weather forecasting centres.
We know that the La Nina phase, which brought the intolerable drought, is beginning to wane, and come October (90 days), we may get the beginnings of a recovery.
It is, indeed, painful to play with the psychology of regional governments currently trying to respond to the worst drought in 60 years.