SoTA Weather Control & Geo-engineering Hackathon

​The Society for Technological Advancement (SoTA) is organising a hackathon on 31st May and 1st June focused on geoengineering and weather control. This is a frontier field of work mired in controversy and high levels of uncertainty. What is certain, however, is that the current pace of decarbonisation is too slow to prevent anthropogenic climate change.

​While a combination of global and localised interventions to cool our rapidly warming planet (“geoengineering”) and modify more frequent and severe extreme weather events (“weather control”) will not address the causes of climate change, it could help to delay its effects and buy us more time to decarbonise and reduce atmospheric GHG levels.

​Currently, parts of the scientific community actively oppose any attempts to deepen our knowledge and understanding of these ideas. They argue it is a distraction from decarbonisation and could create moral hazard by reducing incentives to accelerate these efforts. But there is little evidence to support this prediction. We believe instead that more talented people should be thinking about and working to address more legitimate concerns about the development and use of geoengineering and weather control technologies now and in future.

​Our motivation with this hackathon is to allow you to explore these three legitimate concerns: Can we accurately measure the effects of these technologies and safely control them? Do we know how they can be practically implemented and scaled up? And ultimately, how can we ensure that their potential use is sensibly and fairly governed?