The weather: bring me sunshine Depending on who you believe, this is either the meteorological equivalent of spoon bending or hubristic engineering at its finest. The notion that we can alter the weather dates from the 19th century. Then, the belching factories of the Industrial Revolution caused profound changes in weather, creating darker skies over areas with a high density of factories and increasing rainfall. Meteorologists of that era noted that public holidays tended to be sunnier and drier than working days, while during the First World War soldiers soon learned that a really big artillery barrage could trigger a thunderstorm But it wasn't until the 1940s that concerted attempts were made to change the weather. This was an era of incredible technological progress and innovation when there seemed to be no limits to what mankind could achieve. New jet aircraft were breaking the sound barrier, and scientists were making atomic weapons capable of destroying civilisation. The logical next step, according to the US physicist John von Neumann, was to take control of the skies - whoever did so, he said, would control the world. Another American, atmospheric scientist Vincent Schaefer, is credited with the first "cloud-seeding"" attempts. This involves spraying tiny crystals of substances such as silver iodide or frozen carbon dioxide into the air, using rockets or cannons from the ground or sprayed directly into the clouds from aircraft. The aim is to give nature a helping hand or hinder it. Natural raindrops are created when water vapour in a cloud forms a droplet around "condensation nuclei"" - minute dust particles in the air. It was the soot from those belching Victorian factories acting as condensation nuclei that generated those downpours. Cloud-seeding remains the basis of most weather-modification programmes. It is supposed to either create rain (as described above), or to prevent it by "super-seeding"" the cloud so that instead of raindrops, a mist of water droplets too light to fall is formed. An additional refinement would be to seed a cloud in one place, hoping that it "dumps"" its water vapour as rain before it gets a chance to do so over the place you want to stay dry. Since the 1950s, the Americans and Russians have used cloud-seeding techniques to improve irrigation in arid regions, the dustbowl states of the Midwest for example - and, in the case of the latter, to guarantee blue skies over Moscow during the annual May Day parades. At the height of the Cold War, both sides enthusiastically embraced the technology as a possible weapon - knowing that a severe drought or series of storms could cause as much damage to a nation as a bombing campaign. The Americans later used cloud-seeding during the Vietnam War, hoping to trigger torrential downpours to make life unbearable for North Vietnamese troops in the jungles. China, too, is a fan of weather-modification. More than a thousand rockets laden with iodide crystals were fired into the skies over Beijing ahead of the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony to ensure clear skies and no rain. Only yesterday Indonesia's national disaster agency deployed two helicopters to create rain to fight raging fires across hundreds of acres of carbon-rich peatland that have led to choking levels of dangerous smog in Singapore. "Hopefully, we will be able to create artificial rain," said spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho. Weather-modification technology is constantly evolving, and recently, scientists led by Jerome Kasparian of the University of Geneva have used powerful lasers to create clouds, first in the laboratory and then, fleetingly, in the skies over Berlin. The laser pulses ionise particles in the air - giving them an electrical charge - which causes them to clump together, forming condensation nuclei. Kasparian says that lasers may be a far more reliable way of making rain on demand than conventional cloud-seeding techniques. But there is one major problem, despite decades of applying the technology, no one has proved conclusively that weather modification works. Yes, it is true that the skies stayed clear over the Beijing Olympic Stadium in August 2008, but they might have stayed clear anyway. May Days in Moscow also tend to be dry and sunny. Yet such scientific scepticism and doubts over the effectiveness of the technology were never aired publicly when manipulation of the weather was still being viewed as a vital tool of war by the US and the Soviet Union. And it wasn't the only "science"" of dubious provenance that both sides invested huge sums in. Telekinesis (the movement of solid matter through mental powers) and other "psychic"" powers were also investigated. As late as the Seventies, after their defeat in Vietnam, the US military ran a top-secret laboratory in North Carolina to train a new breed of "super soldiers"" who could stop a person's heart just by thinking about it. The psychic research programme, depicted brilliantly in Jon Ronson's book (and later film) The Men Who Stare At Goats, was wound up after it was realised that it was nonsense. Many critics of weather-modification say the same thing about cloud-seeding. Even the laser experiments have been criticised, some scientists saying that the technique relies on extremely high levels of humidity and low temperatures that rarely occur in nature. Worse than it not working, some say, is the fact that attempts to make it rain or stop raining could be dangerous. Rumours persist that the devastating floods which nearly washed away the town of Lynmouth in Devon in August 1952 were caused by secret cloud-seeding experiments by the RAF. A BBC documentary on the tragedy, which cost 34 lives, claimed that some residents had smelt sulphur in the air before the flash-flood. For what it is worth, I have never met a serious meteorologist who believes that cloud-seeding has done more than perhaps trigger the occasional shower, and perhaps not even that. According to Helen Chivers of the Met Office, no form of weather modification is practised in this country. The UK is in a part of the world that sees mobile weather - weather which is driven by the jet stream and changes quickly - so, any attempt at modification would be pointless. She's right. We are a nation occupying a northerly archipelago on the edge of a large ocean, after all. We should remember that there is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.