In the 1930s to 1950s, psychoanalyst and physician Wilhelm Reich developed cloudbusters, devices to control the weather by harnessing orgone. Orgone is fundamental life energy, its name derived from “orgasm” and “organism.”
This is a still from Kate Bush’s music video for her song “Cloudbusting,” which is told through the eyes of Wilhelm Reich’s son experiencing his father’s incarceration for his work with orgone.
While cloudbusting was dismissed as pseudoscience by the scientific community, clouds continue to exceed measurement and present one of the greatest challenges in modeling climate change.
We don’t know how clouds will influence the already changing state of our climate. Clouds can affect the local climate to make places hotter or cooler, either trapping heat below or reflecting sunlight away. Their formation is affected by moisture, topography, and temperature, conditions that themselves are changing.