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Climate Hackers and Rain Kings
The strange history of weather modification — and what it may mean for climate change
On Christmas, 1859, Thomas Austin gave himself a little present. He let 13 rabbits, imported from Europe, loose on his estate in Victoria, Australia. He thought it might be fun to have something to hunt.
Seven years later, in 1866, hunters killed 14,000 rabbits on his estate. The bunnies, having found suitable weather, no natural predators, and seemingly limitless food to eat, bred like, well, rabbits.
Austin’s mistake was the beginning of the rabbit conquest of Australia. The little mammals colonized two-thirds of the country in 50 years. Though they may have been cute on an individual level, by the hundreds of millions they were a plague. Rabbits crowded out native species, ate up farm animals’ food, altered ecosystems, and caused erosion. They cost Australian farmers their income and, in some cases, their sanity.
Australians tried all sorts of things to control the rabbit population. They shot them, of course, but that wasn’t effective enough. They bulldozed and blasted rabbit warrens. They poisoned and trapped them. When these means of killing didn’t work, they tried to fence off parts of Australia from the rabbit hordes, but these efforts weren’t entirely successful…