It only takes one rained-out Little League game to make a sports lover resent Mother Nature. Now some of today’s scientists and other bigwigs have taken it upon themselves to say: “no more.” Not content to stand idly by and let something as mundane as climate dictate the success of our sports games, they have instead turned to geoengineering – intentional manipulation of the Earth’s environment – to fight back.
Qatari engineers recently announced a project to develop solar-powered artificial clouds to shade the 2022 World Cup from the country’s unforgiving summer sun. One remotely steerable cloud comes with a hefty price tag – $500,000 – just to cool the field by 10 degrees.
This isn’t the first time humans have battled weather for the sake of a sporting event. Click through the gallery below to read more about Qatar’s clouds, Chinese rain-battling techniques and other ways geoengineering has been deployed for the love of the game.
Click to launch an in-depth look at sports’ craziest geoengineering projects.
