Fire season, formerly known as summer, during 2023 in our province of British Columbia (BC) was the worst ever both in terms of number of fires and forest hectares lost to fire.
During the middle of August, statistically the sunniest time of year, BC found itself in a declared State of Emergency. At that time we had >375 forest fires ablaze.
My friend Adam and I had previously enjoyed some apparent success in both creating sunshine for a special event on rainy day and making it rain all over the entire province when much of it was burning, on August 15th, 2021 the sunniest day of the year.
This year, 2023, as August 15th approached, my intent was to determine whether our apparent success was due to one of us independently, both of us together, or, always a possibility, just coincidence. I was apparently independently successful even though things never went anywhere near to what could be expected.
The closest forest fire to us on August 12th was east of the community of Naramata far enough away to be of no threat to the community. It was the Sterling Creek Wildfire. For several nights, using the online weather and forest fire maps I attempted to create rain over the affected area. No rain occurred but when the 15th arrived the fire was downgraded to “Under Control”. It was a rather mediocre success if even that.
But, that same morning, my friend Jon posted on Facebook a request to pray for the small community of Fort Smith which was threatened by forest fires in the Northwest Territories. I wondered if it makes a difference to the success of the experiment if there’s love or compassion involved in targeting a fire with weather? I looked at the satellite weather to find that there were rain clouds in the area headed in the right general direction. All that had to be done was to get them to release their wet payload right over the town. Using the same visualization and feelings of grateful euphoria imagining the cool refreshing rain falling on my face and skin, the life giving beneficence, revitalization and general love of a rainfall already achieved I impelled the clouds to rain atop of Fort Smith and they did so within hours. That was the last we heard of it but evidently the battle against the Wood Buffalo Fire went on for quite a while. The newly-constructed fire breaks significantly changed the landscape of area but it saved the town. The rain upon request was an entirely unexpected success on that very particular day and it would lead to another unexpected success a few days later.
We had just arrived at the north-facing waterfront beach of Okanogan Lake for a swim. We sat down and watched a great cloud of smoke crossing the long lake towards us so we got up again and went home. The next morning our car was covered with ash. A forest fire at the other end of the lake, near the larger city of Kelowna, had increased 100 fold due to winds from the northwest fanning the fire like a bellows. Ten thousand households were on evacuation order and firefighters where coming in from everywhere. Buoyed by my recent apparent success with creating rain at Fort Smith I felt cocky enough to try impelling some desirable weather toward the significant need being felt by our neighbours to the north.
But when I looked at the weather weather map this time there wasn’t a cloud to be found in the entire province or within the American states to the south. The nearest clouds off the west coast were hundreds of miles out in the Pacific Ocean. There was no moisture to be found anywhere reasonably proximal in the sky.
So I changed tactics. The immanent danger was from the strong northwest wind continuing to conflagrate the city so I tried to still the wind. I felt great love for the city and undertook to hold the previously gusting wind completely still. I admit that I imagined a little rain, out of habit, but mostly I thought about bringing the peace of stillness to the area. I did this at night for two days and for those two days the wind in Kelowna was completely still. The news reported that it was a good two days for firefighting around the city but the firefighters complained that they couldn’t deploy areal water-bombing resources for lack of visibility due to the smoke.
So I opened a wind direction map online and attempted to make the wind blow again, in order to clear the smoke, back in the direction from whence it came; the northwest. Sure enough, the next day the wind blew in precisely the right direction the next day for 8 to 10 hours. The bad news was that the visibility in Kelowna, the city with the worst visibility in the world at that time, only doubled increasing from something near 2% up to only 4% leaving it too smoky still for water bombardment.
With previous attempts to influence the weather, not considering that this was the sunniest time of year, the odds were somewhat binary either turning the rain spigot on or off (not counting the grey area option of mere cloudiness). Stopping and directing the wind, however, not only added a whole new unexpected option but also involved a specific compass direction making the odds of success far more unlikely. This was a third good day for firefighters in a row.
On August 19th, the same day that I started effectively praying for Kelowna, a downgraded hurricane Hillary hit Los Angeles notwithstanding the odds of a hurricane hitting LA being extremely low. In the following days, it led a path of rain that spanned the United States. On the 23rd of August, the day after I had some apparent success in directing the wind to the Northwest, the arc of the swath of rain from Hurricane Hillary backed into the region and graced Kelowna with a little rain.
At that point the evacuation orders were all lifted and Kelowna residents were returning to their homes. Feeling quite emotionally exhausted from the undertaking, despite the forest fire lasting for some time longer, I discontinued my weather-altering efforts at that time.
These weather experiments are anecdotal and, even if they prove reproducible, are currently beyond scientific understanding. I’ve only attempted changing the weather 4 times; Two times for sunny events and two times for forest fire mitigation with 3 separate fires involved on this mid-August occasion. That’s not a lot of data. It’s important to approach such phenomena with both a critical and open-minded perspective, recognizing that scientific understanding of these processes is still evolving. Sometimes events may appear to align with our intentions purely by chance and it’s essential to consider the role of coincidence in any anecdotal accounts of weather manipulation. Weather remains a complex and unpredictable influenced by numerous factors, and while individual experiences may suggest a connection between feelings, intention and weather outcomes, more rigorous scientific investigation is needed to draw definitive conclusions.
Notwithstanding I’ve gotten seriously unlikely positive results 100% of the time for the 4-6 experiments that I’ve undertaken and it merits further experimentation for as long as the results remain positive. I may one day end up humbled for having made these unlikely coincidences public but, until then, I’m already humbled by the awesome scope of the results.
At this time rigorous scientific investigation seems unlikely. Until then, with thousands of forest fires now abundant every summer across North America there are plenty of opportunities for good people to experiment with stopping them if they want to try this on their own or with others. We’ll never know if we don’t try.
A significant step is having the audacity to make the attempt.