Going back decades, various projects have been devised to make rain, thwart hurricanes or otherwise control the weather. This week, China announced it will seed clouds in an effort to make rain before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, thereby resulting in sunshine during the summer games.

But controlling the weather remains a tall task and most efforts have failed. Or have they?

By accident, we humans—control freaks by nature—have actually managed weather-control on a truly grand scale, though the results of our efforts are a little beyond our immediate control. Global warming is dramatically affecting the climate, most experts agree, and climate in turn affects the weather. More rain here, less there, rising seas, all that.

Oh, and it’s been shown that jet contrails cause increased cloud cover and affect temperatures. To me, that’s weather. So there are two ways in which we’ve done it.

In recent years, scientists have been reflecting on how to reverse global warming. Among the crazy ideas: Put a bunch of microsatellites in space to reflect sunlight back to space; or inject tons of sulfur into the air , also to shade the globe from sunlight.

Humans have a habit of letting things run amok, however, and so even if these ideas could work, are they good ideas?

An article this week in the Wall Street Journal points out why such projects might be even crazier than they sound. Says James R. Fleming, a professor of science, technology and society at Colby College: “It is virtually impossible to imagine governments resisting the temptation to explore military uses of any potentially climate-altering technology.”

Oh, boy.