Weather control is like armoring. It is the usual way of the armored person, a person who defends himself strongly against a preceived dangerous world, to think the problem is caused by things being "out of control" and that controling them would make the problems go away. Actually, the exact reverse is true.
The armored person who controls his breathing, for example, is having physical and emotional problems because of that control and if he could STOP controlling it, the problems would be over. The controlling of the breath is the reason there are problems.
The normal atmosphere, functioning without human intervention, is the one we grew up in, the environment we developed in for millions of years, and are best adapted to live in. It is therefore the condition in which we are safest.
The most important atmospheric danger at the present time is that the atmosphere no longer is being left alone to do what it does without human input. It is being affected by modern nuclear and electromagnetic technologies. It is being damaged, disrupted, and destroyed by these modern technologies. And adding yet another layer of even MORE modern technology to the already sick and dying atmosphere will not help anything. It will just speed up the process of killing what is left of the atmospheric BIOLOGICAL energy.
Like the patient whose problems are caused by too much control, the atmosphere needs to be released from the burden of human intervention so it can recover and function normally again at it´s own pace, not at a pace determined by humans and what they are doing to it.
The authoritarian personality cannot see any good in anything functioning as it wishes to without being controlled by someone. They feel threatened by the freedom of children, animals, and societies. They feel that anything not under control is a danger. And in this case, the atmosphere is the intended victim of their control-freak mentality. These people want to control the weather because it frightens them to not have power over everything around them, both natural and human.
It is no accident that the same people who get interested in controlling the weather are the ones who are on the far right of the political spectrum in other fields as well. For example, they are very likely to be free-energy advocates, thinking that finding some new power source, such a motor that runs on the ether, will solve all environmental problems.
This bit of idiocy is standard in the alternative science movement, which is a right-wing movement that ignores all the other types of environmental problems, especially the really BIG one of over-population, and tries to claim all environmental issues can be solved by discovering a new power source without the cultural pain of changing social customs and life-styles.
The job of the environmental movement is to stand in the way of this so-called "progress" and stop this destructive intervention before the atmosphere is totally killed by these control-freaks and their shinny new toys.
The Stevens device does not look like it is anything like the Wells-Newman device, and it probably is not.
But nearly ANY electromagnetic device can have harmful effects on the weather. And given that the control-freaks do not see that these effects ARE harmful, they will celebrate them as a wonderful scientific breakthrough in "weather control" instead of seeing that what they have found is really another way of HARMING the weather.
So it may indeed have an effect on local weather conditions, though almost certainly, not a good one.
And, yes, you are right. We may have to get used to "democracy" in the field of "weather control"-a democracy in which everyone who wants to control the weather can do so for a few dollars from their backyard.
In which case, the only thing we can hope for is that civilization collapses and most of these backyard weather-control hobbyists get killed off in the fighting over what is left in the supermarkets before it is too late for the atmospheric life energy to recover from the damage they will do to it.