Infinite shades of green spring from every corner as the sun’s lightbulb illuminates the lush morning landscape. Vibrant orange poppies coax a smile from their observers as they stand strong after a day of vernal rain. In the heavens, the view is not so up-lifting. Stripes and tufts of homogenitus(1) clouds fan out in all directions and then these airplane emplaced clouds are cut by dark shadows from current airplane emissions a mile above them. Meanwhile, the weather report says, “clear.”
On the news, the top story is an extreme tropical thunderstorm in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) causing massive flooding in the home of the world’s busiest airport. The storm dropped six times more rain in a day than the UAE typically receives in a year. Fast forward 24 hours and the major media outlets are “combatting conspiracy theories” that propose the flood was caused by cloud seeding. From the Associated Press to Fox News, experts and officials assure us that the flooding in the UAE and Oman was not caused by cloud seeding.
This isn’t the first time that extreme flooding events have been blamed on cloud seeding. One example is the Rapid City, South Dakota flood of June 9-10, 1972. That year, the U.S. Federal Bureau of reclamation was carrying out “project Skywater” a cloud seeding experiment touted as one of the largest of its day, directed at the Rapid City Regional airport. On July 9, the Bureau flew several cloud seeding missions in the area. That night, the thunderous rain swelled the Rapid Creek to 100x its normal flow rate and 4x the rate of the largest flood recorded before or since. Two-hundred and thirty-eight residents died, over three-thousand people were injured and over four-thousand homes were damaged or destroyed in the flood.
Following the disaster, some survivors blamed the cloud seeding, prompting South Dakota’s governor to appoint a 3 member commission to review the event. The commission was made up of Dr. Pierre St. Amand, geophysicist at the Naval Ordinance Test Station in CA, Robert Elliot, president of North American Weather Consultants (a cloud seeding company), and Ray Jay Davis, a lawyer who often represented the Weather Modification Association (a group which continues to advocate for and promote various types of weather modification). Because of the important cloud seeding trials known as “project Skywater,” the American Meteorological Society’s Third Conference on Weather Modification was scheduled for Rapid City later that June. Following the conference, the governor’s commission investigating the flooding event unveiled their report. It concluded that “In the absence of seeding, the result would have been the same.(8)”
Returning to the April, 2024 thunderstorm induced flooding event in the UAE, the experts initially told us that “the Tuesday rains had stemmed partly from cloud seeding. (2)” As the severity of the flood was recognized these initial statements were rescinded and now we are told that “six pilots had flow missions as part of a regular protocol but had not seeded any clouds.(2)” Missing from any current report is that chemical cloud seeding is an outdated technology. The UAE and neighboring Oman now augment chemical cloud seeding with a more modern form of precipitation enhancement that electrically ionizes the atmosphere instead of seeding it with physical particles. Atmospheric ionization can be carried out either from ground based electric equipment or planes/drones that literally zap the clouds with lasers (3). Worldwide, ionizing techniques have been in use for twenty plus years (4) and have widely usurped the kind of ongoing chemical cloud seeding technology that has been used by PG&E in the Mokelumne River watershed since 1953.
Throughout the last decade, Oman and the UAE have been world leaders in testing and utilizing atmospheric ionization to increase rainfall. Studies conducted in Australia and Oman have demonstrated a ten to eighteen percent increase in rainfall using ionizing technology with a ninety to ninety-nine percent certainty of effectiveness (5). While increased rainfall is generally considered a good thing, “Some experts argue that the (ionizing) cloud seeding technique is resulting in dangerous flooding.(6)”
As the flooding in the UAE and Oman subsides, there is no clear answer as to wether or not atmospheric ionization and/or chemical cloud seeding contributed to the disaster. However the debate, and especially the media’s omission of atmospheric ionization as a possible cause does beg another question: Will officials and experts ever let on that the technology, they are responsible for and/or profiting from, might have contributed to disaster? If these experts and officials did tell the public that their technology is responsible for disaster, they would be liable for damages and risk funding for their future projects.
As Doug Brugge, chair of the Department of Public Health Services at the University of Connecticut pointed out in relation to nuclear testing in the U.S.A. “the stories of regular people are to be trusted more than the words of the government and the experts when the latter are lying in a misguided attempt to protect national security.” But what does nuclear testing have to do with weather modification and ionizing technology? According to the late United Nations nuclear observer, Rosalie Bertell in her year 2000 book, “Planet Earth as the Latest Weapon of War,” “weather modification is the new nuclear, in fact it is more dangerous than nuclear weapons could ever be and infinitely easier to hide.”
Looking outside again in California, five days since the downpours in Oman and the UAE, the wind-whipped leaves of the trees are a darker green than when I first sat down to research and write this piece. The sky is more blue than it was but that blue is still stained with nothing but human caused homogenitus clouds. Today, the weather report is “mostly sunny,” which is accurate, however it is much clearer today than it was when the meteorologists reported it was “clear” on Tuesday.
We may never know what caused the Rapid City Flood of 1972 or the Dubai flood of 2024 but we can choose to pay attention to the sky with our own senses. I’ve been consciously doing just that for the last twenty years and over the last four years there has been a marked decrease in natural clouds with a massive increase in homogenitus (1) clouds. This observation breeds curiosity about what the 1972 American Meteorological Society’s 3rd Conference on Weather Modification has become in 2024. Visiting their website (7), I find that this year marked the 24th Conference on Planned and Inadvertent Weather Modification. The conference was sponsored by Lockheed Martin, one of the largest weapons systems manufacturers on the planet.
It’s time to ask what these kinds of fiscal sponsorships mean for our weather, our climate, our eco-system and our health. It’s time to recognize that experts and officials have biases, fiscal allegiances and concerns about liability that directly impact the stories they tell. It’s time to remember that while our own observations are not unbiased, that doesn’t make the stories we draw from them untrue.
Today’s stories inform tomorrow’s reality. The future starts now.
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