Two days earlier than the waters of the Guadalupe River swelled right into a lethal and devastating Fourth of July flood in Kerr County, Texas, engineers with a California-based firm known as Rainmaker took off in an airplane about 100 miles away and dispersed 70 grams of silver iodide right into a cloud.
Their aim? To make it rain over Texas — a part of a climate modification observe often known as cloud seeding, which makes use of chemical compounds to enhance water droplets inside clouds, making the drops massive sufficient and heavy sufficient to fall to the bottom.
However within the hours after the flood swept by means of the larger Kerrville space and killed no less than 135 folks, together with three dozen kids, conspiracy theories started swirling amongst a small however vocal group of fringe figures.
“I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS … WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?” wrote Pete Chambers, a former U.S. particular forces commander and outstanding far-right activist, on the social media platform X.
The publish acquired 3.1 million views, but was solely one among a number of accusations that sprang up round Rainmaker’s actions and its alleged connection to the flood.
“Anyone who calls this out as a conspiracy theory can go F themselves,” wrote Michael Flynn, former nationwide safety advisor beneath the primary Trump administration, atop a repost of Chambers’ tweet.
The flurry of allegations was shortly debunked, with a variety of impartial scientists saying that the corporate’s actions couldn’t have produced wherever near the quantity of rain that triggered the flood.
“It’s very clear that they have nothing to do with it,” stated Daniel Swain, a local weather scientist with the College of California Agriculture and Pure Sources, in a YouTube briefing following the flood.
Rainmaker additionally denied the claims. The storm dropped as a lot as 4 inches of rain per hour over Texas Hill Nation, and the river in some locations rose by 26 toes in lower than 45 minutes.
However in some methods, the injury was executed. Conspiracy theorists who’ve lengthy alleged that Deep State Democrats are controlling the climate now had an actual incident to level to. And researchers, corporations and consultants working to review and carry out climate modification and geoengineering practices — which some say will probably be wanted as local weather change worsens — now have a fair larger hurdle to beat.
Inside hours of the lethal flood, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene stated she was introducing a invoice to make all types of climate modification — comparable to cloud seeding — a felony.
“This is not normal,” the Georgia consultant stated in a publish on X. “No person, company, entity, or government should ever be allowed to modify our weather by any means possible!!”
That very same week, the U.S. Environmental Safety Company launched two new web sites to “address public questions and concerns “ about weather modification, geoengineering, and contrails, or the thin clouds that form behind aircraft at high altitudes.
“To anyone who’s ever looked up to the streaks in the sky and asked,’ what the heck is going on?,’ or seen headlines about private actors and even governments looking to blot out the sun in the name of stopping global warming — we’ve endeavored to answer all of your questions,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin stated in a video accompanying the web sites’ launch. “In fact, EPA shares many of the same concerns when it comes to potential threats to human health and the environment.”
The EPA web site notes that there’s a distinction between geoengineering, which includes a broad vary of actions designed to switch international temperatures, and climate modification methods comparable to cloud seeding, that are typically short-lived and localized.
Actually, the method of cloud seeding was invented in america and has existed for almost 80 years. Common Electrical scientists Vincent Schaefer, Irving Langmuir and Bernard Vonnegut — older brother of the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut — started experimenting with it as early as 1946.
On July 2, Rainmaker’s staff was working in Runge, Texas, about 125 miles southeast of the place the Guadalupe River would quickly flood, in response to Augustus Doricko, founder and chief government of the corporate, which is headquartered in El Segundo.
The staff flew its airplane to an elevation of 1,600 toes and dispersed about 70 grams of silver iodide into the clouds — an quantity smaller than a handful of Skittles, Doricko stated. The brilliant yellow compound is thought to latch onto water droplets which might be already current in clouds, changing them into ice crystals that may fall as rain or snow, relying on the temperature beneath.
Quickly after the flight, Rainmaker’s meteorologists recognized an influx of moisture to the area and suggested the staff to droop operations, which they did, Doricko stated. Round 1 a.m. the following day, the Nationwide Climate Service issued its first flash flood look ahead to the Kerr County area.
Doricko stated there’s no probability Rainmaker’s actions — which had been contracted by the nonprofit South Texas Climate Modification Assn. and on file with the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — contributed to the flood.
“The biggest and best cloud seeding operations we’ve seen to date have produced tens of millions — and maximally like 100 million — gallons of precipitation,” he stated. “We saw in excess of a trillion gallons of precipitation from that flood. Not only could cloud seeding not have caused this, but the aerosols that we dispersed days prior could not have persisted in the atmosphere long enough to have had any consequence on the storm.”
A number of impartial consultants agreed.
Throughout his briefing, Swain famous that cloud seeding doesn’t create new clouds — it should be carried out on preexisting clouds that have already got water vapor or small liquid drops inside them, primarily enhancing what already had the potential to fall. What’s extra, its results final “minutes to maybe an hour,” Swain stated.
“Best-case-scenario estimates — absolute best-case — are that these cloud-seeding operations are able to augment the amount of precipitation by at most 10% to 15% over very limited areas,” Swain stated. “On average, it’s a lot lower than that. In fact, in some cases, it’s difficult to prove that cloud seeding does anything at all.”
Certainly, Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M College, has gone as far as to name cloud seeding a rip-off — partially as a result of it will possibly prey on farmers and different people who find themselves determined for rain, and since it sometimes delivers solely modest outcomes, he stated.
“There’s no physical way that cloud seeding could have made the Texas storm,” Dessler stated, noting that the storm was fueled by extraordinarily excessive ranges of atmospheric water that stemmed from a tropical disturbance within the Gulf of Mexico. “This is a nonsense argument. There’s no debate here about whether cloud seeding played a role in this disaster.”
Dessler stated the entire dust-up surrounding Rainmaker and the Texas flood is a distraction from the very actual points and challenges posed by international warming. The quantity of fabric injected into the environment throughout cloud seeding and geoengineering operations pales compared to the trillions of tons of carbon dioxide people have already spewed into the environment, he stated.
“The real irony here is that in some sense, the argument they’re making is correct — there is a conspiracy to change the climate,” Dessler stated. “It’s through the emission of carbon dioxide, and it’s by fossil fuel interests and the ecosystem that goes with that. That’s the conspiracy.”
Such limitations haven’t stopped governments and municipalities from investing in cloud-seeding expertise.
One in every of Rainmaker’s first shoppers was the Utah Division of Pure Sources, which was enthusiastic about cloud seeding as a response to the drying of the Nice Salt Lake, Doricko stated. His firm has additionally contracted with the Colorado Division of Pure Sources, the Oregon Division of Agriculture and a number of municipalities in California, together with the Public Works Departments of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.
David Spiegel, supervising engineer with San Luis Obispo County’s Public Works Division, stated the county first started exploring cloud-seeding expertise within the early 2000s in response to extreme drought circumstances and dwindling provides on the Lopez Lake reservoir, which feeds 5 metropolis companies close by. It took years to get this system off the bottom, and it didn’t in the end run till 2019 by means of 2024 — when the state was coping with yet one more drought — to considerably middling outcomes.
Particularly, San Luis Obispo’s cloud-seeding program added about 1,200 acre-feet of water per yr to the almost 50,000 acre-foot reservoir, he stated. (An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons.) In its greatest yr, it added about 2,500 acre-feet.
A part of the problem was that there weren’t many clouds within the space to work with, Spiegel stated. “We didn’t have enough storms to seed because we were still in this drought period, so it was kind of unfortunate.”
Nonetheless, he nonetheless noticed this system as successful as a result of the small water provide positive factors that got here from the cloud seeding priced out to about $300 per acre-foot — far lower than the price of importing provides from different sources such because the State Water Venture, which may run nearer to $1,500 an acre-foot. He stated he would nonetheless contemplate cloud seeding sooner or later ought to the reservoir run low once more.
“We definitely see it as a viable option,” Spiegel stated.
To this point, the state isn’t investing in its personal cloud-seeding packages, although it does maintain a detailed eye on them, in response to Jason Ince, a spokesman with the California Division of Water Sources. He stated any teams conducting cloud seeding work are required to inform the company by submitting a discover of intent.
An October report printed by the division signifies there have been no less than 16 cloud-seeding tasks throughout a number of counties and watersheds in California in recent times.
Such efforts may change into helpful as local weather circumstances maintain shifting within the fallacious route: Warming temperatures and overuse are sapping groundwater provides in California, whereas state and federal officers are nonetheless mired in negotiations over use of the Colorado River — a quickly shrinking water lifeline that provides 40 million folks throughout the American West.
In the meantime, international common temperatures proceed to soar pushed largely by fossil gasoline emissions and human exercise. Many consultants say there’s a great probability that some type of intervention — climate modification, geoengineering or some altogether new expertise — will probably be wanted within the years forward.
“Weather modification projects are vital resources to enhance fresh water supply for communities within their watersheds,” the Division of Water Sources report says. It recommends that the state proceed to assist current cloud-seeding tasks within the state and assist facilitate new ones.
Speigel, of San Luis Obispo County, stated legal guidelines banning cloud seeding and different climate modification measures — such because the one posed by Rep. Greene — can be a detriment to the area.
“It would be a setback for us, because we are constantly looking for other opportunities for water,” he stated. “It would limit our ability to seek out means of more water in these long drought periods. … I definitely think it would stifle our ability to help our customers.”
Much more controversial than cloud seeding are geoengineering methods to dam the quantity of photo voltaic vitality reaching the Earth. Some contain injecting sulfur into the stratosphere. A 2021 report on geoengineering printed by the Nationwide Academies of Sciences affirmed that “meeting the challenge of climate change requires a portfolio of options,” however suggested warning round such strategies.
“[Solar geoengineering] could potentially offer an additional strategy for responding to climate change but is not a substitute for reducing [greenhouse gas] emissions,” the report says.
Dessler, who can also be the director of the Texas Heart for Excessive Climate at Texas A&M, likened geoengineering to airbags on a automotive — one thing nobody ever hopes to make use of however that will be good to have in a local weather emergency.
He stated the main focus ought to proceed to be on lowering using fossil fuels, and that the speak of banning geoengineering, cloud seeding and different types of climate modification by members of the Trump administration and a few lawmakers is extra political than scientific.
“It makes no sense — it shows you that this is not an argument about facts. It’s an argument about worldview,” he stated.
The president has taken many steps to undo efforts to deal with local weather change in current months, together with withdrawing from the Paris local weather accord, an settlement amongst some 200 nations to restrict international warming to beneath 2 levels Celsius (3.6 levels Fahrenheit).
The EPA has additionally eliminated a number of obstacles and rules that govern oil and gasoline drilling within the U.S., and has stated it needs to repeal the endangerment discovering — a long-held authorized and scientific dedication that CO2 emissions hurt human well being and welfare, amongst different important adjustments.
Doricko, Rainmaker’s CEO, stated he was dissatisfied to see cloud seeding politicized within the wake of the Texas flood. He was greatly surprised when he noticed that Rep. Greene had posted an image of his face on X — “insinuating somewhat that cloud seeding, or I, was responsible for the natural disaster in Texas, when any meteorologist or atmospheric scientist could tell you otherwise,” he stated.
“Human civilization is unintentionally modifying the weather and the climate all the time,” Doricko stated, together with by means of fossil gasoline emissions and concrete warmth islands that heat surrounding areas. “What Rainmaker is trying to do is bring some intentionality to that, so that we can modify the weather for our benefit and deliberately.”
Doricko stated he’s additionally an advocate of extra clear reporting, extra stringent rules, and no matter else is required to construct belief with the general public about “a really consequential technology.”
He stated he’ll proceed to have interaction with skeptics of the expertise in good religion.
“Cloud seeding is a water supply tool, and whether you’re a farmer in a red state or an environmentalist in a blue state, water is as nonpartisan as it gets,” he stated. “Everybody needs water.”
