Trump’s EPA chief takes on geo-engineering: Lee Zeldin targets ‘playing God’ with weather control



Geo-engineering — the various processes by which the weather is intentionally altered — is a growing concern, not just here in America but across the globe. Many wonder if practices like cloud seeding, where silver iodide or dry ice is dispersed into clouds to induce precipitation, or solar radiation management, where aluminum oxides or sulfates are injected into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and reduce global temperatures, risks meddling with cosmic forces we can’t even begin to fully realize.

“Geo-engineering really scares me because it seems like we're starting to play God,” says Glenn Beck.

Even more worrisome is the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency has historically been minimally involved in geo-engineering, leaving it up to private companies and researchers to experiment with delicate weather patterns that potentially impact the entire globe. Far more concerned with imposing strict regulations that stifle economic growth but do little to actually protect the environment, the EPA has largely ignored the growing list of consequences of geo-engineering – like acid rain, ozone depletion, and ecosystem disruption.

But that’s all changing under Trump EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin — a man Glenn says is “killing it.” He is taking charge of the agency in ways we’ve never seen before. Unlike former EPA chiefs, who had limited engagement with geo-engineering, Zeldin has prioritized transparency by launching new online resources to address public concerns about geo-engineering and contrails, while actively investigating private activities of geo-engineering companies.

“I agree with your concern just with the idea of playing God,” he told Glenn on a recent episode of “The Glenn Beck Program.”

“It's not like [geo-engineering] is thoroughly studied,” “approved,” “trusted,” or “vetted,” he says.

The vast majority of geo-engineering practices, he explains, are spearheaded by “people who just want to do it on their own,” so they lobby for “someone to hand over a billion dollars” so they can “go dump a whole bunch of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.”

“No, that doesn't sound good; it doesn’t sound right; and it shouldn’t happen,” says Zeldin.

Glenn remembers fearmongering about “global cooling” when he was a child. “There were these scientists that said, ‘We need to dump coal ash on the polar caps because that will attract the heat and stop the impending ice age that was coming,”’ he recounts. “Can you imagine if we had done that? What a stupid idea.”

Today, however, global warming is what the majority of “experts” fret about, and that’s what geo-engineering primarily aims to mitigate.

Except global warming — at least the assumption that the planet is catapulting towards combustion — has been proven overblown. Zeldin reflects on how countless predictions about the planet’s demise have failed to come true. “Six years ago, AOC was saying that in 12 years the planet was going to end. ... Six years later, obviously that's not going to happen,” he says.

The days of writing policy based on the doomsday predictions of “experts” are over under Zeldin’s EPA. The Obama administration’s Endangerment Finding that declared greenhouse gases a threat to public health, resulting in over $1 trillion spent on rigid and economically disastrous climate regulations under the Clean Air Act, is the shameful past Zeldin is moving away from.

“When you're talking about trillions of dollars of federal policy coming out, it should be something decided by Congress. There should be a debate and a vote of the elected representatives of the American people instead of some bureaucrat at some agency deciding to oppose trillions of dollars of regulation on their own,” he tells Glenn.

“In that 2009 Endangerment Finding, there were a whole bunch of different references to interpreting how the law doesn't prevent [agencies] from doing something, so therefore, they must be allowed to do it. That's not how I'm going to operate,” he vows. “I will just follow the plain reading, the plain text of the law, and if Congress wants to change the law, then we'll follow whatever that change is. That is our job.”

To hear more about what the EPA is doing under Zeldin’s leadership, watch the full interview above.

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Is Cloudseeding Playing God? Trump EPA Chief Reacts | Lee Zeldin | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 264
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Is Cloudseeding Playing God? Trump EPA Chief Reacts | Lee Zeldin | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 264

Geoengineering is poisoning the bees — and humans too



According to filmmaker Matt Landman, geoengineering programs are spraying toxic chemicals like aluminum into our skies — and while it’s been documented that what’s in the air is hurting the bee population, it’s not just the bees that we should be concerned about.

“The number one cause of death in the United Kingdom, number one cause of death is dementia — dementia and Alzheimer's from aluminum toxicity in the brain,” Landman tells BlazeTV host Pat Gray and producer Keith Malinak on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”

“A lot of people don’t know that fluoride is just a byproduct of melting aluminum. So fluoride and aluminum want to bond back together,” he explains.

“There’s these attacks from every angle, but at the end of the day, you should consider it complimentary because, like, why is everything out to get us? Because they are terrified of us realizing what’s going on. So they want to dumb us down to the best of their ability,” he adds.


Landman explains that this is why cholesterol is demonized — because it’s a “fatty layer of protection” for your brain.

“So, the same thing that’s happening to the humans, which is the aluminium buildup in the brain. And imagine you get aluminum buildup in the brain, and then they are ramping up these EMF frequencies. ... It’s just like putting aluminum in the microwave, but it’s your brain,” he continues.

“This is why people are having neurological disorders and what have you. So, the same things are happening to the bees. There’s this bee die-off, and biologists and whatnot are dissecting bees, and they have increased aluminum in their brain,” he adds.

With the increase of aluminum in the bees’ brains and EMF frequencies nearby, the bees can’t even find their way back to the hive.

“So, the bees are dying off from the aluminum especially, right? And then Monsanto has come out with an aluminum-resistant gene. Worth mentioning is Monsanto had to hide their name, and they don’t even exist anymore,” Landman says.

He explains that Monsanto has done this because once aluminum is killing all the crops, only their aluminum-resistant seeds will grow.

“They also have a ‘Frankenbee,’ like Frankenstein bee, where the bee is Monsanto-produced, and it can live in a glyphosate, aluminum, like, toxic pesticide/herbicide environment where all the other insects are dying,” he says.

“They like to confuse us. ‘Oh, that’s pretty advanced, genetically modified, whatever, and I’m not a scientist or whatever.’ But it’s actually very simple. They’re spraying poisons on your food that would make the food shrivel up and die,” he continues, explaining that it doesn’t shrivel up and die only because it’s genetically modified.

“And then we wonder why so many people have dementia, Alzheimer’s, so many kids have autism,” he says, adding, “I mean, we’re looking at the wrong source.”

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Did cloud seeding cause the Texas floods? Glenn Beck speaks with the man with the most fingers pointed at him



Over Fourth of July weekend, Kerrville, Texas, was devastated by catastrophic flooding along the Guadalupe River, which rose 26 feet in just 45 minutes. The floods have claimed more than 100 lives, many of whom were children, but that number is expected to rise, as there are still several missing people.

While Central Texas is known for flooding — sometimes severe flooding — what happened last week is unprecedented in its severity. Many aren’t convinced that this was just a freak act of nature. There are growing theories that the floods were caused by human tampering with weather patterns — specifically cloud seeding, a technique where chemicals are released into clouds to encourage them to produce precipitation.

One person in the crosshairs of this theory is Augustus Doricko, founder and CEO of Rainmaker, a U.S.-based climate technology company specializing in cloud seeding. He’s been directly blamed for the Texas floods after it was discovered that his company seeded clouds in Texas just two days before the torrential rain began.

Yesterday, Glenn Beck invited Doricko on “The Glenn Beck Program” to plead his case.

“So explain what cloud seeding does and how you know you didn't have anything to do with [the floods],” Glenn says.

While weather modification sounds like a modern practice, Doricko says it’s been going on since the 1940s when it was developed “to increase water supply for farms, for ecosystem conservation, for reservoirs, for residences, and also our industries.”

Cloud seeding “relies on identifying liquid in clouds and then releasing particulates, specifically silver iodide, into those clouds that the water freezes onto into big snowflakes and then become heavy enough to fall as rain,” Doricko explains, noting that the practice is “paid for by farmers and utilities and government entities that want more water for their constituents.”

While cloud seeding is a highly effective practice — it “can produce tens of millions of gallons of precipitation distributed over hundreds of square miles over the course of about an hour or two,” Doricko says — it could not produce the amount of precipitation that fell in Central Texas last weekend. “The remnants of tropical storm Barry that blew in and caused the flooding, that storm dumped trillions of gallons,” he differentiates.

One of the reasons Doricko has been specifically blamed for the deadly Texas floods is because Rainmaker seeded clouds in Texas on July 2 — two days before the rain began.

“We seeded two clouds, two small clouds, with about 70 grams’ worth of silver iodide,” he says, noting that while there was rainfall as a result, the clouds “dissipated about two hours after” and “could not have stayed suspended in the atmosphere by the time that the flooding started happening.”

Further, in accordance with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation’s suspension criteria, Rainmaker stopped its cloud-seeding operations even before the National Weather Service issued flood warnings.

“We at Rainmaker earnestly believe that this is God’s kingdom to steward, and it is our job to do no harm and do as much good as we can,” Doricko tells Glenn, noting that he became a Christian at age 20 and was actually “baptized in Dallas.”

While he stressed the need to “be cautious” to “mitigate any potential for any damage,” he also warned against banning the technology outright. Not only would it “prevent farmers from having water,” but it would also put even greater distance between the United States and China, which has an enormous weather modification program.

“The United States a year ago spent $2.4 million on cloud-seeding research,” while “China has an annual budget of $1.4 billion for cloud seeding and weather modification,” says Doricko. “They have 35,000 employees in their weather modification office,” and “they have two universities that offer bachelor's degrees in weather engineering.”

“If the United States bans this technology wholesale ... not only will we be behind China, but we won't have regulatory statutes or the capability to monitor who is modifying the weather in the United States and otherwise,” he warns.

While Doricko agrees that weather modification sounds scary, cloud seeding is distinct from other more extreme weather modification practices. Cloud seeding encourages precipitation using “existing puffy clouds,” but “geoengineering is a global climatic intervention designed to either cool the planet down or create reflective high-altitude clouds,” he tells Glenn.

But Glenn still has questions. He points to speculation that the devastating double hurricanes — Helene and Milton — that impacted Florida and North Carolina last year were a result of cloud seeding.

“I never believed any of that stuff, but can it be done?” he asks.

“No. It, at this point in time, cannot be done,” Doricko replies.

However, he is a proponent of exploring how we might “mitigate severe weather,” like hurricanes, in the future. “I think that it would be abdicating our responsibility to try to tend to the world that God gave us if we didn't at least think about it,” he says.

To hear Glenn’s response, watch the clip above.

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Researchers advocate using existing aircraft, sulfur to block sunlight amid UK-backed trials



A study published Monday in the American Geophysical Union's peer-reviewed journal Earth's Future suggested, largely on the basis of different aerosol injection simulations, that it might be worthwhile using existing commercial jetliners to pollute the skies with toxic sulfur dioxide particles in order to dim the sun and thereby cool the planet.

Researchers from University College London indicated that weaponizing jets like the Boeing 777F — roughly 36 of which are produced a year — against the sun would would mean "lower technical barriers," a potential increase in "the number of actors able to produce a substantial global cooling using SAI [stratospheric aerosol injection]," and an earlier potential start date for this master plan.

They acknowledged, however, that the use of existing aircraft for the purposes of SAI would be less efficient than having specialized aircraft flying at altitudes of over 12 miles to conduct dumps and more likely to generate undesirable side effects.

'Dousing our citizens, our waterways and landscapes with toxins.'

According to the study, "Low-altitude SAI with high-latitude and seasonal injection, could achieve a substantial global cooling effect using existing large jetliners with a service ceiling of 13 km."

The researchers estimated "a global cooling of 0.6°C for an injection of 12 Tg at 13 km altitude at 60° North and South, in the local spring and summer." In other words, climate meddlers might be able to cool the planet down just over half a degree with a seasonal dumping of over 13.2 million tons of sulfur at the latitudes of Anchorage, Alaska, and the southern tip of South America.

In effect, they would be emulating the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, which injected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and caused a rapid half-degree drop in global temperatures. According to NASA, this drop lasted for two years until the sulfate dropped out of the atmosphere.

"We find this strategy would have only 35% of the forcing efficiency of a conventional high-altitude-subtropical injection, which would lead to a proportionate increase in the side-effects of SAI per unit cooling, such as human exposure to descending particulate matter," wrote the researchers.

In addition to "dousing our citizens, our waterways and landscapes with toxins," as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put it last month, the embrace of this strategy might increase the "risk of unilateral or poorly planned deployment," said the researchers.

Dozens of U.S. states have taken steps to ban geoengineering and weather modification activities. Earlier this month, the Florida Senate passed legislation that would protect the Sunshine State's skies from climate alarmists' shadowy designs. The United Kingdom has gone in the other direction.

Blaze News recently reported that the U.K. is throwing its approval and weight behind solar geoengineering experiments to be conducted by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency.

'That means that we would need to use three times the amount of aerosol to have the same effect on global temperature.'

Even with America's geoengineering bans, the homeland could potentially be impacted by foreign SAI experiments should the U.K. or another national entity decide to unilaterally execute SAI operations ahead of schedule, thanks to the embrace of modified jetliners.

A 2017 study published in Nature Communications indicated that SAI only in the northern hemisphere might increase droughts, hurricanes, and storms elsewhere, and concluded that "the impacts of SG would not be entirely confined to the perturbed region."

Lead author Alistair Duffey on the new study in Earth's Future told Phys.org, "Solar geoengineering comes with serious risks and much more research is needed to understand its impacts. However, our study suggests that it is easier to cool the planet with this particular intervention than we thought. This has implications for how quickly stratospheric aerosol injection could be started and by who."

"There are downsides to this polar low-altitude strategy," continued Duffey. "At this lower altitude, stratospheric aerosol injection is about one-third as effective. That means that we would need to use three times the amount of aerosol to have the same effect on global temperature, increasing side effects such as acid rain. The strategy would also be less effective at cooling the tropics, where the direct vulnerability to warming is highest."

Duffey added that "climate change is a serious problem," intimating that policymakers might weight the perceived threat of changing weather patterns as more concerning than the threats posed dumping chemicals overhead and generating acidic precipitation.

Columbia University's Climate School noted last April, "Studies show that stratospheric aerosol injection could weaken the stratospheric ozone layer, alter precipitation patterns, and affect agriculture, ecosystem services, marine life, and air quality. Moreover, the impacts and risks would vary by how and where it is deployed, the climate, ecosystems, and the population."

Matthew Henry of the University of Exeter, one of Duffey's co-authors, made clear to Phys.org that even with solar geoengineering, climate alarmists will still want to continue with their project of social engineering: "Stratospheric aerosol injection is certainly not a replacement for greenhouse gas emission reductions as any potential negative side effects increase with the amount of cooling: we can only achieve long-term climate stability with net zero."

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'We're not playing that game': Florida Senate passes ban on geoengineering, weather modifications



The Florida Senate passed a bill prohibiting geoengineering and weather modification activities in a 28-9 vote on Thursday, taking the state one step closer to securing its sunny skies from climate alarmists' shadowy and potentially deadly schemes.

The successful vote comes just after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. identified Florida as one of over two dozen states that are moving to "ban geoengineering our climate by dousing our citizens, our waterways, and landscapes with toxins."

The health secretary noted further that "this is a movement every MAHA needs to support" and that "HHS will do its part."

Background

There have long been efforts, some apparently successful and others deadly, to meddle with the weather.

The United Arab Emirates has, for instance, conducted cloud-seeding missions for decades and has in recent years conducted over 1,000 hours of cloud-seeding missions annually. One government meteorologist blamed such operations for the torrential rains that rocked Dubai last April, which resulted in deadly floods.

Cloud seeding entails the release of tiny particles, such as potassium chloride, into clouds in an effort to artificially increase precipitation.

Lewis Brackpool, an independent journalist and the host of the podcast "The State of It," previously alerted Blaze News to declassified documents showing that the U.K.'s Royal Air Force experimented with artificial rainmaking in the 1950s as part of Operation Cumulus the same week that some of the worst flash floods ever to have hit Britain stormed the village of Lynmouth, killing 35.

'These planes release aluminum, sulfates, and other compounds with unknown and harmful effects on human health.'

Cloud seeding in Utah reportedly helped increase the state's water supply by 12% in 2018.

Rather than trying to make it rain, some scientists have committed to dimming the sun — despite a 2017 study in Nature Communications indicating that aerosols released into the air in an effort to block the sun could lead to an increase in droughts, hurricanes, and storms.

Last year, the Marine Cloud Brightening Program's Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement project, led by researchers from the University of Washington, fired particles into the sky above the San Francisco Bay as part of an experiment ultimately aimed at blocking sunlight and limiting "global warming."

The bill

Miami Republican Ileana Garcia's Senate Bill 56 would prohibit "the injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of a chemical, a chemical compound, a substance, or an apparatus into the atmosphere within the borders of this state for the express purpose of affecting the temperature, weather, climate, or intensity of sunlight."

Should Garcia's bill pass as is, cloud seeding, sun dimming, and other such efforts to modify the weather could land the offending scientist or organization with a $100,000 fine as well as third-degree felony charges. An aircraft operator involved in such felonious efforts could be slapped with a $5,000 fine and up to five years in prison.

"There is a lot of unauthorized activity that is currently not regulated both at a federal and a state level, and this is where we wanted to start," Garcia told her peers in the state Senate, reported the Florida Phoenix. "This is how we are trying to create a method to the madness by creating a reporting mechanism that starts with complaints to the Department of Environmental Protection."

Florida Senate President Ben Albritton reportedly lauded Garcia for producing a "great piece of legislation."

'Tell the House of Representatives in Florida to not gut this bill.'

Albritton told Florida's Voice that when Garcia first raised her concerns about weather modification with him, he initially didn't believe there were such efforts to "control God's domain."

"Honestly, I had a hard time believing it at first, and then she sent me information and sent me websites and all of this," said Albritton. "All of a sudden, I thought, 'Holy mackerel.'"

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo also celebrated Garcia for pushing the legislation.

"Big thanks to Senator Garcia for leading efforts to reduce geoengineering and weather modification activities in our Florida skies," said Ladapo. "These planes release aluminum, sulfates, and other compounds with unknown and harmful effects on human health. We have to keep fighting to clean up the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat."

The House version

While greatly supportive of Garcia's SB 56, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) indicated that the version in the Florida House would betray the purpose of the exercise, codifying the practices as opposed to preventing them outright.

"The Florida House of Representatives has gutted Senator Garcia's legislation," DeSantis said in a video Wednesday. "They would actually codify the practice of geoengineering and weather modification. People got a lot of kooky ideas that they can get in and put things in the atmosphere to block the sun and save us from climate change. We're not playing that game in Florida."

DeSantis added, "I support what Senator Garcia is doing, and I hope that people will tell the House of Representatives in Florida to not gut this bill."

Republican state Rep. Kevin Steele's House Bill 477 does not ban weather modification outright. Instead it requires weather meddlers to first procure a license to do so.

Anyone found to have conducted a weather modification operation without a license or with a revoked license would face a maximum fine of $10,000 — rather than the Senate's proposed fine of $100,000. Violations would qualify as second-degree misdemeanors as opposed to felonies.

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University of Chicago backs mad scientist's plan to block out the sun



A subset of alarmists is convinced that to curb so-called global warming, they must block out the sun, at least partially. David Keith, founding faculty director at the University of Chicago's Climate Systems Engineering Initiative, is among them.

Keith, a multimillionaire who was previously at the University of Calgary and Harvard University, seeks to pollute the stratosphere ultimately with millions of tons of sulfur dioxide.

Blasting aerosols and other reflective substances, such as diamonds or aluminum dioxide, into the atmosphere, roughly 12-16 miles above the Earth, might replicate the effects of volcanic eruptions in blocking sunlight and lowering global mean temperatures.

The 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, which injected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, resulted in a rapid half-degree drop in global temperatures. According to NASA, this drop lasted or two years until the sulfate dropped out of the atmosphere.

Without the guidance of Ivy League technocrats or the help of volcanoes, the species unwittingly found another way to lower global temperatures and scatter solar rays: using fossil fuels.

Emissions from cars, homes, and industry have long mixed in with low-altitude clouds, causing them to brighten and bounce more sunlight, resulting in a cooling effect. However, climate alarmists' ongoing campaign against the use of affordable energy — again, to supposedly curb global warming — might diminish this secondary benefit, thereby exacerbating global warming.

"I think most people are aware that there's a greenhouse gas effect that warms climate," Sarah Doherty of the University of Washington's Marine Cloud Brightening Program told the Weather Channel earlier this year.

"But what most people aren't aware of is that the particles that we've also been producing and adding to the atmosphere offset some of that climate warming," continued Doherty. "So, the overall effect is one of climate warming, but it would be a lot more without that particulate pollution."

Extra to reducing this low-hanging particulate pollution released by a productive society, Keith wants to release his alternative pollutant with a "purpose-built fleet of high-altitude aircraft."

In a February paper in the MIT Technology Review, he co-authored with Harvard Kennedy School research fellow Wake Smith, Keith noted that "offsetting a substantial fraction of global warming — say, 1 °C of cooling — would require platforms that could deliver several million metric tons per year of material to the stratosphere."

"Neither rockets nor balloons are suitable for hauling such a large mass to this high perch. Consequently, full-scale deployment would require a fleet of novel aircraft — a few hundred in order to achieve a 1 °C cooling target," said the paper. "Procuring just the first aircraft in the manner typical of large commercial or military aircraft development programs might take roughly a decade, and manufacturing the required fleet would take several years more."

While Keith acknowledged his scheme's current technological limits and cautioned against near-term deployment, he nevertheless advocated for policymakers to consider the possibility of deployment "earlier than is now widely assumed."

On the basis of his calculations, Keith, who made roughly $72 million off the sale of his carbon capture company to Occidental Petroleum, recently suggested to the New York Times that following through on his scheme would not only lower temperatures but might also change the hue of twilight.

Of course, orange twilight is far from the only possible side effect of such efforts to meddle with the sun and sky.

Numerous scientists have indicated that solar geoengineering might lead to humanitarian and ecological disasters.

In recent years, hundreds of scientists have signed an open letter calling for an international non-use agreement on solar engineering, stressing that "the risks of solar geoengineering are poorly understood and can never be fully known. Impacts will vary across regions, and there are uncertainties about the effects on weather patterns, agriculture, and the provision of basic needs of food and water."

Blaze News previously reported that a 2017 study published in Nature Communications indicated that aerosols released only in the northern hemisphere might increase droughts, hurricanes, and storms elsewhere.

"This is a really dangerous path to go down," Beatrice Rindevall, chairwoman of the Swedish Society for Nature, told the Times. "It could shock the climate system, could alter hydrological cycles and could exacerbate extreme weather and climate instability."

Oxford University atmospheric physicist Raymond Pierrehumbert has characterized solar geoengineering as a threat to mankind.

"It's not only a bad idea in terms of something that would never be safe to deploy," said Pierrehumbert. "But even doing research on it is not just a waste of money, but actively dangerous."

"There certainly are risks, and there certainly are uncertainties," Keith told the Times. "But there's really a lot of evidence that the risks are quantitatively small compared to the benefits, and the uncertainties just aren't that big."

While still a professor at Harvard, Keith attempted to run an experiment, possibly over Arizona. Unable to find a partner to launch a high-altitude balloon and met with objections by Indian groups and other critics, Harvard contracted the Swedish space corporation to run the test. That test was similarly met with controversy and aborted.

After his experiments were foiled, Keith pledged not to be "open in the same way" with future endeavors. He also left Harvard for the University of Chicago, which the Times indicated is permitting him to hire 10 new faculty members and kick off a new $100 million geoengineering program.

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Dubai rocked by heaviest downpour in 75 years and fatal floods following cloud-seeding missions



The United Arab Emirates and neighboring states were rocked this week by the heaviest rains on record, which resulted in devastating floods, dozens of deaths, significant damage, and diverted flights.

A government meteorologist indicated early on that the UAE's well-known geoengineering efforts were at least partly to blame. However, now that there is a body count, the government task force responsible for cloud-seeding missions in the region is attempting to deny responsibility.

Liberal media outlets such as the Guardian and Wired and so-called experts have dutifully accepted these denials, insinuating that climate change or other factors may instead be responsible.

When it rains, the NCM makes it pour

Cloud seeding is the controversial weather modification technique whereby aircraft, rockets, cannons, or ground generators release various chemicals and tiny particles, such as potassium chloride, into clouds in an effort to artificially increase precipitation.

Professor Ari Laaksonen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute indicated that there are two principal cloud-seeding techniques. Hygrocopic cloud seeding serves to speed up droplet coalescence in liquid clouds, "leading to production of large droplets that start to precipitate." The other technique, called glaciogenic cloud seeding, serves to "trigger ice production in supercooled clouds, leading to precipitation."

Cloud seeding not only works but has reportedly helped increase Utah's water supply by an estimated 12% in 2018.

The UAE has been conducting cloud-seeding missions for decades.

According to the Khaleej Times of Dubai, the UAE has ramped up its efforts under the UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement, managed by the Gulf state's National Center of Meteorology. This particular scheme was kicked off by the Ministry of Presidential Affairs of the UAE.

Alya Almazroui, director of the initiative, told the Khaleej Times in September, "By experimenting with various seeding approaches, we anticipate that these campaigns could lead to a more effective cloud-seeding approach and, consequently, increased rainfall in the targeted areas."

On average, the NCM reportedly conducts more than 1,000 hours of cloud-seeding missions every year, using aircraft equipped with hygroscopic flares full of nucleating agents.

It appears as though the NCM may have succeeded in its efforts at the expense of numerous lives.

Disaster and denial

ABC News Australia reported that a year's worth of rain descended on the UAE Tuesday, paralyzing Dubai and effectively closing the Dubai International Airport — the world's busiest hub for international air travel.

Extra to prompting hundreds of flights to divert course, rains fed destructive floods across the Emirates and Bahrain, killing at least 20 in Oman and one person in the UAE. Underground parking lots were flooded and metro operations were shuttered. Power was also knocked off in certain areas.

Dubai's media office acknowledged Tuesday that the downpour the UAE experienced this week was the heaviest it has experienced in 75 years.

Dr. Ahmed Habib, a meteorological specialist with the Gulf state's National Center of Meteorology, told Bloomberg that the NCM dispatched seeding planes from Al Ain airport on Monday and Tuesday to "take advantage of convective cloud formations."

Bloomberg indicated that NCM flew several cloud-seeding flights prior to the downpour. The Associated Press also indicated at least one aircraft associated with the cloud-seeding initiative flew around the country on Monday.

The NCM claimed on Wednesday it had instead seeded the sky on Sunday and Monday. State media did not acknowledge earlier flights.

Omar AlYazeedi, deputy director of the NCM, later told CNBC that the agency "did not conduct any seeding operations during this event."

Habib also later changed his tune, suggesting that the six cloud-seeding flights he had previously told the press about had indeed flown missions but had not seeded any clouds.

Various so-called experts have apparently taken the NCM at its word and seized on the opportunity to instead blame climate change.

Daniel Swain, a "climate scientist" at the University of California, Los Angeles, tweeted, "Did cloud seeding play a role? (Spoiler: likely no!) But how about #ClimateChange? (Another spoiler: likely yes!)."

"When we talk about heavy rainfall, we need to talk about climate change. Focusing on cloud seeding is misleading," Friederike Otto, a supposed global warming specialist at the Imperial College of London, told the Associated Press. "Rainfall is becoming much heavier around the world as the climate warms because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture."

"Rainfall from thunderstorms, like the ones seen in UAE in recent days, sees a particular strong increase with warming. This is because convection, which is the strong updraft in thunderstorms, strengthens in a warmer world," Dim Coumou of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam told Reuters.

Maarten Ambau, an atmospheric physics professor at the University of Reading, told the Guardian that "cloud seeding, certainly in the Emirates, is used for clouds that don't normally produce rain. ... You would not normally develop a very severe storm out of that."

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Scientists just test-fired a cloud device over American soil with the ultimate aim of blocking sunlight



The USS Hornet may be a decommissioned aircraft carrier, yet it has nevertheless become the launch-site for a controversial new war in the skies.

The Marine Cloud Brightening Program's Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement project, led by researchers from the University of Washington, took to the deck of the Hornet Tuesday to launch streams of particles into the sky above the San Francisco Bay. Their ultimate objective is apparently to block and reflect sunlight in hopes of limiting "global warming."

CAARE researchers behind the geoengineering scheme opted not to announce their experiment, reportedly citing concerns that there might be significant backlash.

After all, the American public — or at the very least, the residents of Alameda — might first want to hear from the hundreds of scientists who have called for a non-use agreement for solar radiation management and stated in an open letter that the "risks of solar geoengineering are poorly understood and can never be fully known. Impacts will vary across regions, and there are uncertainties about the effects on weather patterns, agriculture, and the provision of basic needs of food and water."

The experiment

Clouds bounce some of the sun's rays back into space. This supposedly helps cool temperatures locally.

The University of Washington's Department of Atmospheric Sciences conceded that fossil fuel emissions and other human activities have long generated aerosols in the atmosphere that mix in with low-altitude clouds, causing them to brighten and reflect more sunlight, having a cooling effect on the earth's climate.

"I think most people are aware that there's a greenhouse gas effect that warms climate," UW MCB program director Sarah Doherty told the Weather Channel. "But what most people aren't aware of is that the particles that we've also been producing and adding to the atmosphere offset some of that climate warming. So, the overall effect is one of climate warming, but it would be a lot more without that particulate pollution."

With climate alarmists concerned over supposed global temperature increases and the corresponding war on fossil fuels sure to rob the clouds of a contributing brightener, some scientists are keen to pump out aerosols of their own.

Robert Wood, the lead UW scientist running the cloud project, noted on his university blog that the team at the CAARE facility developed a "Cloud-Aerosol Research Instrument (CARI)." This device, which has multiple nozzles and resembles a snow maker, can apparently fire trillions of salt particles into the air.

The UW indicated that once emitted, such particles would only remain airborne in the atmosphere for a few days.

Wood told the San Francisco Chronicle simulations project that if 15% of Earth's marine clouds were artificially brightened, the globe might cool by approximately one degree.

According to the New York Times, CAARE researchers used their CARI device last week aboard the USS Hornet, firing particles and testing to make sure their cloud-brightening machine would function as desired outside a lab.

The Chronicle indicated that the next step of research will entail actually attempting to meddle with the clouds off the coast of California.

The concerns

"Every year that we have new records of climate change, and record temperatures, heat waves, it's driving the field to look at more alternatives," Wood told the Times. "Even ones that may have once been relatively extreme."

Contrary to Woods' intimation, many still regard marine cloud brightening to be an extreme and potentially fruitless initiative.

In addition to noting that MCB and other forms of solar radiation modification may ultimately accomplish little in the way of lowering global temperatures, the Congressional Research Service noted in a May 2023 report that some "modeling studies of [marine cloud brightening] have suggested it could alter precipitation patterns at global and regional levels."

A 2017 study published in Nature Communications indicated that aerosols released just in the northern hemisphere could possibly even lead to an increase in droughts, hurricanes, and storms elsewhere.

Late last month, a group of 31 top atmospheric scientists noted in a paper published in Science Advances that there is presently a "lack of a clear understanding of the relationship between aerosol and meteorological conditions and liquid water and cloud fraction adjustments and their timescales."

"Regional changes in temperature and rainfall could influence heat stress, water availability, crop productivity and the ability of communities to thrive," added the scientists who emphasized the need to evaluate the viability and risks of MCB.

The widespread concerns over the feasibility and fallout of such experiments has prompted the Biden administration to distance itself from the CAARE experiment, even though President Joe Biden signed Congress' Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022, providing funding for a "scientific assessment of solar and other rapid climate interventions in the context of near-term climate risks and hazards," including aerosol injection.

The White House told the Times in a statement, "The U.S. government is not involved in the Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) experiment taking place in Alameda, CA, or anywhere else."

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