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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