Conspiracy theorists have latched onto cloud seeding in recent years. It’s the latest way the feds are trying to control your brain or make you gay or whatever flavor of paranoia their particular version of the theory has taken on.
For those who don’t know, cloud seeding, a practice dating back to the 1940s, is a weather modification technique in which a plane disperses silver iodine crystals into clouds to encourage rainfall. It would be particularly useful for areas experiencing drought—if only it actually worked.
Because it seems that cloud seeding, one of the many things conspiracy theorists have been freaking out about, is largely unsuccessful.
This news comes from a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO—an independent, nonpartisan government agency within the legislative branch that essentially audits the rest of the federal government. The report notes some benefits to cloud seeding, like its intended purpose of increasing rainfall. Its effectiveness at actually producing rain is unclear, though it appears spotty at best.
It’s not necessarily a good thing, despite what conspiracy theorists believe, since droughts are expected to get more frequent and much more intense thanks to the extreme weather conditions brought on by climate change.
Weather control is a Hoax?
After poring over the data from several cloud seeding studies, the GAO found that cloud seeding might actually work and could have some benefits to human life. But it’s pretty much impossible to measure how well it works and whether it’s worth the investment.
For instance, Utah spends $12 million a year on cloud seeding, but without a way to accurately measure whether any of the rain that falls in Utah is a direct result of cloud seeding, there’s no way to know whether the practice has any real effect. At that point, you might as well be studying the effectiveness of Native American rain dances.
The closest the report comes to confirming the lunatic ravings of Alex Jones and GOP representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is this: when silver iodine released into clouds dissolves, it releases silver ions that, in high concentrations, could have negative effects on beneficial bacteria in the environment.
The report posits this as nothing more than a theory requiring more study. So, at worst, the harmful effects of cloud seeding on our environment would essentially amount to a hypochondriacal germaphobe washing their hands more often than necessary.
The federal government has almost nothing to do with cloud seeding anymore. It happens at a state level, and the states use it at their discretion to drum up rainfall to combat draught or to suppress hail, another one of cloud seeding’s uses.
There are currently nine states that regularly cloud seed (a healthy mix of red, blue, and purple states) while another 10 have banned it or banned weather modification in general—seemingly out of a misplaced sense of Alex Jones-style tinfoil hat paranoia.
States that ban it, like Tennessee, are usually the same that futilely try to ban chemtrails left behind by planes, which is impossible and stupid and a waste of everyone’s time, money, and energy.
The post Can the US Government Control the Weather? A New Report Says Not Really. appeared first on VICE.
