this is why all the climate doomers will be wrong. we will be able to engineer our way out of a lot of our climate problems > Rainmaker just became the first company to prove it had created extra rain and snow in Alaska > in just three hours,... they produced ~19M gallons of water, enough to supply 150 American households for an entire year, with just two drones!! > the drones find clouds already holding water and help that water fall as rain or snow > covering Utah’s entire 7,500-square-mile Bear River Basin will take 36 drones working in relays, and the same model can be repeated across the mountain ranges feeding the Colorado River > the extra snow melts into streams and reservoirs, supplying farms, cities and hydropower through the dry months > Rainmaker’s goal is to stop the Great Salt Lake from shrinking by 2030 and double the Colorado River’s flow by 2031 > now imagine this at full scale... they'll basically turn the sky itself into a tool for fighting drought, empty reservoirs, shrinking glaciers, damaged ecosystems, and wildfire riskshow more

This tech is called “cloud seeding” and it’s been around for years. It doesn’t “produce” more rainwater, it just manipulates where the rainwater falls. This sometimes has consequences of taking rainwater AWAY from places that rely on that rainwater. Big issue in the Middle East especially, where one country can “steal” another country’s rainwater

You didn't produce a single drop of water, you condensed it from the air. What area will now be short 19M gallons? I don't want to live in a world where I have to pay a rainfall cooperative to compete with other regions for rain fall.

This post is at the same time SO DUMB, and SO TELLING about what’s wrong with our species… It’s Dunning-Krugger at it’s peak. Somebody claims to induce rain in Alaska—> we’ll engineer out our way out global warming

Sounds great, but you do have to worry about the law of unintended consequences.

The sky is a constantly replenishing reservoir! We can use water from it the same as dams use rivers or wells use aquifers!

We got into this because geo-engineering. The world worked for hundreds of millions of years.. it’s not broken so try and ‘fix it’. I swear some of you ‘smart’ people in tech are the dumbest mf’ers who only try to inflate the frail, low T ego by trying to play god.

i genuinely would like to believe this but my hunch is that the earth is too complex and intraconnected of a system for us to be able make significant changes to variables like this and not produce a bunch of unintended, unwanted effects.

I just wonder what happens when those clouds dont unload where they were supposed to..

Humans should stop messing with this stuff. We are going to accidentally create a superstorm.

Human industry and fossil fuel use emit approximately 38 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year and the richest most powerful people on the planet's power and wealth rests on this continuing.

@ADoricko “We engineered our way out of climate change” is a bold summary of “we got 58 acre-feet out of a cloud that was already wet.”

I can imagine a scenario where this actually creates legal headaches down the line. "Cloud rustling” is the idea that seeding clouds upstream could rob downwind states of precipitation they would’ve naturally gotten. ie: 1922 Compact

No, weather manipulation and weather warfare are not to be allowed. These people belong in prison.

I don’t know enough about it, but I’d guess that if you force a cloud to drop rain in a specific spot it means that same cloud isn’t dropping rain in the spot it was originally going to. Maybe we should fully understand the unintended consequences before opening Pandora’s box?

Logic says that they caused premature rainfall. That same rain the will not fall where it would have without the operation, thus denying another region of would normally have been expected. Nothing was created here, just diverted.

To me this is the scary kind of FAFO. You just dont try to mess with nature this way.

you dont know if any of this is true and you are making wild, vast assumptions, not to mention downwind effects of taking water out of the atmosphere for one location vs another are not known, need to be studied and independently verified, for starters

I’m sure messing with infinitely intricate weather systems for short term gain will have no downsides

We have climate issues and devestating storms from the weather manipulation that is already occurring. I will not support and I will fight any company spraying more crap on us and destroying our soil.

Climate doomers have been climate dooming precisely so people would take it seriously enough to make the necessary technological advances to counter it. That was literally the whole point.

But where is the rain not falling because they did this? Like, if we're diverting rain from the ocean, or that would fall on e.g. northern canada and drain straight into the arctic... that could still have some negative environmental consequences but it's not like the ocean is gonna go dry. It's basically just a more efficient way of transporting water to where it is needed. But if you're forcing clouds to rain on one headwater and in the process drying out another headwater, both of which are vital to people and animals, that's a problem.

I’m definitely bullish on cloud seeding and other potential weather mod interventions. But to say we can engineer our way out of a lot of climate problems is unfortunately a naive take that dramatically underestimates the catastrophic risks we face. Increased precipitation is no doubt helpful, and cloud seeding can be used for other cooling measures like cloud thinning. But we have a long way to go in terms of bringing temperatures down before we start seeing major earth system collapse. See more here:

Really cool engineering! However as with all good stuff there is risk. Who decides who has controll of the skies? If i understand correct this technology moves clouds, so if it rains on one spot there will be another spot which won't get any rain.

While I tend to agree with the original premise of your argument, its fairly naive to think that there would not be serious downstream consequences to other areas where that rain was likely to end up falling later on, or that we could effectively game that system out. Then just imagine local/state/national/international politics getting involved in those decisions.... Sounds like a bad idea to me.

Oh yah cool. Sucking all the water out of the sky for your own purposes, that seems like a great idea

That's a lot of rain in three days. Did it cause a flash flooding?

what gives you the right to mess with the weather

They can't create rain from background meteorological conditions that don't support rain. They can make clouds that are in a borderline condition to rain, and they can make clouds that are raining rain more.

im pretty sure we technically already have the ability to geoengineer away global warming with throwing essentially volcanic ash into the atmosphere. whether it's a good idea or not is another question entirely.

Buy a house on the coast of Florida if you're so sure. Buy two even.

I did not consent.

What are the pumping into the air? Do the people below agree to have these chemicals sprayed above them and into the land? Any long term studies about the impact to health and soil? @grok can you answer these questions?

What Could Possibly Go Wrong

I am guessing you are not an engineer. If the engineering to prevent the problem cannot be done, and it is indeed fundamentally easier, it is profoundly naive to expect to be able engineer putting humpty dumpty back together again.