[dangero]

It’s important to note that rainfall in CA is not 100% natural. The state actively funds cloud seeding.

https://www.grants.ca.gov/grants/gfo-23-311-advancing-precip...

Example of a recent $2.5M grant.

This information is often buried in budgets under applied research grants. I suspect they obscure this information because it could create liabilities, for example, if gov funded rain seeding creates flooding and human death are they partially responsible for this?

[kevinwang]

From the link alone, it looks like the state actively funds cloud seeding research, not active practical cloud seeding?

[dangero]

Applied research is active cloud seeding

[stevenhubertron]

This doesn’t seem important to note at all.

[dangero]

It can affect current rainfall numbers, future rainfall, and future projections

[Animats]

Santa Clara County had an active cloud-seeding program from 1954 through 1994.[1] Santa Clara County used to be a major agricultural area. The goal is not to create rain, but to move it. Get the clouds to dump over the agricultural areas instead of the inland mountains. It worked, a little. But there was a concern that it was making wildfires worse, by doing what it was intended to do and thus making the inland forests more dry.

[1] https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/valleywater.org.us-west-1...

[dangero]

To my point, liability concerns are listed on that pdf as a reason why Santa Clara County stopped.

Cloud seeding can definitely increase rain over California even by your logic. Clouds don't respect state boundaries.

[avree]

That's a grant, to research them, which is important. There are programs that are shut down, since they learned from them: https://sawpa.gov/santa-ana-river-watershed-cloud-seeding/

[dangero]

Applied research is active cloud seeding

[spiderfarmer]

If you’re truly interested in the subject, contact the organizations actually doing research in the subject. Leave your tinfoil hat at home.

[Dig1t]

There are companies that do cloud seeding:

https://www.rainmaker.com/

>Though cloud seeding has been in use around the world for 80 years, we recognize that people have valid questions about how the technology works.

Nothing tinfoil about it.

[dangero]

Thank you. Every time I talk about cloud seeding in CA people have a strongly negative response without any facts and I'm not really sure why

[spiderfarmer]

Well, where are your facts? Did you contact them to find out what they can and cannot do?

The conspiracy theories often imagine cloud seeding as some weather control superweapon that can create catastrophic floods or droughts. In reality, you're just giving water droplets or ice crystals something to condense around (usually silver iodide particles). You're working with what nature has already provided and you can't conjure storms from nothing or dramatically amplify them.

But hey, maybe it's better limit your knowledge about a subject to just its name. It enables you to be afraid of things you don't understand. Some people crave that feeling.

[dangero]

There is tons of public information online about it. This is a strange approach to claim that the only way to know about a topic is to become an investigative journalist making phone calls to research groups.

Most of the usable water supply annually in CA comes from the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

This is also where the largest cloud seeding operations are.

People who claim cloud seeding ops only make a small impact on the usable water supply don’t understand that a small percentage shift in snowpack makes a difference between a drought and not a drought.

What I’m saying is that estimations of total cloud seeding water impact do align with the numbers needed to take the state out of a drought.

As I linked elsewhere there have been lawsuits in the past over cloud seeding causing floods.

[mattmaroon]

That’s silly. If you know about it, so do the lawyers who would come out of the woodwork to take these cases.

[dangero]

Here’s a research report relating to weather modification. It references even a prior California case where a flood happened in an area utilizing cloud seeding.

https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

[mattmaroon]

No what’s silly is the idea that they’re simultaneously trying to hide it and still publicly admitting to it.