Original article (in Albanian) was published on 6/6/2024; Author: Pustina Patris
Claim: Climate changes are not due to global warming, but to government cloud seeding programs
Verdict: Missing context
Cloud seeding, a technique developed to mitigate the effects of global warming, is now being falsely portrayed by conspiracy theorists as responsible for causing climate changes.
As Faktoje has previously explained, the technique of ‘cloud seeding‘ is a weather modification method aimed at altering the amount or type of precipitation that falls from clouds by dispersing substances into the air that act as cloud condensation nuclei, thus modifying the microphysical processes within the cloud.
Although cloud seeding programs have been implemented by various governments around the world since the 1950s, the effectiveness of this technique in increasing precipitation remains a topic of debate. ‘So far’, says ecologist Rob Jackson from Stanford University, ‘making it rain is still more art than science.’
As with many other conspiracy theories, such as the HAARP system, the extraordinary powers attributed to the cloud seeding process appear to stem from a misunderstanding of the process.
In response to this conspiracy theory, climate scientists assert that cloud seeding simply is not a sophisticated enough technology to cause floods or climate changes.
‘The most common technique – in fact, the only widely used weather modification technique – is cloud seeding in an attempt to increase precipitation. The technology is quite rudimentary, and the results are very localized,’ said a spokesperson for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to Reuters.
Steven Siems, co-chair of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Expert Team on Weather Modification, stated, ‘Our current deliberate weather modification efforts cannot possibly be responsible for our unintentional climate changes through greenhouse gas emissions. Anyone suggesting such a thing is completely ignorant of both climate change science and weather modification.’
Some experts express hope that weather modification could eventually assist in combating the effects of climate change.
‘Some scientists believe that humans should address climate change by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching Earth through one or more solar geoengineering techniques,’ stated a NOAA spokesperson. ‘Solar geoengineering would involve modifying the climate, which could, in turn, affect global weather patterns. None of these techniques has been fully researched.’
