The skies over Dubai turned downright cinematic on April 16, 2024, as an unusually fierce storm dropped torrents of rain and unleashed widespread flooding. Social media filled with bizarre images: a Lamborghini forging through murky water, a golfer paddleboarding down a fairway. By the time the storm subsided, four people were dead and damage estimates were at $3 billion. In the aftermath, climate change took the brunt of the blame for the ferocity of the storm. But the "darker corner of the internet" lit up with the theory that this was no natural disaster, writes Kit Chellel at Bloomberg. Instead, this camp blamed the United Arab Emirates' cloud-seeding program.
The UAE, a desert nation with growing water needs, has been deploying the practice for decades, using planes to inject salt and other particles into the sky a bid to wring extra rain from clouds. Fact-checkers and many scientists rushed to debunk the idea that the practice unleashed the deluge, noting that the effects of cloud seeding are hard to pin down and likely modest, especially in storms already primed for heavy rain, as this one was. Still, doubts lingered, including from within the scientific community. "The Dubai floods act as a stark warning of the unintended consequences we can unleash when we use such technology to alter the weather," declared meteorologist Johan Jaques of the environmental data company Kisters. The story suggests future such debates are inevitable:
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"Whatever the form, geoengineering is likely to become increasingly important as the planet heats up, threatening water supply in some countries, increasing it in others. Or it could all be a tech-utopian fantasy, doomed to fall short against elemental forces that we can barely comprehend, let alone control. The answer depends on who you ask." (Read the full story.)
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