Rainmaker, a California company which specialises in “cloud seeding” technology using chemical compounds sprayed from an aircraft to induce localised rainfall, found itself the target of online finger pointing after one of its flights had dispersed 70g of silver iodide some 100 miles from the site of the disaster a full two days before it happened.The Rainmaker flight induced a brief drizzle of 0.5cm of precipitation from two clouds over a scattering of parched farms. By contrast, the tail of the tropical storm which turned the Guadalupe River in Texas’s Kerr County into a lethal torrent on 4 July generated some five trillion litres of water – a feat of which only nature is capable.Until recently, the idea that phenomena ranging from extreme weather events to the vapour trails behind aircraft are evidence of nefarious human activity has been the currency of fringe, often far-right, online agitators. Do you think that all the climate change issues are manmade ?
