Dubai is making its own fake rain to beat 122°F heat

I thought that as air temperature rises, the air is able to absorb more heat, not less. And I thought rain was essentially the fact that there is too much moisture in the air, so it condenses. So this is counterintuitive to me (but I am likely missing something).

It will. I think it was The Economist, but it might have been some other magazine, who had an article recently, regarding Chinas usage of cloud seeding.

You're potentially "stealing" rain from other countries or regions. If it was just going into the ocean, then maybe it's fine, but if you're stealing it from a neighbouring country.

The vast majority of the population of the UAE lives in coastal cities and that is where the rain is induced. To the east, west, and north you have large bodies of water and to the south a (mostly) empty desert.

…which seems significant, no? If you fast forward to a water deprived future (uh, present?) and give nation states the ability to take water that would have fallen on neighbouring countries and take it for themselves… I don’t see how that ends well.

Don’t get me wrong, the technology is fascinating and on purely technological terms it’s a great development. But yes, it could lead to some strange outcomes.

Nobody would mind if there was one place on Earth which we would pollute in an extreme way. The problem is when we are polluting all over the place.

Now imagine if every major city started doing weather engineering.

It's unlikely that we would be able to have a giant effect, there is only so much energy we can put out, but local consequences could be pretty drastic. OTOH, local consequences will kind of fall in the same country.

But dry-brining is all the rage right now anyway.

Wikipedia has a section on effectiveness, “A study conducted by the National Academy of Sciences failed to find statistically significant support for the effectiveness of cloud seeding.”[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding

Where are Google, Facebook, Apple, SpaceX, California state gov?

And Musk is still focused on LA traffic jams. I guess the worst fires in California state history are not enough to sway the titans of industry into action.

Even though these fires are happening in their back yard.

More prescribed burns in the spring and wet years may help, but I don't think the political willpower is there, given the liability if things get out of hand.

The conspiracy nuts claim it's intentionally being used to make targeted natural disasters (and typically throw in chemtrail stuff), which is a very different claim than "we can probably increase rainfall a little bit'.

I've seen a picture from directly overhead of the Amazon river where you can see clouds forming directly over treetops on either side of the river, but not the tiniest wisp of cloud over the river itself.

> Applying electrical shocks to clouds is preferred as it doesn’t require the use of chemicals.

So, a bit different than cloud seeding