Did Bloomberg 'Seed' The Idea Of Cloud-Seeding Causing Dubai Floods In Order To Trap And Discredit 'Climate Deniers?

It’s an unsettling suggestion, reminiscent of the worst days of the psychological ‘nudge’ operations which took place during Covid, but it’s something we should consider I feel. Hitherto, the MSM has been largely dismissive of geoengineering/weather modification advocates. lumping them in with the rest of the ‘disinformation’ and conspiracy theorist crowd. But all of a sudden, Bloomberg lends credence to the real possibility that extreme rainfall and flooding was caused by cloud-seeding in the UAE. That’s odd IMO.

In response, Twitter/X ignites and the geoengineering crowd go crazy, claiming that they were right all along, extending the ‘logic’ that if one extreme weather event was caused by cloud-seeding then all extreme weather events, globally, must be the result of a global conspiracy to modify the weather. Even Matt Ridley and Judith Curry have joined the fray:

It’s no coincidence I believe that we now have this article published in Phys.org:

Cloud seeding, although decades old, is still controversial in the weather community, mostly because it has been hard to prove that it does very much. No one reports the type of flooding that on Tuesday doused the UAE, which often deploys the technology in an attempt to squeeze every drop of moisture from a sky that usually gives less than 4 or 5 inches (10 to 13 centimeters) of rain a year.

"It's most certainly not cloud seeding," said private meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "If that occurred with cloud seeding, they'd have water all the time. You can't create rain out of thin air per se and get 6 inches of water. That's akin to perpetual motion technology."

Meteorologists and climate scientists said the extreme rainfall is akin to what the world expects with human-caused climate change, and one way to know for certain that it was not caused by tinkering with clouds is that it was forecast days in advance. Atmospheric science researcher Tomer Burg pointed to computer models that six days earlier forecast several inches of rain—the typical amount for an entire year in the UAE.

Three low-pressure systems formed a train of storms slowly moving along the jet stream—the river of air that moves weather systems—toward the Persian Gulf, said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann. Blaming cloud seeding ignores the forecasts and the cause, he said.

Many of the people pointing to cloud seeding are also climate change deniers who are trying to divert attention from what's really happening, Mann and other scientists said.

"When we talk about heavy rainfall, we need to talk about climate change. Focusing on cloud seeding is misleading," said Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto, who heads a team that does rapid attribution of weather extremes to see if they were caused by global warming or not. "Rainfall is becoming much heavier around the world as the climate warms because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture."

You see how it works, nudge, nudge, wink, wink? If my suspicions are correct, high profile sceptics like Matt and Judith need to be a lot more careful.