The Case Against Cloud-Seeding

Before reading this post, it is important that one understands the concept and methods used for ice-nucleation, which can be read here. As we know, Silver iodide is used to induce rain, either sprayed into the sky by aircraft or from ground. The toxic acute health effects of Silver iodide have been noted, however much research is lacking regarding chronic health effects and many others. The Material Data Safety Sheet for Silver iodide can be read here. We provide an excerpt from this article:

According to Medscape.com, prolonged exposure can cause discoloration of the hands. While the yellow white film-processing chemical would sometimes leave the skin a little yellow or orange, the lasting result was often a grey ashy color staining their hands. This discoloration is a side-effect of the disorder, agyria.

Argyria is classified as a skin condition though it also can potentially affect mucous membranes. Basically, the silver particles impregnate the skin and leaving residue in mucous membranes. Studies conclude that an unknown amount of silver can cause this condition because the rate at which it affects individuals varies so much. But this is, again, testing contact with the skin, not on the inhalation of silver iodide.

Putting aside human health, there are many controversies still surrounding the idea of cloud-seeding, as it is not based entirely on sound science, as discussed in this article:

There are many, many unscrupulous people in the field of weather modification who up until now have promoted some methods without any proper scientific evidence. Developing countries are particularly at risk here," says Siems. The technique ''remains controversial, especially because in the early days unrealistic claims were made about its success'', says Johannes Verlinde, associate professor of meteorology at US-based Pennsylvania State University. Another reason for the controversy, he says, is that no two clouds are alike, making it difficult to compare clouds to prove it really works.

 Another article for Australia makes similar claims, titled "Scientist admits proof lacking after $160k cloud-seed trial." The Gazette for Colorado Springs states:

Colorado State University climate researcher Bill Cotton conducted one cloud-seeding study five years ago. A $100,000 grant to study weather modification in Colorado produced no definitive results. He said there is a “good chance” cloud seeding boosts snowfall, adding that to have so much spending on it without conclusive research is “kind of sad.” “It’s not a very effective way to do science,” he said. 

Silver iodide is also used for hail mitigation methods. We believe the media isn't telling us the real science behind Silver iodide "hail suppression" and weather patents. Knowing that Silver iodide cloud-seeding is used for inducing ice-nucleation into the sky, we believe instead of getting small hail pellets in a larger general area of the city, we instead get bigger hail pellets to come down instantaneously (with heavy shorter-duration rain). This would mean affecting a smaller area, but with more severity. We present snippets from an article which share these views, the Mountain View Gazette (June 28, 2011), written by Sylvia Cole, with emphasis added in square brackets:

There have already been 80 hours of work logged by pilots of Weather Modification Inc., based out of the Old-Didsbury Airport, this month alone.  

[This leaves us wondering if there were individuals cloud-seeding prior to the June flood in Alberta (2013), perhaps trying a little too hard to prevent hail?]

The company, sponsored by Alberta Severe Weather Management Society (ASWMS), a group of insurance companies that privately funds cloud-seeding in the area, spent 11 of the first 21 days of June shooting silver iodide in the clouds as a way to shrink ice stones and reduce property damage, said Terry Krauss, PhD in meteorology and program director for the ASWMS.

 [Let's hear it from the eye-witnesses]

“We can see from our house when they fly over and we can see their tanks. I saw them two times (last) year and that was the two times we saw hail,” said Wendy Schroeder, who

lives west of Sundre and noticed it for the first time last season. She said the first time she saw the planes go by was July 8 and “within 35 minutes we were pounded. It was an immediate drop of the hail,” she said.

Schroeder said the hail pounded down for seven minutes with big gusts of wind that flooded into her house where the windows weren’t sealed. “In seven minutes we had two inches (of rain) and there was no grass.” She said a couple of days later the same thing happened. “The timing of this is highly suspicious and can’t be ignored.”

Schroeder said she’s only seen the seeding planes once this year and while there wasn’t any hail that followed, she noticed a yellow film left on grass and on her vehicles that she said happens every time a plane goes by and rain or hail follows. She believes the iodide is toxic and bad for livestock, plants and humans. [She is definitely not alone in this belief]

Above: Hail received in Lethbridge, AB on July 6/13

"Alberta Agriculture funded a five-year study from 1974 to 1978 called the Alberta Hail Project. The project, similar to the one funded today by ASWMA, seeded all potential hail clouds for five years. The project was continued until 1985 when it was stopped because of “inconclusive scientific data,” said Cam Hantiuk, media relations for the premier’s office."

The lack of provincial regulation worries Louis Bauman, south of Sundre, who’s been following cloud seeding since the government’s involvement in the 1970s.

His brother Joseph, who has since passed away, fought with the government back in the late ’70s and early ’80s to stop the project. He said it wasn’t right that the government was meddling with the natural course of weather and said such activities were devastating for agriculture, livestock farming and recreation.

“Is it lawful in Alberta to change the natural course of the weather by physical and chemical intervention to produce artificially positive rain and hail storm in one part in order to prevent contingent rain and hail in another?” he wrote in an affidavit to the Red Deer Provincial Court in 1984."

“Something isn’t quite right; something is going on,” Hofer told the Gazette last year. He’s lived in the Sundre area for the last 50 years and said he was hired to work in Penhold during the ’70s when the Alberta Hail Project was in full force. 

Hofer said he was responsible for picking up hailstones to see if there had been any change in the size from the silver iodine. “We quit with it because it didn’t accomplish nothing. You can’t control nature. Cloud-seeding is just some fancy name for creating an electrical storm,” he said. He believes that the seeding only suppresses a storm until eventually it needs to be released. He used the example of a hailstorm on Aug. 2, 2009 that devastated the area. “It builds up and it builds up … until it breaks loose and gets worse.”

The cloud-seeding project with a $2 million annual budget is funded by more than 20 of Alberta’s top insurance firms that represent 90 per cent of all insured companies, said Krauss.

“Maybe the seeding will help Olds and Calgary by pre-emptying the clouds onto us, but what sort of reasoning is that, and how fair could that be?” asked Schroeder in a letter to the editor last year.

Above: July 6/13 - Alberta hailstorm leaving an unusual trail of hail, appearing as a deposited line. Are these the remnants of an aircraft cloud-seeding operation, during its linear flight of Silver iodide dispersing? Could this be what Hofer, Schroeder, and Bauman were referring to? View the image below for a possible answer.

Popular Science, March 1950 Edition, reads: "Punctured Cloud . . . Here's how a man-made hole in a cloud looks from topside, 15,000 feet up. The racetrack-shaped opening, 20 miles long on the sides, five miles across on the ends, was formed by seeding a stratus cloud with dry ice. The ice acts as a trigger on the supercooled water droplets in the cloud. They condense into snow or sleet, fall out of the cloud and, bingo, there's a hole. The cloud-busting is part of Project Cirrus, a joint research program of the Army Signal Corps and the Office of Naval Research. Des. Irving Langmuir and Vincent J. Schnefer, of General Electric, who originated the seeding technique, insist it can make rain. The Army and Navy, interested in military applications, just won't say. 

Above: Cloud Nucleating Generator (CNG) - A propane flame is used to vaporize the seeding solution, which is composed of silver iodide mixed in acetone. The vaporized silver iodide then re-crystallizes in the cold air, forming millions of tiny particles which are intended to serve as ice nuclei. Read more here.

Above: The science of cloud-seeding. We realize that it is not this simplistic, now is it?

In an article by Ronald B. Standler, under a sub-section titled, Langmuir's cloud seeding in New Mexico, we are told:

The General Electric / U.S. Military research project released AgI and dry ice in the vicinity of Albuquerque, NM during October 1948 and July 1949. Langmuir initially claimed that this release caused rain all over the state of New Mexico and possibly in Kansas.

Langmuir's group continued to release AgI in New Mexico between November 1949 and July 1951. Langmuir claimed that the release of AgI modified the weather, not only in the state of New Mexico, but also more than 1000 kilometers downwind. 

The release of AgI "was discontinued in July, 1951 during the great floods in Kansas and adjacent states." (Byers, 1974, p. 20) This flood was no ordinary flood: the 13 July 1951 flood at Kansas City was described as "the most devastating flood in the nation's history"; 17 people died as a direct result of that flood, despite weather forecasts and warnings. (Alexander, 1951) It is still unknown what effect, if any, the AgI release in New Mexico had on rain and floods in Kansas. As discussed below, perhaps the more interesting lesson is not one of science, but ethics: Langmuir sincerely believed that AgI release was modifying weather at long distances from the point of release, yet he continued to engage in such weather modification for two years, despite the possibility of harm from such modification, and despite the lack of consent by affected people. 

Also See:

History and Problems in Weather Modification

Hail Storms: A Case for Anthropogenic Ice-Nucleation?

Hail Storms: A Case for Anthropogenic Ice-Nucleation ?

This is not the first time Wichita, KS has seen large hail coming down, the size of baseballs. It is also not the first time that NEXRAD has been influencing our weather patterns. On July 23, parts of Kansas got hit hard with large-sized hail. Residents described the hail event as happening very quickly, which started off as rain for five or-so minutes.

Although, we realize that hail can be a seldom-occurring natural weather event, it has become far more common after the 1960's, during the introduction of a weather modification patent for generating ice-nucleating crystals. Patent # 3,127,107 from 1964, entitled "Generation of Ice-Nucleating Crystals" states :

This invention pertains to the art of cloud seeding. It relates to a new process and a new device for generating crystals of ice-nucleating materials for introduction of the same into supercooled atmospheric clouds. The seeding of clouds, i.e. the introduction into super-cooled atmospheric clouds of materials which cause the formation of ice crystals in the clouds, has been practised for a number of years for the purpose of controlling or modifying weather conditions.

We realize that in many cases, this type of technology can be used for promoting rain, but does anybody stop to think what would happen if it was put into the wrong hands? Furthermore, how many times has this patent been tested in the sky, before generating the desired size for ice crystals. What are some possible consequences or outcomes when this experiment goes wrong?

Above: Lab and field studies of the ability of aerosols to act as
ice nuclei - from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science

Cloud-seeding has made more advancements up until today, by also using chemical agents which allow freezing water particles at higher temperatures. There are numerous patents, such as Patent # 3,545,677 entitled "Method of Cloud Seeding" (1970), which uses silver iodide (slightly toxic) in its methods. This patent goes into detail, describing what proportion of chemical agents should be used to form an ice nucleus of desired size. It states that, "The end result in all cases, however, is the precipitation of the silver iodide and the freezing of water to cause an ice nucleus." Patent # 3587966 from 1971, entitled Freezing Nucleation, tells us its invention "...relates to depositing ice and other hydrogen-bonding crystals from clouds and to freezing nucleants for causing deposition of ice from clouds. A process of the invention is to provide more effective freezing nucleants to cause ice to separate from clouds."

If there are individuals who are purposely (or by accident) mixing a certain amount of chemical agents causing large ice nuclei to grow, can you imagine the possibilities? Just imagine if this technology got into the wrong hands. We know that if we have the capability to suppress hail, we also have capability which can do the opposite.

Bacteria are particularly good at ice-nucleation, causing it to occur at temperatures as high as -2 °C. The fact that bacteria like P.syringae being able to nucleate ice crystals has been known for decades. P.syringae bacteria are well-known "catalysts" for ice formation. This is well-documented, mentioned  in the Journal of Bacteriology and weather modification publications dating back to 1989, just to name a few :

"Ice Nucleating Activity of Pseudomonas syringae and Erwinia herbicola", Journal of Bacteriology, 153: pp. 222-231.

Ward et al., (1989) "Preliminary Experimental Evaluation of Sonomax™ Snow Inducer, Pseudomonas syringae, as an Artificial Ice Nucleus for Weather Modification", J. Weather Mod., 21: pp. 9-13.

One contribution to the growing understanding of bacteria’s role in precipitation was recently presented at the American Society of Microbiology meeting. Alexander Michaud studied hailstones that fell on his Montana State University campus, and as reported by the BBC:

"He analysed the hailstones’ multi-layer structure, finding that while their outer layers had relatively few bacteria, the cores contained high concentrations. “You have a high concentration of ‘culturable’ bacteria in the centres, on the order of thousands per millilitre of meltwater,” he told the meeting."

ABC News also similarly reports that:

"Hail storms seem to arise out of nowhere, but US scientists have found that plant bacteria may be to blame. A Montana scientist collected some large hailstones measuring more than five centimetres in diameter after a June storm last year, froze them, and later analysed the water that melted away in layers. "Bacteria have been found within the embryo, the first part of a hailstone to develop," says Alexander Michaud of Montana State University, who presented the research at a meeting of microbiologists in New Orleans."

When we think of "chemtrails", cloud-seeding, or aerosols used for Geoengineering, how many of us think of bacterial agents? The mainstream media relates hail formation to the P.syringae bacteria without mentioning a single word on weather modification or cloud-seeding that uses these biological agents for precipitation. The bacteria is also used for artificial snow-making in ski hill resorts. Although some may attribute our climate to naturally-occurring bacteria in the atmosphere, we must also take into consideration weather modification patents that are using these bacterial strains in massive cloud-seeding operations. One such patent is US # 5223412, entitled "Cell-free and whole cell ice-nucleators and process for their production" :

Microbially-produced ice nucleator mixtures which include either cell-free ice nucleator particle mixtures and/or whole cell ice nucleator mixtures. These mixtures are produced in methods which comprises culturing a selected microorganism in a two step process at a first temperature in a first step and at a lower temperature in a second step. The microorganisms include Erwinia, Pseudomonas and Escherichia coil. These methods produce ice nucleator mixtures having increased concentrations of ice nucleating sites per given weight or volume of ice nucleator material.

P.syringae, along with other strains, is also mentioned in the whole of the text. In another weather patent # 5,223,412, take note of the bold font:

"U.S. Pat. No. 4,464,473 describes isolation of DNA segments encoding for substances having ice nucleation activity (INA). The DNA is isolated from organisms known to provide for ice nucleation such as various species of Pseudomonas including syringe, coronafaciens, pisi, tabaci or fluorescens. Xanthomonas, such as translucens or Erwinia, such as herbicola can also be employed. The host is then transformed with the DNA and the substances having ice nucleation activity expressed by the host microorganism. According to the disclosure, organisms which have a wide variety of ecological niches can be modified so as to provide for ice nucleation activity in new environments and/or with higher efficiency."

We must also take into consideration the anthropogenic disease toll that these bacteria have on plants. An article from the University of Minnesota reports:

Cornwell University: A tomato plant leaf infected
with bacterial speck, the disease caused by P.syringae

Many foliage plants are susceptible to bacterial diseases, especially during gloomy winter months. Common symptoms include leaf spots, blights, and wilting. Different species of bacteria affect plants in different ways. Plant symptoms include tip burns, leaf spots, blights, rots, wilts, or the total collapse of plant tissues. The most severe and devastating diseases of foliage plants are caused by bacteria belonging to the genera Erwinia, Xanthomonas and Pseudomonas.

You can read more about disease caused by Pseudomonas syringae here, or Erwinia here. To read more about bacterial plant disease, you can refer to the Cornell University Department of Plant Pathology ,

We must ask ourselves, how much bacteria is being spewed into the atmosphere artificially by humans? And what is its relation to hail and ice-nucleating crystals in the atmosphere? Is the weather modification (cloud-seeding) technology in the hands of righteous individuals? Could this be a case for anthropogenic undesired ice-nucleation (i.e. hail) and anthropogenic plant disease?

When our team heard about the large hail received in Wichita, we analysed the NEXRAD radar in this area immediately, which can be seen here. The radar, however, is from July 24th (one day after the hail storm). From both radar videos, we can clearly see the radar begins pulsing intensely, and an electromagnetic blast is emitted from the stations between 2:00 and 3:00 pm (CDT). We also see tapered storm systems being generated by these NEXRAD stations. Power outages were reported for 100,000 people in neighbouring Oklahoma, and also near Wichita, KS in Sedgwick county.

Above: Wichita, KS (KICT) NEXRAD Station begins heavy EM-pulsing. Also note the tapered storm system that is created nearby. July 24 - 08.52 UTC 

Above: Wichita, KS (KICT) NEXRAD Station - July 24, 2.47 pm CDT (19.47 UTC). Electromagnetic blasts emitted from stations like this are not very common.

Above: From left to right. July 24. Order of radar events. Vance Air Force Base, OK (KVNX) NEXRAD Station. 10.21 UTC, 14.21 UTC, 18:09 UTC, 18:57 UTC. Note the tapered storm system formed in the first image (near the Doppler centre), then the sudden pulsing of this station, and the electromagnetic blast shown in the last frame. 

Speaking of electromagnetism, there is also technology which uses electromagnetism to produce negatively charged ions for cloud generation or ice-nucleation

Erwinia stewartii bacteria causing plant disease in corn crops

Atlantic Sky Update - Boston, MA

Heavy spraying continues in #Boston #ma , mostly going N-S / NE-SW... It makes one wonder what we are "really" seeing on these #satellite images with mixed moisture robbed by #metallic #aerosol #geoengineering . This #weather system is a large one, stretching from #halifax to #florida , with #nexrad devices on the #atlantic side pulsing frequencies to shape and move this system. We have been told by local residents in #plymouth that prior to the #rain and #clouds , there was an intense #heatwave , but who knows if there is a more sinister motive.

This rain could definitely be used in Arizona where the fires are raging. It is unfortunate for those travelling to the #capecod to get some #sunshine at the #beach , but instead are greeted with #geoengineered #clouds with trapped #fog and #rain

The last photo shows how to escape a geoengineered sky simply using satellite radar. It proved to be successful, despite all the weather forecasts stating that it was all cloudy in Boston; however we were greeted with sun, warmth, and blue skies.