Cloud SEEDING BLAMED For Texas Floods, Deaths, Company CEO SPEAKS Out ft. Augustus Doricko
BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/ Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com Host: Tim Pool @Timcast (everywhere) Guest: Rainmaker CEO Augustus Doricko @ADoricko (X) My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL Cloud SEEDING BLAMED For Texas Floods, Deaths, Company CEO SPEAKS Out ft. Augustus Doricko
No, weather modifications did not cause the deadly flash floods in Texas.
A question that many are asking.
Two days before the flash floods in Texas that killed over 100, and the number is going up, as well as many little girls.
It's a sad story.
There was a company that engaged in cloud seeding operations.
Many on the right have said it is these actions that has resulted in this flash flood.
Now, the AP says no, but you know what?
We are so sick and tired of being lied to that we don't trust these institutions.
So when the corporate press comes out saying it's not possible, don't be surprised when no one believes it.
We saw something similar in Dubai.
Let me, I think I have the Dubai story here.
The weather experiment that really flooded Dubai.
Well, the story here was that there was cloud seeding done in Dubai, and then of all places, it flooded.
So many people speculated that cloud seeding had caused the problem.
What's the argument that it wouldn't?
Well, the CEO of a cloud seeding company that actually did cloud seed in Texas days before the flood says they could not produce nearly enough rainfall to contribute to what caused this flooding.
And I will say this.
New Mexico also is dealing with flooding.
And as far as I can tell, there's no cloud seeding in New Mexico.
I will also additionally add, yo, we flooded for real.
Yeah, we flooded here in West Virginia.
It's not as bad nearly, but we have had such an intense amount of rain, I kid you not, we had to get a pump for our basement and we were pumping water out of it.
And it was actually crazy.
It caused a short.
And we were talking with the contractors, the companies we work with.
We were like, what's going on?
And they were like, the groundwater level is rising dramatically because of how much rain we've gotten.
It's unprecedented.
The amount of rain in West Virginia has been absolutely insane.
It may just be that we got a period of extremely heavy rain.
Now, here's what I don't like in all of this.
We'll talk to this cloud seeding CEO in just a moment.
He's coming in.
He's going to tell us about what's really going on from his perspective.
But the issue is on the right, they're saying it's cloud seeding, on the left, saying it's climate change.
And I'm like, dude, sometimes it rains.
There are periods of great storms and hurricanes.
They happen.
And one particular incident is not indicative of any deep state conspiracy or this mass global upheaval of weather.
You've got both, and they've decided to make it whatever it is that fits their political agenda.
I don't think it's global climate change, and I don't think it's cloud seating, to be completely honest.
However, I do think there are, well, to be honest, the cloud seating is more reasonable an argument than the climate change one.
I think climate changes.
I think it's happening.
The question is, if it is man-made, can we even do anything about it?
I'm not going to purport to know the answers of whether it is or is not man-made.
I won't assert that.
The only question I have for the politics is, why are they insuring homes in Miami Beach and offering 30-year mortgages on them if they think the water is going to rise and wipe them out?
So clearly the insurance companies and the banks don't believe in climate change.
Or at the very least, they don't care, I guess.
Well, let's do this.
To get into the issue of cloud seating, we're going to pull in the CEO of this cloud seating company.
This is Augustus Dorico.
I'm probably pronouncing it wrong, but hopefully not.
Who actually, they say, was engaged in cloud seating.
So we're loading up the interview now.
I got to click a few links, which gets it all booted up.
I'm the founder and CEO of Rainmaker, which is a next generation cloud seeding company that flies drones into clouds and disperses material that makes clouds rain or snow more for the sake of saving farms, ecosystems, cities, and industries that are at risk of drought.
And I should also say immediately thereafter that that cloud seeding operation and all of Rainmaker's operations had nothing to do with the floods that ensued.
And so just to give you context on what cloud seeding is a little bit more first and then the timeline of events as it relates to the flood.
Cloud seeding relies on finding clouds that exist, right?
It's not chemtrails, right?
If you see a long streak in the sky, that has nothing to do with cloud seeding.
It's not dimming the sun either, which is another real technology called solar radiation modification.
Cloud seeding is a water supply tool invented in the United States in the 1940s that farmers have been using, that governments have been using for decades to enhance their water supplies.
In Texas, there are municipalities and farmers that contract with us to produce more water for their crops themselves, for rain on their crops, to replenish their reservoirs, to recharge their aquifers.
Because if you look at Texas, obviously it does not need more water right now.
But the Ogallala aquifer is radically depleted.
As of just June 24th, there was severe drought throughout a lot of the state.
And so these entities, these farms and municipal governments, they contract with us to make more rain when there is drought.
We were flying a cloud seeding operation for about 20 minutes on July 2nd at about 1 p.m. Central Time.
That cloud seeding flight seeded two clouds where we dispersed about 70 grams worth of silver iodide.
That's material we use.
And that's like 10 Skittles worth of material.
We seeded those clouds and then they then precipitated and dissipated over the course of two hours after.
So those clouds themselves were gone.
The aerosols that we dispersed precipitated out and dispersed away.
They didn't remain in the atmosphere long after.
We then saw the National Weather Service issue their flash flood warning at about one in the morning on the 3rd.
We, as cloud seaters, are regulated by the state of Texas with something called suspension criteria, which means if there already is risk of flooding, if there already is too much moisture on the ground and any more rain could cause flooding, if the reservoirs are too full and could spill over and cause flooding, then we're legally required by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation to suspend operations to do no harm.
And not only did we act in accordance with Texas state law and stop before those operations happen, our meteorologists were capable enough to identify that there was going to be risk of flooding before we were required to suspend operations and then had no effect whatsoever on the remnants of Tropical Storm Berry that did blow in and induce the floods that occurred.
And just for context on scale too, real quick, the best cloud seeding operations that we've seen to date, either from our operations or from the best in class research at universities across the Western U.S., those cloud seeding operations produced tens of millions of gallons of precipitation over the course of about an hour or two, distributed over hundreds of square miles.
The flooding that occurred, that system dumped like three to four trillion gallons of precipitation.
So one, we weren't operating during that storm.
Two, the air soils that were dispersed in the prior day could not have persisted long enough to affect that.
And then three, even if we had been seating during that system and we weren't, there's no way that cloud seeding could have produced as much water as we saw from that flood.
So I got to ask, there's flooding in New Mexico right now.
I'm up here in the D.C. area in West Virginia, and we've had a month or two months of unprecedented rainfall where the locals are telling us it's really, really bad.
To me, it sounds like what you guys were doing on the surface is completely unrelated, as is what you were saying.
And I saw the story yesterday, people were saying it's cloud seeding.
They were cloud seeding right before this flood.
This is what caused it.
It seems like a big leap where you have to actually break down what it is you guys were doing.
Then you got to answer a few other questions.
Why is there flooding in New Mexico?
And why is there heavy rainfall in Appalachia?
I don't want to say unprecedented, but it's a, I mean, no joke, the amount of rain we've gotten has been really insane.
So we're in an elevated position and the groundwater level was ridiculously high.
And I had to get a pump from my basement.
But so let me ask you this then.
Let's talk about scale.
The operation you did, when you do this stuff, you send out a drone, a couple drones.
And it's also worth saying, too, just for context and like references, that flight was conducted at about 1,600 feet above ground level.
So 1,600 feet above ground level was about its max altitude.
And so again, for the folks that are concerned about the long streaks that they see in the sky, right, they are sometimes called contrails or sometimes called chemtrails.
I have not yet seen any evidence to suggest there is malevolent government conspiracy to produce chemtrails that are giving us neurotoxins or mind control viruses or chips or anything like that.
I'm totally open to evidence of it, though.
And so a lot of people have seen me pictures of the sky.
But those streaks that you see are occurring around 20,000, 30,000 feet.
And so our operations, our flights, be they with drones or airplanes, are 10,000 feet lower than that, if not 20.
So when you release a small amount of material, it seems like less than a drop of water in the ocean compared to what this flooding and these storms actually were.
But you kind of mentioned it.
Is it possible for a cloud seeding entity to create rainfall that would result in floods of this magnitude?
So the reason why we have suspension criteria is because cloud seeding produces precipitation, right?
And if there are already coincident risks, like a huge system that is going to cause flooding naturally, cloud seeding it would be imprudent, right?
There's no way physically to produce 4 trillion gallons worth of precipitation with cloud seeding technology that exists or with anything that's even been theorized about now.
That being said, there's something that I think a lot of people will bring up in the comments that I want to address transparently, right?
Like I think there's a lot of mistrust around weather modification.
It's obviously a very consequential technology, and we should, I should, I have to be as transparent as possible to earn the trust of these people that have understandable concerns.
There have been in the past operations that were deliberately intended to cause flooding.
So if you look at Operation Popeye in the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force was conducting cloud seeding flights to try to flood out the Hawaiian trail.
Now, the fundamental difference between cloud seeding now and in the past isn't just that we use drones.
It's that with radar and specifically new kinds of radar, we can measure what our effect is on the cloud.
Whereas before, you know, you would fly up into a cloud, sprinkle some magic beans, and then maybe it would rain, maybe it wouldn't.
It's hard to say what the effect was.
We can now measure that.
And so how effective was Operation Popeye?
It's very hard to say.
But it's worth acknowledging that very publicly because it has been done by the U.S. government before.
And to my knowledge, hasn't been done since.
But again, if there is any evidence of that, happy to engage with people online about it.
So in Texas, our customers are associations of counties and private farming interests that need more water either for their crops or for their reservoirs or for their aquifers, like I said.
So the flight on the second that people have referenced repeatedly and saying was causal for the flooding, that was for the South Texas Weather Modification Association.
I'll also say, you know, I can absolutely handle it.
I feel no responsibility for the flood, obviously, but can handle people accusing me or sending me death threats about that.
To the poor farmers in Texas that are just trying to pay for more rain because their crops will die without it.
Like they are totally undeserving of the virulent, virulent death threats that they've gotten.
And that being said, though, I am still sympathetic to the people that have lost so much and that have emotions running high.
And I think that people want to find a scapegoat.
They want to find a culprit they can hold responsible for the flooding because in a world where there was someone responsible and if you could hold them to account, you could potentially stop this in the future.
Unfortunately, there are still natural disasters.
There is nobody responsible for this here.
And that's more tragic.
However, cloud seeding right now, right, it's used for precipitation enhancement.
It's used to make more water for people that are suffering from drought.
And there's huge droughts that are causing the city of Phoenix to cut off water to residencies right now.
And so we need some sort of weather modification right now with serious regulatory oversight from the state and federal governments.
And like most business owners aren't asking for more regulation.
I am because I want people to feel like this is a trustworthy and beneficial technology.
But all of that to say, yeah, it's used for mitigating drought right now.
It has been attempted to be used for severe weather suppression in the past.
So if you look at Project Storm Fury, this is where the American government, the U.S. Weather Bureau, and Air Force collaborated to seed hurricanes in a totally different manner, but to seed hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean before they reached the Pacific to reduce the amount of rain that would precipitate out of them when they hit the eastern seaboard, and then also to reduce their wind velocities to mitigate their damage.
Now, we didn't have the radar or the satellite imagery at the time to attribute what our effect was.
But if we were to ban this technology now, not only would we prevent farmers across America from having access to water, not only would we put at risk all of the ecosystems and cities in the American West that are deprived of water, not only would we be at greater risk of wildfire, but also we would shut the door on the potential research into the future to mitigate severe weather as well and continue to be beholden to these tragic natural disasters.
We take existing big fluffy clouds that have water in them.
We'll fly our plane or drone into those clouds and then disperse an aerosol, like a small particulate, not nanoparticles, but a particulate into the clouds.
And silver iodide, it has a crystal structure that's very similar to ice.
And so water that's in small droplet form, not big enough to precipitate, will freeze onto the silver iodide crystal, grow into a big enough snowflake, break apart, create more snowflakes that all then become big enough to precipitate and sometimes melt back into rain.
In Utah and Colorado, where we also operate, filling up reservoirs and enhancing snowpack, we mostly do snowpack enhancement.
In Texas, it's rain enhancement.
The last interesting thing to say is that with radar, right, specifically with something called dual polarization radar, you can discriminate between liquid and ice in cloud.
And in so doing, measure what your effect on that cloud is.
I think a lot of people have talked about either HARP or lasers or sound to like percuss clouds and shake the water out of them.
You know, I am a technologist and business owner, and so a lot of these technologies are peripherally interesting to me, but I haven't yet seen any evidence to suggest that they're.
There was a story a while ago, this is years, a decade plus, where there were discussions about universities publishing positive results for using infrared lasers to trigger rainfall in clouds or things like that.
But I guess just some general questions, I suppose, is, is there a risk from silver iodide being in the water and then going into our crops and going into our land?
So there's generally like three questions that come up or concerns around cloud seeding.
And one is, are you polluting with what you're dispersing into those clouds?
And so silver iodide itself, like should you eat it hand over fist?
No.
But when we look at the data from decades of programs in the past that are emitting about 50 to 100 grams of silver iodide per operation dispersed over hundreds of square miles, there's already two parts per million of silver in most American soil.
After decades of cloud seeding from these old operations in Utah and California and Colorado, we've only seen an increase in eight parts per trillion above the background amount.
That's like almost an immeasurably small increase.
It's not even necessarily statistically significant, and it's a million times less than what's already naturally in the soil.
So have we seen any adverse ecological, agricultural, or human health impacts from silver iodide from cloud seeding?
No, categorically and like absolutely not.
And that isn't to say that like the notion of a more organic biodegradable material in the future is something I'm not interested in, right?
Like just for the PR, if anything, that seems to make sense.
And to preempt any potential ecological issues, that would be sensible.
It's also worth saying like strontium, barium, aluminum, these things are often referenced in like soil samples or rain samples, and then people accuse cloud seeding of having produced those.
Like we don't use any strontium or barium or aluminum for cloud seeding.
I don't know of anybody that does.
There might be more in the atmosphere now from other pollution, but that actually is worth like driving a point home on.
Right now, we already modify the weather unintentionally in so many ways, right?
Like just take, for example, building a city.
The heat island from a city, from all of the like streets that you build and the concrete changes the precipitation patterns and the heat around the city, right?
If we talk about emissions, whether it's to do with like the degradation of the ozone hole in the last century or CO2 or just sulfates that come from our factories, we're already modifying the weather unintentionally right now.
And I think Rainmaker's thesis is that with caution and with regulation and with the mindset of stewardship, we should intentionally try to modify the weather for both humanities flourishing and also creations.
You know, it's really fascinating is I was reading, I've read several articles about the, I guess they call it sort of the terraforming of Vegas in that we've modified the weather of Vegas in one really simple way.
When a human being flies from their hometown, let's say they're in Chicago or they're in Omaha, into Vegas, they're bringing water with them in their bodies.
And then by virtue of going to the bathroom, it increases the moisture levels in the desert, which then results in an increase in clouds over a very long period of time.
I'm curious if like these are these are considerations in your research, in the work that you have to do in the regulations, the long-term impact of increasing the amount of water.
So I'll put it this way.
If you have an area of farmland, let's say it's in Texas or Utah, and they have an average of, I don't know, an inch of rainfall per year or something, they then say we need more rainfall, so you come in.
The first question I guess I have is, how much rain do you create in these areas with a sustained cloud seating operation?
Is it going to be a noticeable increase in the, you know, per inches per year?
So right now, a given cloud seeding operation, if you look at all the data from our ops and then from other academic research, produces less than like a centimeter of precipitation on a given event.
And maybe the technology, I'm sure that the technology can be improved meaningfully in the future, but any given operation is not capable of inducing like a flash flood.
It is a de minimis amount in terms of the like length of precipitation on the ground, but in terms of the volume of water distributed over, you know, 100 square miles, that's very consequential.
Like that's a lot of water.
That's tens of millions of gallons from just one op.
With respect to like whether we should be or how we should think about changing the environment, first of all, like before we even think about greening deserts, right, we just have to get back to baseline.
Like there is less precipitation now.
There's less water available now in a lot of these regions like California, the Colorado River Basin, writ large, Texas, than there was 100 years ago.
And so the farmers and the people that settled the West, they had more water than we do now.
And by cloud seeding, we can get closer to or at least back to that amount of water.
Then the second thing as well, is like, how do we think about making more water?
Well, we should do it with a mindset of stewardship, of a mindset of stewardship.
And so I think it's worth saying that another question that comes up in cloud seeding is like, well, are you playing God, right?
And first of all, like in a very material sense, we already modify creation and specifically the water cycle in a whole host of ways intentionally right now for both our benefit and the environments.
Like God, I believe in God.
I happen to be a Christian, but God like made the rivers flow in a particular direction, right?
And then we build dams and reservoirs to store that water and redirect their flow.
God put the salt water in the oceans and we desalinate it and take it out for our interest now.
And also there's water in the ground that was there from essentially the beginning of time that we pump up faster than it would ever naturally come up in springs for the sake of our environment and for the sake of our farms and our cities.
In fact, actually, talk about like unintentional consequences or like unintentionally modifying the weather.
We've pumped so much groundwater out of the earth that the axis of the earth has changed.
And if we don't, here's something really, really concerning.
You know, we had the Dust Bowl about a century ago, and that was awful.
Like that destroyed the lives of so many Americans.
Well, there's an impending Dust Bowl now because of aquifer degradation, right?
We're pumping so much more out of the aquifers than is sustainable.
We're pumping so much more out of the aquifers than naturally percolates into them that as the water levels go down, the sediment compresses and the amount of water you can even store in the aquifers long term is being permanently reduced.
And so if we lose these aquifers, then we lose the capacity to have groundwater ever again in the future.
And so as the Olala in Texas and the Midwest is being drawn down, like we have to produce more water because the alternatives are either not having groundwater ever again or needing to tell farmers to stop farming and making everybody have like two minute showers.
And so again, I think this should be something that there's federal regulatory oversight for, state level regulatory oversight for transparency and the ability for people to ask questions and consent to it, 100%.
But if we don't produce more water in the areas where there are droughts, then there are impending disastrous consequences.
I guess just, you know, possibly the last question, maybe it'll lead to more.
But what I was alluding to about, you know, Vegas and the changing of this terrain, the concrete of the city, like you mentioned, it's a heat, what did you call it, heat Island.
Yeah, Vegas is this big concrete block.
It's really hot.
But also, they keep shipping in food.
They keep shipping in people, which has inadvertently been terraforming the city and the desert.
I should say the desert.
And interestingly, as well, many people want grass.
So they're artificially bringing in gas and then humans bring in this water because they want it to happen.
I feel like, and I don't mean to imply this is a net negative or a bad thing.
Let me just start by saying in the whole climate change argument, there are people that are arguing that an increase in CO2 will increase the speed at which crops grow.
I don't know, whatever.
Make your arguments.
But if you are increasing the amount of rainfall in a particular area more so than it's experiencing now, could it change that type of terrain in some way that we can't predict?
So again, a mindset of stewardship and caution and regulatory oversight is super necessary because this is going to be consequential, right?
What you can see now with regenerative agriculture, which I'm totally in favor of, right?
Like I think we should have way more regenerative agriculture.
If you plant crops and maintain those crops, specific grasses in areas that used to be deserts, those crops will keep more water in the soil and then they'll release natural dust particles that facilitate more cloud formation and subsequent precipitation.
And so you get this virtuous cycle from regenerative agriculture.
By producing more water in a lot of these regions and then growing crops or growing grasses, we can actually retain more water and then get more natural precipitation as well.
So should we do that wontonly?
Should anybody be allowed to do it?
Absolutely not.
But like, are there potential virtuous cycles that could lead to a more abundant United States by cloud seeding?
Yeah, absolutely.
And my hope is that first and foremost, like everybody affected in Texas has prayers and family and supplies sent to them and that they are taken care of.
But then secondly, that nobody takes this natural disaster as an opportunity to drum up political support for baseless claims that would ban a technology that ultimately could help hundreds of millions of people across the United States and then billions across the world.
I think I would just want to say that if anybody does have questions, if anybody is skeptical, I am doing my darndest to answer every single question that people do pose to me and will continue to do so for as long as it is necessary to build trust and transparency here.
And so if you are concerned, whether you ask questions in good faith or bad faith or threaten to kill me, I'm happy to talk about that.
But in general, I'm praying for the people of Texas, despite Cloud Seating not having any responsibility for it and happy to talk with everyone about Cloud Seeding's potential.
That, of course, was, as you learned, the CEO of Rainmaker.
And I'm just going to say, guys, nobody trusts anybody.
And I get it.
There's this big post by, somebody posted a quote from What If from Rudyard Lynch, What If Alt History.
What if Alt is?
And he was basically saying everyone's going insane because of the internet.
And the best thing you can do is get away from it now and build up your life and protect yourself and secure your resources.
And he's half right.
He's half right.
I think I'll do a big thing about, you know, record about it and talk about it.
But, you know, the media will claim one thing.
They'll lie.
They'll tell you not to trust what you see with your eyes and ears.
And that's why we end up in this position where people are going to say, hey, these cloud seaters, they were doing this right before the flood.
The challenge is, how do you know?
I certainly don't think the guy should get death threats because that doesn't solve any problems, even if it is the cloud seeding that caused the floods.
I think investigation and deep dives and challenging him and having him come on, bring him to debates, make him be part of that conversation is the best way we go about doing this stuff.
But I've got to tell you, man, for the people in Texas, I hope and I pray for the best.
These are tragic stories.
And the people of New Mexico, and I also watch it again, we haven't gotten anywhere near as bad because we are elevated quite a bit here where I'm at.
But the rain has been ridiculous.
It's not a joke.
I mean, we've had endless rain for months now, which is, people are saying they've never seen it this bad.
And the groundwater is, I mean, the land where we're at is just, you're walking on sludge.
It's slush.
And then it's crazy, man.
But not to downplay what's going on in Texas, man.
I hope and pray for the best.
So I appreciate you guys hanging out.
We're going to gear up this raid for our friend Russell Brand, who is live now.
Thank you guys so much for hanging out.
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