Now, time for the weather

For several months now, I have been religiously following the weather forecast for gardening reasons. I need to know if there will be a cold spell coming over the weekend because I’m planning to plant my tomatoes then. I also need to know if there will be rain two days from now so I could spare myself one watering session.

Imagine my confusion, then, when I started noticing something quite strange. The 24-hour forecast has been quite accurate but the five-day and 14-day ones not so much — especially the latter. Now, I know that it gets harder to predict the weather the longer the period but the differences in minimum and maximum temperatures have been rather marked. And they made me wonder.

We have such cutting-edge technology for predicting the weather now. Shouldn’t forecasts be more reliable than they were 20 years ago? Because it certainly seems that they aren’t. Of course, I’m the farthest thing from an expert, but the question forces itself, along with another. If weather forecasts are this unreliable, what about the long-term predictions we are being drowned in?

Those are the same long-term predictions that are motivating radical ideas such as shading the Sun because we’re all going to die otherwise. Little to no thought goes into the possible side effects of such manipulations because it’s all very urgent and we can think about those later. And anyway, if something bad happens we’ll blame it on climate change.

As you will have guessed by now, this brings me to the floods in the UAE this week. The media coverage of the disaster was extremely interesting, I thought, especially in two reports — one from Bloomberg and one from CNBC.

The Bloomberg report, which came out on Tuesday, cited a meteorologist with the Emirati National Center of Meteorology as saying seven cloud-seeding missions had been conducted on Monday and Tuesday to stimulate rainfall. It then noted that another statement by the NCM said the missions had been done on Sunday and Monday. Then came the most interesting bit.

On Wednesday, CNBC quoted the deputy director general of that same NCM as saying that it “did not conduct any seeding operations during this event,” meaning the heavy rains.

But that NCM meteorologist, Ahmed Habib, had never said the missions were conducted during the rains. He had said they were conducted prior to them. But, and this is extra-special, he also went back on his original statement, telling CNBC that “six pilots had flown missions as part of regular protocol, but had not seeded any clouds.” Climate alarmist media didn’t wait to be told twice what to do.

“Don’t blame cloud seeding for the Dubai floods”, The Guardian instructed. Dubai floods broke records, has clear climate change ties, Axios informed us. No, Dubai's Floods Weren't Caused by Cloud Seeding, Wired intoned authoritatively. Speculation 'cloud seeding' caused Dubai record rainfall refuted by experts blaming climate change, ABC reported.

I don’t know about you but this outpour of reports made one thing clear to me: the floods were definitely caused by cloud seeding at the wrong time, or possibly the wrong rate. You know, the louder something gets denied, the more likely it is to be true, as we have had ample opportunities to see over the past four years.

Now, the UAE has been seeding clouds for years in a bid to attract more rain for obvious reasons. It is easy to point this out in support of the climate change argument. So many cloud-seeding missions and only one devastating flood, after all. It is quite a strong argument.

Yet those conflicting reports can’t not make those with a suspicious streak, well, suspicious. And I’m not talking about suspicions about who’s lying and why (because of the insurance claims, per my husband and I couldn’t argue). No, my suspicions are that when every kind of weather can be blamed on climate change, this could provide convenient justification for other radical interventions up to and including the otherwise idiotically sounding Sun-shading idea.

Attributing things like heavy rains, drought, winter storms, and even earthquakes to climate change gives a free pass to restless minds that like to tinker with things. Sometimes the tinkering produces positive results — I’m thinking post-it notes, for instance, or teflon. Tinkering with the climate, however, sounds like going a step too far. Or a hundred steps.

In early April, the New York Times published a detailed report on a solar geoengineering experiment that sought to “bounce some of the sun’s rays back into space, a way of temporarily cooling a planet that is now dangerously overheating.” The bouncing back was to be done by spraying aerosol into the atmosphere. If that worked, the NYT reported, “the next stage would be to aim at the heavens and try to change the composition of clouds above the Earth’s oceans.”

Sounds perfectly safe, right? Well, no, of course not, and even a Greenpeace member has said so. “You could well be changing climatic patterns, not just over the sea, but over land as well,” David Santillo, a senior scientist with the group said. “This is a scary vision of the future that we should try and avoid at all costs.”

Indeed, it is scary but this hasn’t stopped the restless minds. In February, Switzerland suggested the formation of a UN expert group to look into solar geoengineering. Later the same month, the UN dropped the idea because it couldn’t reach consensus on how to implement it. Also because it believes solar geoengineering could be dangerous. Yeah, I was surprised, too.

But that’s unimportant. Because solar geoengineering is perfectly legal in most of the world. What could go wrong, as my Energy Realities podcast partners like to say. And it’s not just solar geoengineering, I’m sure. Restless minds, remember.

It won’t be too far-fetched to blame these restless minds on the climate change hysteria that recently saw the EU Court of Human Rights rule that climate change violates an article in the European Convention on Human Rights that says we all have the "right to respect for private and family life."

To be honest, I’m not sure what’s more dangerous for human civilisation at this point: unproven, untested but fascinating technology that may change the Earth’s climate or courts in the grips of climate hysteria. The latter sounds like a more immediate danger but the former’s potential implications could be a lot more devastating. Good thing they’re potential only for the time being.

Now, I know we’re all used to Fun Fridays here on this Substack boat, which I’m considering naming “The Demolition Dame” as one reader graciously called me recently. This voyage didn’t turn out so funny but that’s perhaps because there’s no fun in floods and climate experiments, not to mention court rulings that set precedent many of us would deem dangerous — even if the only thing those Swiss crones (I will not apologise) won was an 80,000-euro compensation from the state.

We shall return to our regularly scheduled Friday fun-poking next week. Now, time for the weather.