The United Arab Emirates was hit with historic flooding on Tuesday after roughly a year’s worth of rain fell in just a single day. The record rainfall, more than four inches at the Dubai airport and 10 inches elsewhere in the country, caused some people online to speculate it was all caused by cloud seeding. But the UAE’s National Center of Meteorology released a statement to CNBC on Wednesday denying the claims.
Cloud seeding has a long and controversial history. The first known human-created snowstorm was instigated shortly after World War II when a pilot with General Electric’s research lab released dry ice into some clouds near Schenectady, New York. And various weather control programs were investigated in the 1950s as a possible weapon against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But it wasn’t until the late 1960s and early 1970s that the U.S.