Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuff Bryant, and it's You Should Know Rainy Edition is the Rainy How appropriate that we're doing this one today because it has been raining in Atlanta for forty days and forty nights. It seems like it really has been. I've been breaking up the duck boots. Man, it's almost never wear those because it's not that rain. But well, yeah, sure it is as well, dude, we're in the midst of like a ten year drought. You know, we're still in drought level conditions. Yeah, and then tomorrow it says maybe even snow in the northern suburbs. That would be nice chance of rain or snow. Um. You know, despite all this rame, we still learn a drought condition and we haven't for a while. You remember we're back in two thousand seven, Yeah, when Sonny Purdue was the governor. They held in an official state prayer for rain, where Governor Purdue led a prayer for rain, saying like God, please rain, for the love of God, for the love of you please make your rain. Yeah, and it rained. Um. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that he held that prayer on the night before it was calling for chance of rain. I don't remember it raining the next day. Yeah, rain the next day, and people were said, Oh, my goodness, God made it rain, Sonny produce the magic rain. Yeah, Mother Nature at work. So, um, you've got people praying for rain. You have the rain dance, um. Yeah, which is really hard to find any information on these days, but apparently the Pueblo had a pretty cool rain dance because you know, they lived in the southwest for it was very dry, so they knew what they were doing. Um. And then there's something that I discovered today called the Papa ruta, which is from um Romania, and basically, a girl from a village would run around wearing like a skirt with um made of like vines and branches, and she would go um dancing through the streets of the village and then go house to house and then when she was greeted at the door of each house, people would pour water on her and she would just continue dancing and people would be playing music and um. Eventually it would hopefully rain. Eventually that would evolve into the wet t shirt contest at the Animal City Beach. I guess that's probably where it came from. Who knew. Yeah, which, of course you referenced the fact that Panama City Beach was settled by Romanian settlers. Uh so Yeah, for a change, we're talking about the weather and it's not uh, some little boring chit chat. You know what I'm saying. You don't think this was boring chit chat. It's legit is. You know, usually when you're like, oh, you know, it's raining here, it's just a very boring way to say. I have not much to say what I'm saying. Let's see what this is actual. Yeah, it is. Uh, we're saying that. Um. Because we're talking about weather modification. You could say that rain dance was an early attempt at it um and then in the early twentieth century people started to try to apply science to it. And there were some pretty cool attempts early on by very smart guys from like Harvard and M I. T. And a Dutch guy um to basically either make it rain, to make it stop raining, or to deter some other kind of weather phenomenon like fog or hurricanes were tornadoes. Actually those came along a little later. But fog, I think you have down in They were trying to dispad fog. Yeah, a guy named Professor Henry G. Houghton of m I T Yeah. I think my favorite is the Harvard guy, Professor Emory Leon Chaffe. It sounds like he's be from the University of the South. Yeah. Well, he was flying around in a plane in nine um with charge sand whatever the heck that is. Well, I think it's saying that you apply an electrical current too. Ye, you'd do something through its eons, right, And he was dumping into the clouds and actually he was definitely onto something. I don't know where he figured that out, but he um was. I guess you could say the grandfather of cloud seating then, yeah, grand Grandpa Chaffee, all right, And things were kind of humming along a little bit until um, Kurt Vonnie gets older brother Bernie Bernard, Doctor Bernard really took it by the horns and made some headway as far as cloud seating and actually controlling the weather in the mid nine right. I guess he was researching that for ge and he figured out that silver iodide has virtually the same distance between um points and its crystal lattice structure as ice. So he said, you know what, all bet, this would be a really good stand in for ice formation. So if you put it into clouds, maybe it would make ice form. Yeah, and he even figured out how to generate it, right, yeah, Yeah, He's like, not only that, this is an all theoretical I'm a Vonn again, So I'm gonna just go the extra mile. You don't know, my little brother yet dreaming knocked out by his book and people are going to try to band t shirts with his quotes on it during Bamned Books Week. The irony is going to be lousing. So what's what's the process. Uh. While the process of creating it, he dissolves a mixture of or we're gonna call it a g I. Yeah, of a g I um an acetone, which is also id out is that right? Oh? Another with acetone? Yeah, the acetone is flammable. You can spray that through a nozzle, make the tiny little droplets. They burn those droplets up, and then that really makes it more efficient. One gram of a g I can then produce one hundred quadrillion nuclei for the ice crystals. So you take that stuff, you put it up in the clouds, it goes up. That's right. And it actually, according to Vonnegut's theories, um has a number of effects. Uh, and here's how it works. Yeah, this is regular confuse. Okay, this is what the segments we like to call Josh teaches Chuck in addition to the world Okay, you're ready. So you think that zero degrees celsius or thirty two degrees fahrenheit is where ice freezes. It is, That's what they always say. This is actually the melting point of ice. So ice ice um freezes between zero and negative thirty nine degrees celsius um. And it depends on the number of impurities, which will call nuclei. And when we're talking nuclei, when you're talking about cloud seating, you're talking about any particle that can attract water to become a rain drop, that can attract water, vapor and turning into ice through sublimation um and become snow or leat or anything like that. So a nuclei is anything that you introduced into a cloud that becomes the center of this precipitation right, See that already makes more sense. Okay, So with there's two types of clouds as far as Vonne Gets concerned, um or as technique is concerned, there is a super cool cloud which has water um that is less than zero degrees celsius present, and that's the ideal cloud for cloud seating, correct for one type of cloud seating for using silver iodide, Because what you're trying to do there is create ice. And if you're using silver idide, which has a similar structure to ice crystals, UM, you're going to use that in the super cool one, because if you use it in the other type, the warm cloud, it's not going to do anything because it's not going to form ice no matter what. The temperature is too high. But you can still see the warm cloud Correctly, you can't. So you use a silver iodide vonne Gets method is still in use today UM. Where you're burning silver eyedide mixed an acid tone. You create quadrillions of nuclei that float up into the cloud, create um an updraft. Because check this out, this is even more beautiful. When the silver iodide nuclei enter the cloud, they start to attract the water vapor and as the water vapor converts from vapor, not turning back into liquid because it's sublimation, that's right. Converts from liquid or vapor into ice. It creates heat energy as a result. It doesn't create it. It heat energy. It comes about right. Uh. And as that happens, that creates a convective current going up in the cloud, which creates a swirl and updraft, which makes the cloud bigger, which means that the stuff, the particles that happened at the top have longer to fall through to create more ice, accumulate more ice, and have a better chance of becoming snow. So that's the super cool cloud using silver iodide, so the cloud is literally pregnant with precipitation. Yeah, that not only creates snow and ice, but actually makes a cloud bigger to increase the likelihood that it will produce snow and ice. Just by introducing silver iodide bonding. It was a genius. The other way is to do to use a warm cloud, which is a cloud where the water temperature the air temperature is over zero decreased celsius. That's right, And then that is pretty simple. Is use table salt really or sand charge otherwise, but you want to dump that into the top of the cloud, right, and it requires dumping a lot of it too. Is that one of the problems with it. Yeah, I mean, it's just there's more to it. If you're doing UM, if you're using bonning its method, you can use the seating station on the ground. If you're if you're using static cloud seating where you're flying overhead and dropping stuff into the clouds. UM, you have to have a plane, you have to have a lot more of it. But what you're using is called a high high groscopic solution, which attracts water create rain drops which fall through the cloud, becoming bigger and bigger on the way and then bam, you have a rain. You've just seated a cloud. That's amazing. So ge did have a plane UM in nine or at least the articles as they rented an airplane because it did ano their own and they said we should try this out, and they released dry ice into these clouds for four days UH in November December, and on the last day they received the heaviest snowfall of that winter. UM and the Arab New York's Schenectady, New York. But there's been a lot of well, we'll get to whether or not the stuff works at the very end. But it seems like every time it happens, people are saying, I think we might have caused that, and other people think, yeah, but did we really? Were you guys just cloud seating enough so that over enough days that it was bound rain anyway, like the government Georgia praying for rain the night before it's supposed to rain exactly. Um. So GE was convinced enough that this was working that it's it was like, we can't do this anymore. And the Army said, hey, we have a bunch of money on don't you let us in on this. And we have a bunch of money and low scruples because we're about to start testing acid on people whether they like it or not. So cloud seating is like nothing to us. And GE said, Okay, as long as you guys are totally liable, sure we'll do it with you. So they partnered up for Project syrus Um and seven. In October forty seven, they dumped a hundred and eighty pounds of dry eyes into a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean and possibly changed the direction of that hurricane to make landfall right here in Georgia UH and end up killing several people. So that was sort of an oops. Although again they're like, did we really cause that? Well, the guy who was Bernard vonne gets boss Irving Langmuir, he's a Nobel winning chemist. He was totally convinced. According to him, there's a probability that they had caused this hurricane to change um direction. I think he felt a lot about himself, didn't he He did. He was always like, no, that was us, and he would publish papers like that and the government would step in and be like, you, this paper doesn't exist anymore. Do you want us to like grease you? Are you trying to push our buttons? Um? But there was another scientists who pointed out that that same that a hurricane followed the exact same path caused about the same amount of damage in nineteen o six. So was it the dry ice? Was it not? Who knows? So he just compared it to an older hurricane, said this could have happened naturally. They did the same thing in UH in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in nineteen forty eight. In July nineteen and apparently it rained all over the state of New Mexico and as far away as Kansas, causing oh actually that was later, but the same deal from New Mexico. They think they made it rain in Kansas to the point where like the great floods of Kansas in adjacent states they thought, man, could it have traveled that far? Well, that was another things Langmuir was convinced about that, like they had impregnated clouds that traveled the thousand kilometers away. Yeah, and enough that he was like, we have to stop doing this. And Bernard vonne Get testified to Congress like nobody should be doing this except maybe a federal government. Right. But then other expert medialogist came out and said, you know what, this whole thing in Kansas, if there was any effect at all, it might have been just slightly enhanced. So it's really not all your fault. So the the U. S Government is is very much interested in this. They're very much entrenched in this, even as there not sure whether or not it's working, or the scientific community is at odds over whether or not it was working. But the US government was convinced enough that they were basically weaponizing the weather. They're doing all this to figure out how to screw with other countries, troops, economies, the whole shebang, and as the US for carrying out tests. So were the Brits right, yeah, the Royal Air Force of course, if we had our project serious, they had operational cumulus. Very clever to think of all these cloud names. Uh. And this was going on recently in two thousand one, the BBC investigated these rumors and um apparently or actually were they investigating the old rumors? Yeah? Okay, well I guess that makes more sense. I thought they did it recently too, though No, I don't know the Brits alright, Uh soo the the Royal Air Force did fly above the cloud line, dropped a bunch of this stuff and thirty minutes later it started to rain, and it rained and rained and rained, and by the end of the month North Devon and North of England was um basically got two fifty times the amount of rain they ever get, which is a pretty spectacularly convincing two d and fifty times. Yeah, it's like a flood time. And there there was actually huge flood too, um in a village Lynmouth, UM where basically ninety million tons of water converged on the village at once. Unbelievable. On the day that they started seating, when it started raining, um and thirty five people lost their lives. They were carried out to sea, they were crushed by bowlders. Entire houses were taken out by bowlers that were brought down by the water. Um. But of course they said this wasn't US, and the Royal Air Force pretended it never happened, So who knows. We did our own little experiments here in the US and uh, as far as weaponization goes. In Vietnam, we tried to extend the monsoon season on the Ho Chi Minh trail and apparently it worked by like thirty to forty five days. Supposedly we extended monsoon season that year in nine at a cost of like twenty one million dollars and um over the course of missions. And they said it like it's they look at it now as a semi successful mission, whatever that means. It was it was good enough. Yeah, they're like things were slippery um. And that was actually called Operation Popeye, no cloud names. And the whole reason and we have an awareness of Operation Popeye is because a reporter named Jack Anderson uh he uh, he got his hands on a secret memo from the Joints Chiefs of Staff to President Johnson that made reference to weather modification techniques in Laos, And he started digging around and found out that the government had done that, and he when this article came out, I was had a really good time because the US government was or Congress was not in a mood to uh weaponized weather, and so they kind of took this article. They took the publicity from it. They took a Senate Committees recommendation that like, this is way too big for us to be messing with, and went and had a summit with the Soviets about banning weather modification. Yeah, they said it was a laussy idea. Did you practice that well? I thought too much time had gone by it. I was like, you know what, I'm gonna say it anyway, it was a good time. It doesn't matter when you throw the pun down, it's always bad. Was a lossy idea, and they did. They got together with the Soviets and they said the big deal breaker I guess between them making a deal right then was they couldn't decide between the distinctions of tactical versus strategic. They thought, hey, if it's tactical. That's cool, because we're just trying to benefit from the weather, um and make stuff harder on you to get around. UM. Strategic uses would like try and like flood a major city, ruined crops, ruined crops, destroy the economy. Yeah. Um. And so the summit dissolved. But um, the fact that they were even talking about the strategic ones suggests that the the US and the Soviets both thought that one or both were on the verge of being able to do weather modification at that level. UM. So the the talks fell apart. But UM, the U N basically stepped in and said, hey, we'll take over from here, and they created UM and MAUD, which is the Environmental Environmental Modification Convention, which basically bands weaponizing weather, and the US and the Soviets ratified it came into effect the night. So you can't weaponize weather, but you can still do like weather modification as long as it's not what's called geophysical warfare, like you're trying to dissipate a storm or change the course of a hurricane for good for good and that kind of stuff. Uh. For instance, China, they've been at this for a long time. Uh, since the late nineteen fifties, and they have a program that employs between thirty and thirty people called the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, and that is they have a department, the Weather Modification Department, and they use that. And you probably remember in the news even seeing this at the Beijing Olympics, they busted clouds to try and prevent rain from happening because they didn't want to rain out their their opening ceremony in their games. Yes, so any cloud that they saw, they would shoot rocket propelled grenades filled with silver eyed eye um or anti aircraft artillery phil with silver eyed die. They were just shooting clouds. And there's like thirty thousand people. A lot of them are farmers who are armed with government issue rocket launchers. Yeah, because they're on the right place. Yeah, to shoot at clouds. Get that cloud. Yeah, I did that like a Southern redneck. That was weird. Get that cloud. Mant's they sound like China. Jerry just left it that. Uh So. Then hale is the next thing that we've tried to conquer. N the National Hail Research Experiment was started and basically to suppress hail along what's known as Hale Alley in Colorado, h some state called Kansas, Northwest Kansas, Southeast Wyoming in northwest Nebraska, and UM. It was scheduled the last five years, but it did not. I think it was shut down in yeah, two years ahead of time and not necessarily through any fault of its own. The seventies turn out to be like the driest decade ever in Hale Alley. UM. But their their whole goal was to seed clouds to basically hurry up the process of them precipitating so that it wouldn't have a chance to become hal to keep them warm clouds to UM, and just to if it is going to hail, they would be smaller pieces of hail and it would just accelerate the process. UM. But there was some funny things that came out of it, like we learned that farmers don't like clouds eating. Yeah, and they tried in Maryland and Virginia, and there were farmers like shooting at the aircraft. And then in the San Luis Valley, Uh, there were somebody blew up with dynamite a radar truck for a private weather modification company. All in the seventies. So the seventies, weather mood was not very popular, and in some states now because of farmers concerns, um weather modification is banned. Yeah. Yeah, people are afraid that you're gonna take the cloud that was destined for their field and use it over your field. That was my cloud. Well that's we might as well talk about it. Then that's a big issue. Um. As far as our next topic, thwarting hurricanes, it seems like a great idea, but one leading scientist, what's his name, Moche Alamorrow, He's from m i t. He says, you know, only a handful of hurricanes ever developed out of like a hundred tropical storms, let's say, and very few of those hurricanes calls landfall that do like lots of damage. So this rainfall is vital to South America. And what are we gonna start just trying to thwart every tropical storm we see? Like we're playing god here a little too much. That's stuff happens for a reason, right exactly, despite the fact that hurricanes can be very dangerous and costly take lives. I get the feeling he's like, you know, we might just want to live with that every couple of years rather than try to mess with the thermodynamics of an ocean current exactly. Well, and that's kind of what some of the ideas for um dissipating or moving hurricanes. A couple of ideas are shooting dropping hydrogen bombs on a hurricane to dissipated, which I don't know what the fact they would happen, um, But Bill Gates is in on a patent for um dissipating hurricanes, which apparently uses fleets of vehicles to pump cold water from lower depths of the ocean to the surface to mix with the warm surface temperatures are comparatively warmer surface temperatures, so that the convective currents that those warm surface temperatures creating hurricanes that make them more and more powerful are dissipated, so the hurricanes forces reduced because hurricanes draw their strength from that heat, and uh, you can cool it down. The idea is that you might then dissipated again, messing with the thermodynamics. Is that a good thing? And then there's one that's really routined. Um, you've probably looked right past it at your local airport, which is fog dissipation. Yeah, they do this regularly with below freezing temperature fog R not too hard. They can do it from the ground. Yeah, but aren't they trying to do it above temperature as well? Yeah, they try cloud seating to dissipate it as well. But they also um will heat the landing areas, which dissipates fog, but it is weather modification. Uh. And then they'll also um inject propane gas, which apparently dissipates below freezing fog as well. Airports. Have you ever been on a plane that had to be the ice before takeoff? That happened to me for the first time this Christmas and Akron. It takes a really long time. It took a long time, and I was right there by the window by the wing, and I was I watched the whole thing. It was fascinating but also a little bit terrifying. Um. I was just like, did you get it all? Yeah? Did you miss the spot? Did you see that whould go over it again? Yeah? I wish I knew exactly what they were doing. I'll have to look into that because I always like to know that stuff. Well, I'm sure we could just go ahead and suggested ourselves with the apologian d I think we should actually they're they were spraying the wings. I know that, but I don't think it was just like hot water. No, it's not. It's some sort of crazy solution. Yeah, that's what I think, crazy cucku solution de icing. Yeah. Uh so does this stuff work, Josh, that is a great question, Chucker's Um, No one really knows. There's actually you know, we said Irving Langmuir and Bernard Vonnegut were definite true believers, but then there's plenty of other people who are like, you don't know that that happened. It could have just been coincidence. Um. And there's actually a split among American um scientific groups over whether it has any effect or not. Here's what I think. Okay, here's my immature opinion. I think it possibly works, but it's such a haphazard result and so not easily so difficult to control that does that really work? Like, you may have an effect, but unless you can really pinpoint control it, I don't know if you can say that works. And part of the problem is carrying out rigorous scientific experiments, right, Like if you you can't control where the wind is going to take the silver iodide, So if you're trying to impregnant one cloud and keep another as a control cloud. How do you know that the control clouds not infected with with UM silver iodide and that it's going to rain as well as a result of your experiment. So it's a very tough thing to experiment on. Well, and didn't they find out when they tried to do the UM ice crystals in the hurricane? Didn't they find out that there are already ice crystals there? Yeah, that didn't have much an effect, right, noah, UM National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration UM. They carried something out which was pretty cool. It's called Project storm Fury for like thirty years trying to seed hurricanes, and yeah, they found that, oh there's ice. They're all right, this isn't gonna have an effect. Well, they learned more about hurricanes, so that way, at least they did by being crazy and flying into it. UM. And then so the National Academy of Sciences said, thirty years of study has produced no solid evidence that the stuff works. The American Meteorological Society said, you know, we think there's probably about a ten percent effect that this has. It increases precipitation by ten percent, and uh, everybody else's who knows? Does it hurt this cloud seating? I can understand trying to mess with a hurricane, but I mean just shooting silver Eye died in the air. If the Chinese want to do that with the rocket propelled grenades, girl, I don't have their fun. I think you and I should. They got these biplanes here in Atlanta. I think we should get some dry ice. We should chop it up, and we should go take on these biplane rides on a cloudy day, dump it out and see what happens. That's a great idea. Let's do it, Okay, let's try. Can we charge that on the on the company guard? We probably could go as long as we documented it somehow. That's right. If you want to know more about things like dry ice by planes, weather modification, um, flying into hurricane people have actually done that. I wrote a cool article on it, Bill Gates, Bill Gates, Um. You can type all those things into the search bar how stuff works dot com and it will bring up some pretty cool articles. And we also worked off with some need articles that we found online all over the place. So just search weather modification and have a great time with him. Uh. Since I said have a great time, and I mean it's time for the listening. Then. Uh, before we do listener mail, a couple of quick shoutouts. One, we want to shout out our Kiva team with a new goal. Yes. Uh, if you don't know, if you go to k I v a dot org slash teams slash stuff, you should know. We set up a microblout lending team. How long ago now, October two thousand eight, Yes, and it took thousand nine. It began with little Stephen Colbert challenge, but we quickly dusted him. Two. Yeah, we wanted to see who could get to a hundred thousand first. I'm not sure as teams even there yet. Darl Uh they didn't pay attention to us, but it doesn't matter. Um. The plant is our team is doing great and we have a new goal. Thanks to our our de facto captains, glinted Sonia. They put together the numbers for us and our goal as of June twenty one this year is two million dollars loan. Yes, by the summer solstice. Summer Solstice, two million bucks is our goal for our team. We're well on our way and uh, jump on board. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, and loan twenty five bucks and if it gets paid back and he said, you know what, that's the only loan ever want to make. You can actually get that money back. Yeah, if it feels dirty to you, just wait like about a month, maybe a little longer, I don't know. And once he's paid back, you can take it out. Yeah. And Josh has written some great blog post on micro lending and the controversies around it and why we still support it. Yeah, so we're well aware. Uh, and we also want to shout out our buddy Bill Wadman. Yeah. We met Bill in Brooklyn and he's a very talented portrait photographer and he said, you know, I'd love to shoot you guys here on my list of people I'd like to work with. Came out to the Bellhouse, took some great pictures. One of them is now our avatar on our Facebook page, and uh, it was it was a good experience for us, for two guys who really don't like having your pictures made. Yeah, he was very gentle. He was very gentle and they turned out great. And uh, you can see his work at Bill Wadman dot com or he has a podcast about photography that is not about This is what lends you should get. It's about it's called on taking pictures, and it's more about the philosophy and science. So they're taking pictures. Did you see the post on us? He was like, I think it was titled like look at these two schmows. I got to sit for me. He didn't find that on at www dot on taking pictures dot com and imagine a iTunes. I didn't look. But if it's a podcast, it's probably on iTunes right anyway, Thanks Bill Wadman and good luck to you, sir. We'll see you as soon. Yeah, thanks everybody, all right, and now on the listener mail. This is a nice little Christmas homeless shout out to our good friend Martin. Love this email. We love our Scottish friends. Guys, you asked for a Christmas story while I was listening to your homelessness podcast. Anyway, last year a friend of mine was going to catch a bus and saw a homeless man outside the bus station a freezing night, and in Scotland you know that it's gold, so he decided to give the guy twenty pounds. The homeless man began to cry, thanked my friends and explained that he was on the street doing a drug problem and after running away from his family. Um. However, that day he had been thinking of going home to his family for Christmas and cleaning up his life. Now that he had the money, he was going to do just that. He took my friends address, so he insisted on paying him back. So my family gave him the address and caught a bus. This summer he received a letter from the man explaining that he did in fact go home. He went to rehab and he is now working for his father. The family is extremely happy and he not only included the twenty pounds as payback, but a picture of him and his dad's workshop with his dad and his two brothers. This just goes to show what a little can do for some people, especially around the holidays. Love the show, guys, how about a show on the Scottish Wars Independence and that has funden? Oh that's pretty good. And then an awesome letter. Yeah that was great. I just love that one. Um, thanks a lot, Martin, Thanks a lot to all of our people in Scotland. How's it going. I didn't see it right. It gets worse with already truck. You sound like Truman, Componi and the last years you could do a bit of a Scottish accent. It left me. Don't do Scottish accent? Do Sean Connery trying Sean connedy often see there it is right there. Uh. If you want to hear Chuck to a certain kind of accent, send us a suggestion. He takes all comers, right, Chuck. Uh. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email at Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, or you can join us on at our home on the way um Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com m brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places,

Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuff Bryant, and it's You Should Know Rainy Edition is the Rainy How appropriate that we're doing this one today because it has been raining in Atlanta for forty days and forty nights. It seems like it really has been. I've been breaking up the duck boots. Man, it's almost never wear those because it's not that rain. But well, yeah, sure it is as well, dude, we're in the midst of like a ten year drought. You know, we're still in drought level conditions. Yeah, and then tomorrow it says maybe even snow in the northern suburbs. That would be nice chance of rain or snow. Um. You know, despite all this rame, we still learn a drought condition and we haven't for a while. You remember we're back in two thousand seven, Yeah, when Sonny Purdue was the governor. They held in an official state prayer for rain, where Governor Purdue led a prayer for rain, saying like God, please rain, for the love of God, for the love of you please make your rain. Yeah, and it rained. Um. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that he held that prayer on the night before it was calling for chance of rain. I don't remember it raining the next day. Yeah, rain the next day, and people were said, Oh, my goodness, God made it rain, Sonny produce the magic rain. Yeah, Mother Nature at work. So, um, you've got people praying for rain. You have the rain dance, um. Yeah, which is really hard to find any information on these days, but apparently the Pueblo had a pretty cool rain dance because you know, they lived in the southwest for it was very dry, so they knew what they were doing. Um. And then there's something that I discovered today called the Papa ruta, which is from um Romania, and basically, a girl from a village would run around wearing like a skirt with um made of like vines and branches, and she would go um dancing through the streets of the village and then go house to house and then when she was greeted at the door of each house, people would pour water on her and she would just continue dancing and people would be playing music and um. Eventually it would hopefully rain. Eventually that would evolve into the wet t shirt contest at the Animal City Beach. I guess that's probably where it came from. Who knew. Yeah, which, of course you referenced the fact that Panama City Beach was settled by Romanian settlers. Uh so Yeah, for a change, we're talking about the weather and it's not uh, some little boring chit chat. You know what I'm saying. You don't think this was boring chit chat. It's legit is. You know, usually when you're like, oh, you know, it's raining here, it's just a very boring way to say. I have not much to say what I'm saying. Let's see what this is actual. Yeah, it is. Uh, we're saying that. Um. Because we're talking about weather modification. You could say that rain dance was an early attempt at it um and then in the early twentieth century people started to try to apply science to it. And there were some pretty cool attempts early on by very smart guys from like Harvard and M I. T. And a Dutch guy um to basically either make it rain, to make it stop raining, or to deter some other kind of weather phenomenon like fog or hurricanes were tornadoes. Actually those came along a little later. But fog, I think you have down in They were trying to dispad fog. Yeah, a guy named Professor Henry G. Houghton of m I T Yeah. I think my favorite is the Harvard guy, Professor Emory Leon Chaffe. It sounds like he's be from the University of the South. Yeah. Well, he was flying around in a plane in nine um with charge sand whatever the heck that is. Well, I think it's saying that you apply an electrical current too. Ye, you'd do something through its eons, right, And he was dumping into the clouds and actually he was definitely onto something. I don't know where he figured that out, but he um was. I guess you could say the grandfather of cloud seating then, yeah, grand Grandpa Chaffee, all right, And things were kind of humming along a little bit until um, Kurt Vonnie gets older brother Bernie Bernard, Doctor Bernard really took it by the horns and made some headway as far as cloud seating and actually controlling the weather in the mid nine right. I guess he was researching that for ge and he figured out that silver iodide has virtually the same distance between um points and its crystal lattice structure as ice. So he said, you know what, all bet, this would be a really good stand in for ice formation. So if you put it into clouds, maybe it would make ice form. Yeah, and he even figured out how to generate it, right, yeah, Yeah, He's like, not only that, this is an all theoretical I'm a Vonn again, So I'm gonna just go the extra mile. You don't know, my little brother yet dreaming knocked out by his book and people are going to try to band t shirts with his quotes on it during Bamned Books Week. The irony is going to be lousing. So what's what's the process. Uh. While the process of creating it, he dissolves a mixture of or we're gonna call it a g I. Yeah, of a g I um an acetone, which is also id out is that right? Oh? Another with acetone? Yeah, the acetone is flammable. You can spray that through a nozzle, make the tiny little droplets. They burn those droplets up, and then that really makes it more efficient. One gram of a g I can then produce one hundred quadrillion nuclei for the ice crystals. So you take that stuff, you put it up in the clouds, it goes up. That's right. And it actually, according to Vonnegut's theories, um has a number of effects. Uh, and here's how it works. Yeah, this is regular confuse. Okay, this is what the segments we like to call Josh teaches Chuck in addition to the world Okay, you're ready. So you think that zero degrees celsius or thirty two degrees fahrenheit is where ice freezes. It is, That's what they always say. This is actually the melting point of ice. So ice ice um freezes between zero and negative thirty nine degrees celsius um. And it depends on the number of impurities, which will call nuclei. And when we're talking nuclei, when you're talking about cloud seating, you're talking about any particle that can attract water to become a rain drop, that can attract water, vapor and turning into ice through sublimation um and become snow or leat or anything like that. So a nuclei is anything that you introduced into a cloud that becomes the center of this precipitation right, See that already makes more sense. Okay, So with there's two types of clouds as far as Vonne Gets concerned, um or as technique is concerned, there is a super cool cloud which has water um that is less than zero degrees celsius present, and that's the ideal cloud for cloud seating, correct for one type of cloud seating for using silver iodide, Because what you're trying to do there is create ice. And if you're using silver idide, which has a similar structure to ice crystals, UM, you're going to use that in the super cool one, because if you use it in the other type, the warm cloud, it's not going to do anything because it's not going to form ice no matter what. The temperature is too high. But you can still see the warm cloud Correctly, you can't. So you use a silver iodide vonne Gets method is still in use today UM. Where you're burning silver eyedide mixed an acid tone. You create quadrillions of nuclei that float up into the cloud, create um an updraft. Because check this out, this is even more beautiful. When the silver iodide nuclei enter the cloud, they start to attract the water vapor and as the water vapor converts from vapor, not turning back into liquid because it's sublimation, that's right. Converts from liquid or vapor into ice. It creates heat energy as a result. It doesn't create it. It heat energy. It comes about right. Uh. And as that happens, that creates a convective current going up in the cloud, which creates a swirl and updraft, which makes the cloud bigger, which means that the stuff, the particles that happened at the top have longer to fall through to create more ice, accumulate more ice, and have a better chance of becoming snow. So that's the super cool cloud using silver iodide, so the cloud is literally pregnant with precipitation. Yeah, that not only creates snow and ice, but actually makes a cloud bigger to increase the likelihood that it will produce snow and ice. Just by introducing silver iodide bonding. It was a genius. The other way is to do to use a warm cloud, which is a cloud where the water temperature the air temperature is over zero decreased celsius. That's right, And then that is pretty simple. Is use table salt really or sand charge otherwise, but you want to dump that into the top of the cloud, right, and it requires dumping a lot of it too. Is that one of the problems with it. Yeah, I mean, it's just there's more to it. If you're doing UM, if you're using bonning its method, you can use the seating station on the ground. If you're if you're using static cloud seating where you're flying overhead and dropping stuff into the clouds. UM, you have to have a plane, you have to have a lot more of it. But what you're using is called a high high groscopic solution, which attracts water create rain drops which fall through the cloud, becoming bigger and bigger on the way and then bam, you have a rain. You've just seated a cloud. That's amazing. So ge did have a plane UM in nine or at least the articles as they rented an airplane because it did ano their own and they said we should try this out, and they released dry ice into these clouds for four days UH in November December, and on the last day they received the heaviest snowfall of that winter. UM and the Arab New York's Schenectady, New York. But there's been a lot of well, we'll get to whether or not the stuff works at the very end. But it seems like every time it happens, people are saying, I think we might have caused that, and other people think, yeah, but did we really? Were you guys just cloud seating enough so that over enough days that it was bound rain anyway, like the government Georgia praying for rain the night before it's supposed to rain exactly. Um. So GE was convinced enough that this was working that it's it was like, we can't do this anymore. And the Army said, hey, we have a bunch of money on don't you let us in on this. And we have a bunch of money and low scruples because we're about to start testing acid on people whether they like it or not. So cloud seating is like nothing to us. And GE said, Okay, as long as you guys are totally liable, sure we'll do it with you. So they partnered up for Project syrus Um and seven. In October forty seven, they dumped a hundred and eighty pounds of dry eyes into a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean and possibly changed the direction of that hurricane to make landfall right here in Georgia UH and end up killing several people. So that was sort of an oops. Although again they're like, did we really cause that? Well, the guy who was Bernard vonne gets boss Irving Langmuir, he's a Nobel winning chemist. He was totally convinced. According to him, there's a probability that they had caused this hurricane to change um direction. I think he felt a lot about himself, didn't he He did. He was always like, no, that was us, and he would publish papers like that and the government would step in and be like, you, this paper doesn't exist anymore. Do you want us to like grease you? Are you trying to push our buttons? Um? But there was another scientists who pointed out that that same that a hurricane followed the exact same path caused about the same amount of damage in nineteen o six. So was it the dry ice? Was it not? Who knows? So he just compared it to an older hurricane, said this could have happened naturally. They did the same thing in UH in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in nineteen forty eight. In July nineteen and apparently it rained all over the state of New Mexico and as far away as Kansas, causing oh actually that was later, but the same deal from New Mexico. They think they made it rain in Kansas to the point where like the great floods of Kansas in adjacent states they thought, man, could it have traveled that far? Well, that was another things Langmuir was convinced about that, like they had impregnated clouds that traveled the thousand kilometers away. Yeah, and enough that he was like, we have to stop doing this. And Bernard vonne Get testified to Congress like nobody should be doing this except maybe a federal government. Right. But then other expert medialogist came out and said, you know what, this whole thing in Kansas, if there was any effect at all, it might have been just slightly enhanced. So it's really not all your fault. So the the U. S Government is is very much interested in this. They're very much entrenched in this, even as there not sure whether or not it's working, or the scientific community is at odds over whether or not it was working. But the US government was convinced enough that they were basically weaponizing the weather. They're doing all this to figure out how to screw with other countries, troops, economies, the whole shebang, and as the US for carrying out tests. So were the Brits right, yeah, the Royal Air Force of course, if we had our project serious, they had operational cumulus. Very clever to think of all these cloud names. Uh. And this was going on recently in two thousand one, the BBC investigated these rumors and um apparently or actually were they investigating the old rumors? Yeah? Okay, well I guess that makes more sense. I thought they did it recently too, though No, I don't know the Brits alright, Uh soo the the Royal Air Force did fly above the cloud line, dropped a bunch of this stuff and thirty minutes later it started to rain, and it rained and rained and rained, and by the end of the month North Devon and North of England was um basically got two fifty times the amount of rain they ever get, which is a pretty spectacularly convincing two d and fifty times. Yeah, it's like a flood time. And there there was actually huge flood too, um in a village Lynmouth, UM where basically ninety million tons of water converged on the village at once. Unbelievable. On the day that they started seating, when it started raining, um and thirty five people lost their lives. They were carried out to sea, they were crushed by bowlders. Entire houses were taken out by bowlers that were brought down by the water. Um. But of course they said this wasn't US, and the Royal Air Force pretended it never happened, So who knows. We did our own little experiments here in the US and uh, as far as weaponization goes. In Vietnam, we tried to extend the monsoon season on the Ho Chi Minh trail and apparently it worked by like thirty to forty five days. Supposedly we extended monsoon season that year in nine at a cost of like twenty one million dollars and um over the course of missions. And they said it like it's they look at it now as a semi successful mission, whatever that means. It was it was good enough. Yeah, they're like things were slippery um. And that was actually called Operation Popeye, no cloud names. And the whole reason and we have an awareness of Operation Popeye is because a reporter named Jack Anderson uh he uh, he got his hands on a secret memo from the Joints Chiefs of Staff to President Johnson that made reference to weather modification techniques in Laos, And he started digging around and found out that the government had done that, and he when this article came out, I was had a really good time because the US government was or Congress was not in a mood to uh weaponized weather, and so they kind of took this article. They took the publicity from it. They took a Senate Committees recommendation that like, this is way too big for us to be messing with, and went and had a summit with the Soviets about banning weather modification. Yeah, they said it was a laussy idea. Did you practice that well? I thought too much time had gone by it. I was like, you know what, I'm gonna say it anyway, it was a good time. It doesn't matter when you throw the pun down, it's always bad. Was a lossy idea, and they did. They got together with the Soviets and they said the big deal breaker I guess between them making a deal right then was they couldn't decide between the distinctions of tactical versus strategic. They thought, hey, if it's tactical. That's cool, because we're just trying to benefit from the weather, um and make stuff harder on you to get around. UM. Strategic uses would like try and like flood a major city, ruined crops, ruined crops, destroy the economy. Yeah. Um. And so the summit dissolved. But um, the fact that they were even talking about the strategic ones suggests that the the US and the Soviets both thought that one or both were on the verge of being able to do weather modification at that level. UM. So the the talks fell apart. But UM, the U N basically stepped in and said, hey, we'll take over from here, and they created UM and MAUD, which is the Environmental Environmental Modification Convention, which basically bands weaponizing weather, and the US and the Soviets ratified it came into effect the night. So you can't weaponize weather, but you can still do like weather modification as long as it's not what's called geophysical warfare, like you're trying to dissipate a storm or change the course of a hurricane for good for good and that kind of stuff. Uh. For instance, China, they've been at this for a long time. Uh, since the late nineteen fifties, and they have a program that employs between thirty and thirty people called the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, and that is they have a department, the Weather Modification Department, and they use that. And you probably remember in the news even seeing this at the Beijing Olympics, they busted clouds to try and prevent rain from happening because they didn't want to rain out their their opening ceremony in their games. Yes, so any cloud that they saw, they would shoot rocket propelled grenades filled with silver eyed eye um or anti aircraft artillery phil with silver eyed die. They were just shooting clouds. And there's like thirty thousand people. A lot of them are farmers who are armed with government issue rocket launchers. Yeah, because they're on the right place. Yeah, to shoot at clouds. Get that cloud. Yeah, I did that like a Southern redneck. That was weird. Get that cloud. Mant's they sound like China. Jerry just left it that. Uh So. Then hale is the next thing that we've tried to conquer. N the National Hail Research Experiment was started and basically to suppress hail along what's known as Hale Alley in Colorado, h some state called Kansas, Northwest Kansas, Southeast Wyoming in northwest Nebraska, and UM. It was scheduled the last five years, but it did not. I think it was shut down in yeah, two years ahead of time and not necessarily through any fault of its own. The seventies turn out to be like the driest decade ever in Hale Alley. UM. But their their whole goal was to seed clouds to basically hurry up the process of them precipitating so that it wouldn't have a chance to become hal to keep them warm clouds to UM, and just to if it is going to hail, they would be smaller pieces of hail and it would just accelerate the process. UM. But there was some funny things that came out of it, like we learned that farmers don't like clouds eating. Yeah, and they tried in Maryland and Virginia, and there were farmers like shooting at the aircraft. And then in the San Luis Valley, Uh, there were somebody blew up with dynamite a radar truck for a private weather modification company. All in the seventies. So the seventies, weather mood was not very popular, and in some states now because of farmers concerns, um weather modification is banned. Yeah. Yeah, people are afraid that you're gonna take the cloud that was destined for their field and use it over your field. That was my cloud. Well that's we might as well talk about it. Then that's a big issue. Um. As far as our next topic, thwarting hurricanes, it seems like a great idea, but one leading scientist, what's his name, Moche Alamorrow, He's from m i t. He says, you know, only a handful of hurricanes ever developed out of like a hundred tropical storms, let's say, and very few of those hurricanes calls landfall that do like lots of damage. So this rainfall is vital to South America. And what are we gonna start just trying to thwart every tropical storm we see? Like we're playing god here a little too much. That's stuff happens for a reason, right exactly, despite the fact that hurricanes can be very dangerous and costly take lives. I get the feeling he's like, you know, we might just want to live with that every couple of years rather than try to mess with the thermodynamics of an ocean current exactly. Well, and that's kind of what some of the ideas for um dissipating or moving hurricanes. A couple of ideas are shooting dropping hydrogen bombs on a hurricane to dissipated, which I don't know what the fact they would happen, um, But Bill Gates is in on a patent for um dissipating hurricanes, which apparently uses fleets of vehicles to pump cold water from lower depths of the ocean to the surface to mix with the warm surface temperatures are comparatively warmer surface temperatures, so that the convective currents that those warm surface temperatures creating hurricanes that make them more and more powerful are dissipated, so the hurricanes forces reduced because hurricanes draw their strength from that heat, and uh, you can cool it down. The idea is that you might then dissipated again, messing with the thermodynamics. Is that a good thing? And then there's one that's really routined. Um, you've probably looked right past it at your local airport, which is fog dissipation. Yeah, they do this regularly with below freezing temperature fog R not too hard. They can do it from the ground. Yeah, but aren't they trying to do it above temperature as well? Yeah, they try cloud seating to dissipate it as well. But they also um will heat the landing areas, which dissipates fog, but it is weather modification. Uh. And then they'll also um inject propane gas, which apparently dissipates below freezing fog as well. Airports. Have you ever been on a plane that had to be the ice before takeoff? That happened to me for the first time this Christmas and Akron. It takes a really long time. It took a long time, and I was right there by the window by the wing, and I was I watched the whole thing. It was fascinating but also a little bit terrifying. Um. I was just like, did you get it all? Yeah? Did you miss the spot? Did you see that whould go over it again? Yeah? I wish I knew exactly what they were doing. I'll have to look into that because I always like to know that stuff. Well, I'm sure we could just go ahead and suggested ourselves with the apologian d I think we should actually they're they were spraying the wings. I know that, but I don't think it was just like hot water. No, it's not. It's some sort of crazy solution. Yeah, that's what I think, crazy cucku solution de icing. Yeah. Uh so does this stuff work, Josh, that is a great question, Chucker's Um, No one really knows. There's actually you know, we said Irving Langmuir and Bernard Vonnegut were definite true believers, but then there's plenty of other people who are like, you don't know that that happened. It could have just been coincidence. Um. And there's actually a split among American um scientific groups over whether it has any effect or not. Here's what I think. Okay, here's my immature opinion. I think it possibly works, but it's such a haphazard result and so not easily so difficult to control that does that really work? Like, you may have an effect, but unless you can really pinpoint control it, I don't know if you can say that works. And part of the problem is carrying out rigorous scientific experiments, right, Like if you you can't control where the wind is going to take the silver iodide, So if you're trying to impregnant one cloud and keep another as a control cloud. How do you know that the control clouds not infected with with UM silver iodide and that it's going to rain as well as a result of your experiment. So it's a very tough thing to experiment on. Well, and didn't they find out when they tried to do the UM ice crystals in the hurricane? Didn't they find out that there are already ice crystals there? Yeah, that didn't have much an effect, right, noah, UM National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration UM. They carried something out which was pretty cool. It's called Project storm Fury for like thirty years trying to seed hurricanes, and yeah, they found that, oh there's ice. They're all right, this isn't gonna have an effect. Well, they learned more about hurricanes, so that way, at least they did by being crazy and flying into it. UM. And then so the National Academy of Sciences said, thirty years of study has produced no solid evidence that the stuff works. The American Meteorological Society said, you know, we think there's probably about a ten percent effect that this has. It increases precipitation by ten percent, and uh, everybody else's who knows? Does it hurt this cloud seating? I can understand trying to mess with a hurricane, but I mean just shooting silver Eye died in the air. If the Chinese want to do that with the rocket propelled grenades, girl, I don't have their fun. I think you and I should. They got these biplanes here in Atlanta. I think we should get some dry ice. We should chop it up, and we should go take on these biplane rides on a cloudy day, dump it out and see what happens. That's a great idea. Let's do it, Okay, let's try. Can we charge that on the on the company guard? We probably could go as long as we documented it somehow. That's right. If you want to know more about things like dry ice by planes, weather modification, um, flying into hurricane people have actually done that. I wrote a cool article on it, Bill Gates, Bill Gates, Um. You can type all those things into the search bar how stuff works dot com and it will bring up some pretty cool articles. And we also worked off with some need articles that we found online all over the place. So just search weather modification and have a great time with him. Uh. Since I said have a great time, and I mean it's time for the listening. Then. Uh, before we do listener mail, a couple of quick shoutouts. One, we want to shout out our Kiva team with a new goal. Yes. Uh, if you don't know, if you go to k I v a dot org slash teams slash stuff, you should know. We set up a microblout lending team. How long ago now, October two thousand eight, Yes, and it took thousand nine. It began with little Stephen Colbert challenge, but we quickly dusted him. Two. Yeah, we wanted to see who could get to a hundred thousand first. I'm not sure as teams even there yet. Darl Uh they didn't pay attention to us, but it doesn't matter. Um. The plant is our team is doing great and we have a new goal. Thanks to our our de facto captains, glinted Sonia. They put together the numbers for us and our goal as of June twenty one this year is two million dollars loan. Yes, by the summer solstice. Summer Solstice, two million bucks is our goal for our team. We're well on our way and uh, jump on board. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, and loan twenty five bucks and if it gets paid back and he said, you know what, that's the only loan ever want to make. You can actually get that money back. Yeah, if it feels dirty to you, just wait like about a month, maybe a little longer, I don't know. And once he's paid back, you can take it out. Yeah. And Josh has written some great blog post on micro lending and the controversies around it and why we still support it. Yeah, so we're well aware. Uh, and we also want to shout out our buddy Bill Wadman. Yeah. We met Bill in Brooklyn and he's a very talented portrait photographer and he said, you know, I'd love to shoot you guys here on my list of people I'd like to work with. Came out to the Bellhouse, took some great pictures. One of them is now our avatar on our Facebook page, and uh, it was it was a good experience for us, for two guys who really don't like having your pictures made. Yeah, he was very gentle. He was very gentle and they turned out great. And uh, you can see his work at Bill Wadman dot com or he has a podcast about photography that is not about This is what lends you should get. It's about it's called on taking pictures, and it's more about the philosophy and science. So they're taking pictures. Did you see the post on us? He was like, I think it was titled like look at these two schmows. I got to sit for me. He didn't find that on at www dot on taking pictures dot com and imagine a iTunes. I didn't look. But if it's a podcast, it's probably on iTunes right anyway, Thanks Bill Wadman and good luck to you, sir. We'll see you as soon. Yeah, thanks everybody, all right, and now on the listener mail. This is a nice little Christmas homeless shout out to our good friend Martin. Love this email. We love our Scottish friends. Guys, you asked for a Christmas story while I was listening to your homelessness podcast. Anyway, last year a friend of mine was going to catch a bus and saw a homeless man outside the bus station a freezing night, and in Scotland you know that it's gold, so he decided to give the guy twenty pounds. The homeless man began to cry, thanked my friends and explained that he was on the street doing a drug problem and after running away from his family. Um. However, that day he had been thinking of going home to his family for Christmas and cleaning up his life. Now that he had the money, he was going to do just that. He took my friends address, so he insisted on paying him back. So my family gave him the address and caught a bus. This summer he received a letter from the man explaining that he did in fact go home. He went to rehab and he is now working for his father. The family is extremely happy and he not only included the twenty pounds as payback, but a picture of him and his dad's workshop with his dad and his two brothers. This just goes to show what a little can do for some people, especially around the holidays. Love the show, guys, how about a show on the Scottish Wars Independence and that has funden? Oh that's pretty good. And then an awesome letter. Yeah that was great. I just love that one. Um, thanks a lot, Martin, Thanks a lot to all of our people in Scotland. How's it going. I didn't see it right. It gets worse with already truck. You sound like Truman, Componi and the last years you could do a bit of a Scottish accent. It left me. Don't do Scottish accent? Do Sean Connery trying Sean connedy often see there it is right there. Uh. If you want to hear Chuck to a certain kind of accent, send us a suggestion. He takes all comers, right, Chuck. Uh. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email at Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, or you can join us on at our home on the way um Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com m brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places,