The extreme weather appeared to be the result of a relatively normal weather system bringing rain that had been turbocharged by ocean and atmospheric warming, said Janette Lindesay, a climate scientist at the Australian National University. “It’s highly likely that global heating has played a role in the intensity of the event,” she said.
Some possible misinformation that’s going around related to this story, Bloomberg says Dubai’s cloud seeding program is to blame, Wired says Bloomberg is wrong about that. The Wired article sounds better informed and more persuasive imo.
The NYT is also very clear that it’s not cloud seeding:
Although some have speculated that recent cloud seeding efforts by the U.A.E. — using chemicals to increase the chances of clouds producing rain — could have contributed to the extreme weather, scientists said this was very unlikely.
“Rainfall enhancement could not cause that kind of increase in rainfall,” said Steven Siems, an expert in cloud seeding at Monash University in Australia, adding that any effects from cloud seeding would have been “marginal” at most.
Weird, I just read a Bloomberg article that claimed it was climate change… which immediately made me wonder why Bloomberg wrote those words as I thought they didn’t acknowledge climate change.
Bloomberg (the news outlet) has a bunch of rather competent reporters who regularly cover climate, and Michael Bloomberg (who owns a controlling interest in it) was one of the major funders of the Sierra Club’s campaign to phase out coal use in the US.
TIL
Could there ever be a way to harness all that water and keep it in the desert?
It’s not impossible; it just requires building a whole lot of expensive infrastructure which is used very infrequently. People usually don’t choose to do that.
Fair enough I guess but if anybody has the money to throw away it’s Dubai
Honestly it’s hard to say for sure exactly what will happen with climate change. Some areas that aren’t deserts now will become deserts, some desert areas will become hotter and even more inhospitable than they already are, but some areas will get increased rainfall and we may see the transition of some currently temperate and desert areas to something more closely resembling a rainforest.
These unprecedented and usually violent storms could become more common in the area and they may need to look at ways to remove water from the area as fast as possible instead of trying to find ways to keep it.
