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Cloud Seeding

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Submitted By donjackson0724
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Running head: Cloud Seeding

Negligibility of Cloud Seeding
Don Jackson
Angelo State University
November 13, 2012

Cloud Seeding
How is there a water shortage, if there is no water leaving earth? Foremost, accessible freshwater accounts for a very small amount of the earth's water. Ninety-seven percent of all water is salt water and most of the remaining three percent is locked in polar ice caps, glaciers, and deep underground aquifers (McCaffrey, 2000). The problems arising from a shortage of freshwater are beyond human and crop needs. Significant percentages of power in numerous countries are provided by hydroelectric turbines, efficiency of a cloud seeding operation will continue to be negligible because scientists cannot know exactly what rainfall would or would not have occurred but for their efforts.
Clouds and precipitation are paramount meteorological processes in the general public's concept of “weather” (Lin, Wang, Schlesinger). Since the mid-1940s, countries have used cloud seeding to attempt to control the rain. As would be expected, these programs have met with mixed responses. The world is on the brink of a water crisis, due to expanding populations, evident climate change, and pollution causing much of the existing freshwater unusable, the demand for freshwater has never been more immense. Presently, cloud seeding operations have been successfully conducted by about 40 countries during different periods during the last 50 years. Even though cloud seeding is an expensive operation, advocates say it is far cheaper than constructing a new dam or desalting ocean water through a desalination plant (Simms, 2010). This argument does not hold much leverage, considering the absence of hard data showing that cloud seeding efficiently increases rainfall; despite having been used for over sixty years. Cloud seeding operations have been used to

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