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Regarding the effectiveness: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/making-it-rain/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/making-it-rain/ > Operation Popeye
by tpmx 7y ago
Regarding the effectiveness:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/making-it-rain/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/making-it-rain/
> Operation Popeye had four main objectives: to turn the roads to mud, to cause landslides along roadways, to wash out river crossings, and to keep roads muddier for longer than usual. But cloud seeding at the utime, and even today, is far from an exact science. At best , the military could measure three things: what the average rainfall for that area was, what the estimated rainfall would have been, and what actually fell after a seeding mission. But, in the end, they couldn’t collect enough data to rigorously analyze the outcomes. “The rain is completely variable,” says Fleming. “You have a tremendous temporal variability, spatial variability, and that means that statistics are not robust about what your particular intervention did to that particular rainfall.”
> And even if the U.S. military could make it rain, they couldn’t precisely control where the rain landed. One official described accidentally dumping a ton of rain on an American Special Forces camp.
> Nevertheless, Operation Popeye was deemed effective enough to continue for five years, from 1967 to 1972.
- morninglight 7y ago> Operation Popeye was deemed effective enough to > continue for five years, from 1967 to 1972." If this farce had been successful in any way, politicians and their corporate benefactors would have milked it for every dime possible. Remember, this is America and the "success" of a war is only defined by which side of the cash register you stand. If that is too difficult to comprehend, then consider: The Vietnam War was deemed effective enough to continue for twenty years, from 1955 to 1975. The Iraq War was deemed effective enough to continue from 2003 to present. The War in Afghanistan was deemed effective enough to continue from 2001–present.