Author: Bryan Clark / Source: The Next Web
Facing ominous skies, Volkswagen was prepared. It wasn’t sweating the forecast, which included calls for rain and, perhaps, hail. Instead, it used the impending tempest as an excuse to break out its “weather cannons.”
The cannons are supposed to protect against loss.
But farmers near Volkswagen‘s Puebla, Mexico production plant, believe they’re actually causing it.The farmers allege that Volkswagen‘s anti-hail devices have cost them thousands of acres of crops due to drought-like conditions. By keeping precipitation away during the rainy season in May, the farmers argue, Volkswagen has cost them nearly 5,000 acres of crops this year.
The weather cannons are “affecting the Earth‘s cycles,” Gerardo Perez, one of the affected farmers, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Rooted in the in-between area of legitimate science and something else entirely, the devices rely on a mixture of acetylene and oxygen ignited in the lower chamber. The resulting blast shoots a shockwave into the atmosphere, which, some believe, disrupts the formation of ice.
For Volkswagen, it’s the perfect weapon against Mother Nature — unless you count its other perfect weapon against Mother Nature, lying on emissions tests. With just a handful of weather cannons, the company can protect an entire fleet of cars from the damage brought on by seasonal storms. Unfortunately, there’s zero consensus among the scientific…
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