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Yahoo
21-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How a California cloud-seeding company became the center of a Texas flood conspiracy
Two days before the waters of the Guadalupe River swelled into a deadly and devastating Fourth of July flood in Kerr County, Texas, engineers with a California-based company called Rainmaker took off in an airplane about 100 miles away and dispersed 70 grams of silver iodide into a cloud. Their goal? To make it rain over Texas — part of a weather modification practice known as cloud seeding, which uses chemical compounds to augment water droplets inside clouds, making the drops large enough and heavy enough to fall to the ground. But in the hours after the flood swept through the greater Kerrville area and killed at least 135 people, including three dozen children, conspiracy theories began swirling among a small but vocal group of fringe figures. "I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS … WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?" wrote Pete Chambers, a former U.S. special forces commander and prominent far-right activist, on the social media platform X. The post received 3.1 million views, yet was only one of several accusations that sprang up around Rainmaker's activities and its alleged connection to the flood. "Anyone who calls this out as a conspiracy theory can go F themselves," wrote Michael Flynn, former national security advisor under the first Trump administration, atop a repost of Chambers' tweet. Read more: Warnings ignored: The grim connection between the L.A. wildfires and Texas floods The flurry of allegations was quickly debunked, with a number of independent scientists saying that the company's actions could not have produced anywhere close to the amount of rain that triggered the flood. "It's very clear that they have nothing to do with it," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, in a YouTube briefing following the flood. Rainmaker also denied the claims. The storm dropped as much as four inches of rain per hour over Texas Hill Country, and the river in some places rose by 26 feet in less than 45 minutes. But in some ways, the damage was done. Conspiracy theorists who have long alleged that Deep State Democrats are controlling the weather now had a real incident to point to. And researchers, companies and experts working to study and perform weather modification and geoengineering practices — which some say will be needed as climate change worsens — now have an even bigger hurdle to overcome. Within hours of the deadly flood, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she was introducing a bill to make all forms of weather modification — such as cloud seeding — a felony. "This is not normal," the Georgia representative said in a post on X. "No person, company, entity, or government should ever be allowed to modify our weather by any means possible!!" That same week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched two new websites to "address public questions and concerns " about weather modification, geoengineering, and contrails, or the thin clouds that form behind aircraft at high altitudes. "To anyone who's ever looked up to the streaks in the sky and asked,' what the heck is going on?,' or seen headlines about private actors and even governments looking to blot out the sun in the name of stopping global warming — we've endeavored to answer all of your questions," EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a video accompanying the websites' launch. "In fact, EPA shares many of the same concerns when it comes to potential threats to human health and the environment." The EPA website notes that there is a distinction between geoengineering, which involves a broad range of activities designed to modify global temperatures, and weather modification techniques such as cloud seeding, which are generally short-lived and localized. Read more: Like Texas, California faces major dangers when extreme floods come In fact, the process of cloud seeding was invented in the United States and has existed for nearly 80 years. General Electric scientists Vincent Schaefer, Irving Langmuir and Bernard Vonnegut — older brother of the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut — began experimenting with it as early as 1946. On July 2, Rainmaker's team was working in Runge, Texas, about 125 miles southeast of where the Guadalupe River would soon flood, according to Augustus Doricko, founder and chief executive of the company, which is headquartered in El Segundo. The team flew its plane to an elevation of 1,600 feet and dispersed about 70 grams of silver iodide into the clouds — an amount smaller than a handful of Skittles, Doricko said. The bright yellow compound is known to latch onto water droplets that are already present in clouds, converting them into ice crystals that can fall as rain or snow, depending on the temperature below. Soon after the flight, Rainmaker's meteorologists identified an inflow of moisture to the region and advised the team to suspend operations, which they did, Doricko said. Around 1 a.m. the next day, the National Weather Service issued its first flash flood watch for the Kerr County region. Doricko said there's no chance Rainmaker's actions — which were contracted by the nonprofit South Texas Weather Modification Assn. and on file with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — contributed to the flood. "The biggest and best cloud seeding operations we've seen to date have produced tens of millions — and maximally like 100 million — gallons of precipitation," he said. "We saw in excess of a trillion gallons of precipitation from that flood. Not only could cloud seeding not have caused this, but the aerosols that we dispersed days prior could not have persisted in the atmosphere long enough to have had any consequence on the storm." Read more: EPA seeks to roll back regulations that limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants Multiple independent experts agreed. During his briefing, Swain noted that cloud seeding does not create new clouds — it must be conducted on preexisting clouds that already have water vapor or small liquid drops inside of them, essentially enhancing what already had the potential to fall. What's more, its effects last "minutes to maybe an hour," Swain said. "Best-case-scenario estimates — absolute best-case — are that these cloud-seeding operations are able to augment the amount of precipitation by at most 10% to 15% over very limited areas," Swain said. "On average, it's a lot lower than that. In fact, in some cases, it's difficult to prove that cloud seeding does anything at all." Indeed, Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, has gone so far as to call cloud seeding a scam — in part because it can prey on farmers and other people who are desperate for rain, and because it typically delivers only modest results, he said. "There's no physical way that cloud seeding could have made the Texas storm," Dessler said, noting that the storm was fueled by extremely high levels of atmospheric water that stemmed from a tropical disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico. "This is a nonsense argument. There's no debate here about whether cloud seeding played a role in this disaster." Dessler said the whole dust-up surrounding Rainmaker and the Texas flood is a distraction from the very real issues and challenges posed by global warming. The amount of material injected into the atmosphere during cloud seeding and geoengineering operations pales in comparison to the trillions of tons of carbon dioxide humans have already spewed into the atmosphere, he said. "The real irony here is that in some sense, the argument they're making is correct — there is a conspiracy to change the climate," Dessler said. "It's through the emission of carbon dioxide, and it's by fossil fuel interests and the ecosystem that goes with that. That's the conspiracy." Read more: Texas flood highlights deadly climate risk from extreme weather Such limitations haven't stopped governments and municipalities from investing in cloud-seeding technology. One of Rainmaker's first clients was the Utah Department of Natural Resources, which was interested in cloud seeding as a response to the drying of the Great Salt Lake, Doricko said. His company has also contracted with the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, the Oregon Department of Agriculture and multiple municipalities in California, including the Public Works Departments of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. David Spiegel, supervising engineer with San Luis Obispo County's Public Works Department, said the county first began exploring cloud-seeding technology in the early 2000s in response to severe drought conditions and dwindling supplies at the Lopez Lake reservoir, which feeds five city agencies nearby. It took years to get the program off the ground, and it didn't ultimately run until 2019 through 2024 — when the state was dealing with yet another drought — to somewhat middling results. Specifically, San Luis Obispo's cloud-seeding program added about 1,200 acre-feet of water per year to the nearly 50,000 acre-foot reservoir, he said. (An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons.) In its best year, it added about 2,500 acre-feet. Part of the challenge was that there weren't many clouds in the area to work with, Spiegel said. "We didn't have enough storms to seed because we were still in this drought period, so it was kind of unfortunate." However, he still saw the program as a success because the small water supply gains that came from the cloud seeding priced out to about $300 per acre-foot — far less than the cost of importing supplies from other sources such as the State Water Project, which can run closer to $1,500 an acre-foot. He said he would still consider cloud seeding in the future should the reservoir run low again. "We definitely see it as a viable option," Spiegel said. So far, the state isn't investing in its own cloud-seeding programs, though it does keep a close eye on them, according to Jason Ince, a spokesman with the California Department of Water Resources. He said any groups conducting cloud seeding work are required to notify the agency by submitting a notice of intent. An October report published by the department indicates there have been at least 16 cloud-seeding projects across multiple counties and watersheds in California in recent years. Read more: New scientific interventions are here to fight climate change. But they aren't silver bullets Such efforts could become useful as climate conditions keep moving in the wrong direction: Warming temperatures and overuse are sapping groundwater supplies in California, while state and federal officials are still mired in negotiations over use of the Colorado River — a rapidly shrinking water lifeline that supplies 40 million people across the American West. Meanwhile, global average temperatures continue to soar driven largely by fossil fuel emissions and human activity. Many experts say there's a good chance that some form of intervention — weather modification, geoengineering or some altogether new technology — will be needed in the years ahead. "Weather modification projects are vital resources to enhance fresh water supply for communities within their watersheds," the Department of Water Resources report says. It recommends that the state continue to support existing cloud-seeding projects in the state and help facilitate new ones. Speigel, of San Luis Obispo County, said laws banning cloud seeding and other weather modification measures — such as the one posed by Rep. Greene — would be a detriment to the region. "It would be a setback for us, because we are constantly looking for other opportunities for water," he said. "It would limit our ability to seek out means of more water in these long drought periods. ... I definitely think it would stifle our ability to help our customers." Even more controversial than cloud seeding are geoengineering techniques to block the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth. Some involve injecting sulfur into the stratosphere. A 2021 report on geoengineering published by the National Academies of Sciences affirmed that "meeting the challenge of climate change requires a portfolio of options," but advised caution around such methods. "[Solar geoengineering] could potentially offer an additional strategy for responding to climate change but is not a substitute for reducing [greenhouse gas] emissions," the report says. Dessler, who is also the director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M, likened geoengineering to airbags on a car — something no one ever hopes to use but that would be good to have in a climate emergency. He said the focus should continue to be on reducing the use of fossil fuels, and that the talk of banning geoengineering, cloud seeding and other forms of weather modification by members of the Trump administration and some lawmakers is more political than scientific. "It makes no sense — it shows you that this is not an argument about facts. It's an argument about worldview," he said. Read more: The planet is dangerously close to this climate threshold. Here's what 1.5°C really means The president has taken many steps to undo efforts to address climate change in recent months, including withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, an agreement among some 200 nations to limit global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The EPA has also removed several barriers and regulations that govern oil and gas drilling in the U.S., and has said it wants to repeal the endangerment finding — a long-held legal and scientific determination that CO2 emissions harm human health and welfare, among other significant changes. Doricko, Rainmaker's CEO, said he was disappointed to see cloud seeding politicized in the wake of the Texas flood. He was taken aback when he saw that Rep. Greene had posted a picture of his face on X — "insinuating somewhat that cloud seeding, or I, was responsible for the natural disaster in Texas, when any meteorologist or atmospheric scientist could tell you otherwise," he said. "Human civilization is unintentionally modifying the weather and the climate all the time," Doricko said, including through fossil fuel emissions and urban heat islands that warm surrounding areas. "What Rainmaker is trying to do is bring some intentionality to that, so that we can modify the weather for our benefit and deliberately." Doricko said he is also an advocate of more transparent reporting, more stringent regulations, and whatever else is needed to build trust with the public about "a really consequential technology." He said he will continue to engage with skeptics of the technology in good faith. "Cloud seeding is a water supply tool, and whether you're a farmer in a red state or an environmentalist in a blue state, water is as nonpartisan as it gets," he said. "Everybody needs water." This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
21-07-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
How a California cloud-seeding company became the center of a Texas flood conspiracy
Two days before the waters of the Guadalupe River swelled into a deadly and devastating Fourth of July flood in Kerr County, Texas, engineers with a California-based company called Rainmaker took off in an airplane about 100 miles away and dispersed 70 grams of silver iodide into a cloud. Their goal? To make it rain over Texas — part of a weather modification practice known as cloud seeding, which uses chemical compounds to augment water droplets inside clouds, making the drops large enough and heavy enough to fall to the ground. But in the hours after the flood swept through the greater Kerrville area and killed at least 135 people, including three dozen children, conspiracy theories began swirling among a small but vocal group of fringe figures. 'I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS … WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?' wrote Pete Chambers, a former U.S. special forces commander and prominent far-right activist, on the social media platform X. The post received 3.1 million views, yet was only one of several accusations that sprang up around Rainmaker's activities and its alleged connection to the flood. 'Anyone who calls this out as a conspiracy theory can go F themselves,' wrote Michael Flynn, former national security advisor under the first Trump administration, atop a repost of Chambers' tweet. The flurry of allegations was quickly debunked, with a number of independent scientists saying that the company's actions could not have produced anywhere close to the amount of rain that triggered the flood. 'It's very clear that they have nothing to do with it,' said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, in a YouTube briefing following the flood. Rainmaker also denied the claims. The storm dropped as much as four inches of rain per hour over Texas Hill Country, and the river in some places rose by 26 feet in less than 45 minutes. But in some ways, the damage was done. Conspiracy theorists who have long alleged that Deep State Democrats are controlling the weather now had a real incident to point to. And researchers, companies and experts working to study and perform weather modification and geoengineering practices — which some say will be needed as climate change worsens — now have an even bigger hurdle to overcome. Within hours of the deadly flood, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she was introducing a bill to make all forms of weather modification — such as cloud seeding — a felony. 'This is not normal,' the Georgia representative said in a post on X. 'No person, company, entity, or government should ever be allowed to modify our weather by any means possible!!' That same week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched two new websites to 'address public questions and concerns ' about weather modification, geoengineering, and contrails, or the thin clouds that form behind aircraft at high altitudes. 'To anyone who's ever looked up to the streaks in the sky and asked,' what the heck is going on?,' or seen headlines about private actors and even governments looking to blot out the sun in the name of stopping global warming — we've endeavored to answer all of your questions,' EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a video accompanying the websites' launch. 'In fact, EPA shares many of the same concerns when it comes to potential threats to human health and the environment.' The EPA website notes that there is a distinction between geoengineering, which involves a broad range of activities designed to modify global temperatures, and weather modification techniques such as cloud seeding, which are generally short-lived and localized. In fact, the process of cloud seeding was invented in the United States and has existed for nearly 80 years. General Electric scientists Vincent Schaefer, Irving Langmuir and Bernard Vonnegut — older brother of the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut — began experimenting with it as early as 1946. On July 2, Rainmaker's team was working in Runge, Texas, about 125 miles southeast of where the Guadalupe River would soon flood, according to Augustus Doricko, founder and chief executive of the company, which is headquartered in El Segundo. The team flew its plane to an elevation of 1,600 feet and dispersed about 70 grams of silver iodide into the clouds — an amount smaller than a handful of Skittles, Doricko said. The bright yellow compound is known to latch onto water droplets that are already present in clouds, converting them into ice crystals that can fall as rain or snow, depending on the temperature below. Soon after the flight, Rainmaker's meteorologists identified an inflow of moisture to the region and advised the team to suspend operations, which they did, Doricko said. Around 1 a.m. the next day, the National Weather Service issued its first flash flood watch for the Kerr County region. Doricko said there's no chance Rainmaker's actions — which were contracted by the nonprofit South Texas Weather Modification Assn. and on file with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — contributed to the flood. 'The biggest and best cloud seeding operations we've seen to date have produced tens of millions — and maximally like 100 million — gallons of precipitation,' he said. 'We saw in excess of a trillion gallons of precipitation from that flood. Not only could cloud seeding not have caused this, but the aerosols that we dispersed days prior could not have persisted in the atmosphere long enough to have had any consequence on the storm.' Multiple independent experts agreed. During his briefing, Swain noted that cloud seeding does not create new clouds — it must be conducted on preexisting clouds that already have water vapor or small liquid drops inside of them, essentially enhancing what already had the potential to fall. What's more, its effects last 'minutes to maybe an hour,' Swain said. 'Best-case-scenario estimates — absolute best-case — are that these cloud-seeding operations are able to augment the amount of precipitation by at most 10% to 15% over very limited areas,' Swain said. 'On average, it's a lot lower than that. In fact, in some cases, it's difficult to prove that cloud seeding does anything at all.' Indeed, Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, has gone so far as to call cloud seeding a scam — in part because it can prey on farmers and other people who are desperate for rain, and because it typically delivers only modest results, he said. 'There's no physical way that cloud seeding could have made the Texas storm,' Dessler said, noting that the storm was fueled by extremely high levels of atmospheric water that stemmed from a tropical disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico. 'This is a nonsense argument. There's no debate here about whether cloud seeding played a role in this disaster.' Dessler said the whole dust-up surrounding Rainmaker and the Texas flood is a distraction from the very real issues and challenges posed by global warming. The amount of material injected into the atmosphere during cloud seeding and geoengineering operations pales in comparison to the trillions of tons of carbon dioxide humans have already spewed into the atmosphere, he said. 'The real irony here is that in some sense, the argument they're making is correct — there is a conspiracy to change the climate,' Dessler said. 'It's through the emission of carbon dioxide, and it's by fossil fuel interests and the ecosystem that goes with that. That's the conspiracy.' Such limitations haven't stopped governments and municipalities from investing in cloud-seeding technology. One of Rainmaker's first clients was the Utah Department of Natural Resources, which was interested in cloud seeding as a response to the drying of the Great Salt Lake, Doricko said. His company has also contracted with the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, the Oregon Department of Agriculture and multiple municipalities in California, including the Public Works Departments of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. David Spiegel, supervising engineer with San Luis Obispo County's Public Works Department, said the county first began exploring cloud-seeding technology in the early 2000s in response to severe drought conditions and dwindling supplies at the Lopez Lake reservoir, which feeds five city agencies nearby. It took years to get the program off the ground, and it didn't ultimately run until 2019 through 2024 — when the state was dealing with yet another drought — to somewhat middling results. Specifically, San Luis Obispo's cloud-seeding program added about 1,200 acre-feet of water per year to the nearly 50,000 acre-foot reservoir, he said. (An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons.) In its best year, it added about 2,500 acre-feet. Part of the challenge was that there weren't many clouds in the area to work with, Spiegel said. 'We didn't have enough storms to seed because we were still in this drought period, so it was kind of unfortunate.' However, he still saw the program as a success because the small water supply gains that came from the cloud seeding priced out to about $300 per acre-foot — far less than the cost of importing supplies from other sources such as the State Water Project, which can run closer to $1,500 an acre-foot. He said he would still consider cloud seeding in the future should the reservoir run low again. 'We definitely see it as a viable option,' Spiegel said. So far, the state isn't investing in its own cloud-seeding programs, though it does keep a close eye on them, according to Jason Ince, a spokesman with the California Department of Water Resources. He said any groups conducting cloud seeding work are required to notify the agency by submitting a notice of intent. An October report published by the department indicates there have been at least 16 cloud-seeding projects across multiple counties and watersheds in California in recent years. Such efforts could become useful as climate conditions keep moving in the wrong direction: Warming temperatures and overuse are sapping groundwater supplies in California, while state and federal officials are still mired in negotiations over use of the Colorado River — a rapidly shrinking water lifeline that supplies 40 million people across the American West. Meanwhile, global average temperatures continue to soar driven largely by fossil fuel emissions and human activity. Many experts say there's a good chance that some form of intervention — weather modification, geoengineering or some altogether new technology — will be needed in the years ahead. 'Weather modification projects are vital resources to enhance fresh water supply for communities within their watersheds,' the Department of Water Resources report says. It recommends that the state continue to support existing cloud-seeding projects in the state and help facilitate new ones. Speigel, of San Luis Obispo County, said laws banning cloud seeding and other weather modification measures — such as the one posed by Rep. Greene — would be a detriment to the region. 'It would be a setback for us, because we are constantly looking for other opportunities for water,' he said. 'It would limit our ability to seek out means of more water in these long drought periods. ... I definitely think it would stifle our ability to help our customers.' Even more controversial than cloud seeding are geoengineering techniques to block the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth. Some involve injecting sulfur into the stratosphere. A 2021 report on geoengineering published by the National Academies of Sciences affirmed that 'meeting the challenge of climate change requires a portfolio of options,' but advised caution around such methods. '[Solar geoengineering] could potentially offer an additional strategy for responding to climate change but is not a substitute for reducing [greenhouse gas] emissions,' the report says. Dessler, who is also the director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M, likened geoengineering to airbags on a car — something no one ever hopes to use but that would be good to have in a climate emergency. He said the focus should continue to be on reducing the use of fossil fuels, and that the talk of banning geoengineering, cloud seeding and other forms of weather modification by members of the Trump administration and some lawmakers is more political than scientific. 'It makes no sense — it shows you that this is not an argument about facts. It's an argument about worldview,' he said. The president has taken many steps to undo efforts to address climate change in recent months, including withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, an agreement among some 200 nations to limit global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The EPA has also removed several barriers and regulations that govern oil and gas drilling in the U.S., and has said it wants to repeal the endangerment finding — a long-held legal and scientific determination that CO2 emissions harm human health and welfare, among other significant changes. Doricko, Rainmaker's CEO, said he was disappointed to see cloud seeding politicized in the wake of the Texas flood. He was taken aback when he saw that Rep. Greene had posted a picture of his face on X — 'insinuating somewhat that cloud seeding, or I, was responsible for the natural disaster in Texas, when any meteorologist or atmospheric scientist could tell you otherwise,' he said. 'Human civilization is unintentionally modifying the weather and the climate all the time,' Doricko said, including through fossil fuel emissions and urban heat islands that warm surrounding areas. 'What Rainmaker is trying to do is bring some intentionality to that, so that we can modify the weather for our benefit and deliberately.' Doricko said he is also an advocate of more transparent reporting, more stringent regulations, and whatever else is needed to build trust with the public about 'a really consequential technology.' He said he will continue to engage with skeptics of the technology in good faith. 'Cloud seeding is a water supply tool, and whether you're a farmer in a red state or an environmentalist in a blue state, water is as nonpartisan as it gets,' he said. 'Everybody needs water.'
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First Post
09-07-2025
- Politics
- First Post
‘Weather weapon' and more: After Texas floods, a flurry of conspiracy theories emerge
Over 100 have been left dead in the Texas flash floods including some young girls. Even now, the search for missing people continues. But that has not stopped some from going online and spreading rumours and conspiracy theories about the matter. Let's take a look at the claims and what experts are saying read more Water rises from severe flooding along the Guadalupe Kerr County, Texas on Friday. AP The tragedy in Texas has left over 100 dead including some young girls. Even now, the search for missing people continues. But that has not stopped some from going online and spreading rumours and conspiracy theories about the matter. Some have even claimed that 'weather weapons' have been deployed against Texas. But what happened? What do we know? Let's take a closer look: 'When was last cloud seeding?' It began with a number of people on the far-right and within the Q-Anon community taking to social media. They blamed cloud seeding – which is done to encourage rain by adding silver iodide or dry ice to a cloud – for the flash floods. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD 'I need someone to look into who was responsible for this,' far-right figure and ex-special forces commander Pete Chambers wrote. 'When was the last cloud seeding?' 'Anyone able to answer this?' asked Mike Flynn, a Q-Anon figure and former NSA in the Trump administration. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, famous for coining the phrase 'Jewish space lasers', joined the fray. Marjorie Taylor Greene earlier suggested that 'lasers or blue beams of light' from 'space solar generators' in the sky started wildfires. Reuters 'I am introducing a bill that prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity', Greene wrote on X. 'It will be a felony offence.' Right-wing influencer Gabrielle Yoder too pointed the finger at cloud seeding – specifically to cloudseeding company Rainmaker. As did Flynn, who wrote on X, 'anyone who calls this out as a conspiracy theory can go F themselves'. 'Weather weapon deployed' Others claimed some sort of weather weapon had been deployed. Michael Meyer, the founder of extremist Veterans on Patrol, wrote on Telegram, 'Due to the recent weather weapon deployed against Texas, which resulted in a high number of child murders, efforts to eliminate this military treason are being escalated.' 'Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake,' Kandiss Taylor, who plans to run as a GOP candidate, wrote on X. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD That doesn't even seem natural,' Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director of Women for America First, added. Experts, of course, dismissed such claims. 'It is not physically possible or possible within the laws of atmospheric chemistry to cloud seed at a scale that would cause an event like \[the Texas flooding\] to occur,' Matt Lanza, a digital meteorologist based in Houston, told Wired. Senator Ted Cruz was among those rebuffing the conspiracy theories. 'The meteorological ingredients [for the storm] were already there, and cloud seeding could not have played a role,' Lanza added. 'I am trying to be as transparent as possible, because this is an incredibly controversial subject but isn't actually as regulated and discussed transparently as it ought to be by the federal government,' Doricko added. 'Just for the record, I'm not a deep state plant from either Bill Gates or Palantir, Peter Thiel or Bill Clinton.' Among those rebuffing the conspiracy theories was Senator Ted Cruz. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD 'To the best of my knowledge, there is zero evidence of anything related to anything like weather modification,' Cruz was quoted as saying. 'Look, the internet can be a strange place. People can come up with all sorts of crazy theories.' 'There's a time to have political fights. There's a time to disagree. This is not that time,' Cruz added. Some on the left mocked these claims from the right. One, using a famous Simpsons meme of Principal Skinner, asked if the Trump funding cuts were responsible for the tragedy. 'No, it must have been Democrats using a weather modification machine,' the caption stated. What do experts say? However, experts say that claiming those blaming cuts at the National Weather Service (NWS) by the Trump administration aren't correct either. There have been claims that (weather agencies) did not foresee catastrophic (Texas) floods – but that's simply not true," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, wrote on X rival Bluesky. 'This was undoubtedly an extreme event but messaging rapidly escalated beginning (around) 12 (hours) prior…Locations that flooded catastrophically had at least 1-2+ hours of direct warning from NWS.' STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD 'This truly was a sudden & massive event and occurred at worst possible time (middle of the night). But (the) problem, once again, was not a bad weather prediction: it was one of 'last mile' forecast/warning dissemination,' Swain added. Search and recovery workers dig through debris looking for any survivors or remains of people swept up in the flash flooding at Camp Mystic in Hunt, Texas. AFP 'False claims from both the left and right have spread widely on social media following the catastrophic floods in Texas,' Sarah Komar and Nicole Dirks from the disinformation watchdog NewsGuard wrote. 'When extreme weather events occur, conspiracy theories about humans creating or controlling them often soon follow.' Even the media fell victim to such stories Kerr County Lead, a local outlet, was forced to retract a false story about the miracle rescue of two girls who clung to a tree in the floods. The story first surfaced in social media posts that quickly went viral, but a local official said the reports were '100 per cent inaccurate.' 'Like everyone, we wanted this story to be true, but it's a classic tale of misinformation that consumes all of us during a natural disaster,' Louis Amestoy, Kerr County Lead's editor, wrote in a note to readers on Sunday. 'Unfortunately, the story is not true and we are retracting it.' STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD With inputs from agencies
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Far-right conspiracy theories spread online in aftermath of the Texas floods
Disasters and tragedies have long been the source of American conspiracies, old and new. So when devastating flash floods hit Texas over the Fourth of July weekend, and as the death toll continues to rise, far-right conspiracists online saw their opportunity to come out in full force, blurring the lines of what's true and untrue. Some people, emerging from the same vectors associated with the longstanding QAnon conspiracy theory, which essentially holds that a shadowy 'deep state' is acting against president Donald Trump, spread on X that the devastating weather was being controlled by the government. 'I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS,' posted Pete Chambers, a former special forces commander and frequent fixture on the far right who once organized an armed convoy to the Texas border, along with documents he claimed to show government weather operations. 'WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?' The same chain of posts on the social media platform X singled out a California-based 'precipitation enhancement' company as a potential culprit. It didn't take long for one of the most integral figures in the QAnon movement to repost Chambers, which received millions of views on the Elon Musk owned-app. 'Anyone able to answer this?' wrote retired general Mike Flynn, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration and who helped legitimize QAnon after pledging allegiance to the movement in 2020, reposting Chambers. Conspiracists and grifters on other platforms joined in. One YouTuber with hundreds of thousands of subscribers posted breathless coverage of what he called: 'The TRUTH of WEATHER MANIPULATION' in a segment which earned him close to 200,000 views alone. The halls of Congress echoed the sentiment, as Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – a vaccine skeptic and GOP hardliner, who has espoused Jeffrey Epstein conspiracies – didn't waste the moment to say she was introducing a bill of her own after the floods. 'I am introducing a bill that prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity,' she wrote on X as the aftermath of the floods continued. 'It will be a felony offense.' There were also amplifications of a false story that rescuers found two girls who were allegedly found alive near Comfort, Texas – something CNN's Brian Stelter pieced together. Laura Loomer, another far-right propagandist and one of Maga's biggest stars, retweeted a story that stemmed from a volunteer rescuer who had heard the rumor. Eventually, the tale was disproven. Of course, there has been much debate online about who is to blame for the deadly floods, with many not just turning to outlandish weather manipulation allegations, but pointing the finger at the Trump administration's recent budget cuts in favor of things like the massive funding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In a viral post on Instagram, the Austin Firefighters Association blamed its chief for delaying the flood response in the hard hit Kerr County, because he was more interested in saving money rather than the lives of potential flood victims. 'Why would Fire Chief Joel G. Baker do this, you may ask?' the post read. 'It was a misguided attempt to save money.' The National Weather Service has also faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials. Texas senator Ted Cruz, who was again on vacation overseas during a natural disaster in his state that claimed the lives of his constituents, helped push the so-called 'big, beautiful bill' last week, which among other major cuts, ensured weather forecasting funding was slashed significantly nationwide. Posts on the Telegram app, in the neo-Nazi and far-right circles that characteristically find racist inspirations behind every news event – yet still mostly supports the Trump administration – were highly critical of the flood response and blamed it on the government's stupidity. 'There is brewing resentment in Texas against their state government from both Democrats and Republicans for their lack of emergency management at the state level, and the incompetence in planning and building disaster mitigation projects,' posted one account. Another post promoted the idea that the Trump administration had failed to protect 'White girls' lives', in reference to the death of 27 campers at Camp Mystic, and in general 'White Americans'. Meme makers on the left have taken the opportunity to mock the right, with one popular image spreading online using the Simpson's character, Principal Skinner, shown wondering if Trump's cuts, perhaps, are to blame for the deaths in Texas. 'No, it must have been Democrats using a weather modification machine,' the caption concludes.
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Far-right conspiracy theories spread online in aftermath of the Texas floods
Disasters and tragedies have long been the source of American conspiracies, old and new. So when devastating flash floods hit Texas over the Fourth of July weekend, and as the death toll continues to rise, far-right conspiracists online saw their opportunity to come out in full force, blurring the lines of what's true and untrue. Some people, emerging from the same vectors associated with the longstanding QAnon conspiracy theory, which essentially holds that a shadowy 'deep state' is acting against president Donald Trump, spread on X that the devastating weather was being controlled by the government. 'I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS,' posted Pete Chambers, a former special forces commander and frequent fixture on the far right who once organized an armed convoy to the Texas border, along with documents he claimed to show government weather operations. 'WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?' The same chain of posts on the social media platform X singled out a California-based 'precipitation enhancement' company as a potential culprit. It didn't take long for one of the most integral figures in the QAnon movement to repost Chambers, which received millions of views on the Elon Musk owned-app. 'Anyone able to answer this?' wrote retired general Mike Flynn, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration and who helped legitimize QAnon after pledging allegiance to the movement in 2020, reposting Chambers. Conspiracists and grifters on other platforms joined in. One YouTuber with hundreds of thousands of subscribers posted breathless coverage of what he called: 'The TRUTH of WEATHER MANIPULATION' in a segment which earned him close to 200,000 views alone. The halls of Congress echoed the sentiment, as Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – a vaccine skeptic and GOP hardliner, who has espoused Jeffrey Epstein conspiracies – didn't waste the moment to say she was introducing a bill of her own after the floods. 'I am introducing a bill that prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity,' she wrote on X as the aftermath of the floods continued. 'It will be a felony offense.' There were also amplifications of a false story that rescuers found two girls who were allegedly found alive near Comfort, Texas – something CNN's Brian Stelter pieced together. Laura Loomer, another far-right propagandist and one of Maga's biggest stars, retweeted a story that stemmed from a volunteer rescuer who had heard the rumor. Eventually, the tale was disproven. Of course, there has been much debate online about who is to blame for the deadly floods, with many not just turning to outlandish weather manipulation allegations, but pointing the finger at the Trump administration's recent budget cuts in favor of things like the massive funding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In a viral post on Instagram, the Austin Firefighters Association blamed its chief for delaying the flood response in the hard hit Kerr County, because he was more interested in saving money rather than the lives of potential flood victims. 'Why would Fire Chief Joel G. Baker do this, you may ask?' the post read. 'It was a misguided attempt to save money.' The National Weather Service has also faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials. Texas senator Ted Cruz, who was again on vacation overseas during a natural disaster in his state that claimed the lives of his constituents, helped push the so-called 'big, beautiful bill' last week, which among other major cuts, ensured weather forecasting funding was slashed significantly nationwide. Posts on the Telegram app, in the neo-Nazi and far-right circles that characteristically find racist inspirations behind every news event – yet still mostly supports the Trump administration – were highly critical of the flood response and blamed it on the government's stupidity. 'There is brewing resentment in Texas against their state government from both Democrats and Republicans for their lack of emergency management at the state level, and the incompetence in planning and building disaster mitigation projects,' posted one account. Another post promoted the idea that the Trump administration had failed to protect 'White girls' lives', in reference to the death of 27 campers at Camp Mystic, and in general 'White Americans'. Meme makers on the left have taken the opportunity to mock the right, with one popular image spreading online using the Simpson's character, Principal Skinner, shown wondering if Trump's cuts, perhaps, are to blame for the deaths in Texas. 'No, it must have been Democrats using a weather modification machine,' the caption concludes.
