As Hurricane Milton bears down upon Western Florida and North Carolina continues to recover from Hurricane Helene the Right Wing Disinformation Machine has cranked into overdrive. Not content to get in the way of FEMA recovery efforts, MAGAs are now literally claiming that Democrats can control the weather and are sending hurricanes to red states in order to harm Republicans.
By now we’ve all heard Trump’s lies about the Biden/Harris administration’s response to Hurricane Helene but the crazy really started with the odious Marjorie Taylor Greene (she of Jewish Space Laser fame) who Tweeted (sorry, Xitted) that “they” are controlling the weather and sent Hurricane Helene up the Florida coast, straight into North Carolina, and north into Georgia, leaving a path of destruction in its wake. After being roundly mocked online she then doubled down and posted a graphic about cloud seeding and other geoengineering efforts prove her right while petulantly whining “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
Of course none of her “evidence” actually proved that humans have the ability to literally create hurricanes and direct them wherever they want to but that didn’t matter to her.
Not content to be outdone in this race to the bottom of the Disinformation Barrel, the even more odious Alex Jones posted yesterday that “Democrats are in control of hurricanes and using them as weather weapons.”
Feast your eyes on this bit of madness:
"I'm going to be covering today, and I've sent the crew over 20 clips, and I've got over a hundred documents right here," he explained. "I'm gonna do a big presentation for everybody on what's really going on with weather weapons."
Jones claimed to have interviews and government documents that would prove his point.
"Then we have the bold headlines that I put up on X that the Kamala Harris, you know, the Biden-Harris administration is in control of this hurricane," he said of Hurricane Milton.
"So they have the power certified easily with just five or six big aircraft," he opined. "And that's the old technology, not the lasers that are all certified and the Doppler radar. They also have on ships and in large oil drilling platforms that they've launched. They could totally just make this thing stop and dump the water in the ocean."
Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? I mean does this guy even understand the amount of energy it would take to spin up a hurricane? Five or six big aircraft certainly would not be able to accomplish such a feat. I mean how much energy does a Category 5 hurricane produce? Good thing we have the internet.
A mature Category 5 hurricane generates 1.5 x 10^12 watts of energy PER DAY from its winds, which is roughly half of the world's total electrical generating capacity.
That’s 1.5 PETAWATTS (or 15 trillion watts) of energy DAILY. I’m pretty sure five or six big airplanes and a few drilling platforms are not capable of producing the kind of energy required to spin up a hurricane (and why WOULD Democrats send a Category 5 hurricane to take out another Blue city anyways?)
But this does bring up a point. Humans have been trying to affect the weather through geoengineering since the 19th Century in order to produce rain in drought stricken areas or affect local weather in other ways. In fact the US Air Force even tried to use cloud seeding in during the Vietnam War as a method of impeding North Vietnamese troop movements in what was dubbed “Operation Popeye.”
The U.S. Air Force flies more than 2,600 cloud-seeding sorties over North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as part of a covert effort to extend the monsoon season and inhibit North Vietnamese troop movements. Dubbed Operation Popeye, the program is the first known instance of hostile weather manipulation in military history. When columnist Jack Anderson reveals its existence in the Washington Post in 1971, the public is outraged. The subsequent scandal soon becomes known as the "Watergate of weather warfare."
How does cloud seeding work, exactly? Cloud seeding is a weather modification technique that increases a cloud's ability to produce rain or snow by introducing tiny particles into the cloud. These particles, called ice nuclei, provide a surface for water molecules to bond and form ice crystals. The ice crystals grow until they are heavy enough to fall to the ground as precipitation.
More recently scientists have been discussing the use of geoengineering to prevent the worst effects of climate change. The IPCC mentioned geoengineering in its Fifth Assessment Report released in 2010, and in 2022 the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine released a report on solar geoengineering which proposes to use particles injected into the atmosphere to theoretically reflect sunlight back into space and prevent the Earth from warming up further (which is the subject of the fictional book Termination Shock by Cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson).
Scientists researching solar geoengineering are studying three main ideas:
-
Stratospheric aerosol injection. This idea is to add liquid or solid particles to the air about 10-15 miles (16-25 kilometers) above Earth’s surface to reflect sunlight. This type of injection happens naturally with some large volcanic eruptions. For example, the aerosols injected into the stratosphere by the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo reflected enough sunlight to cool Earth’s surface for the next 2 years. Injecting particles on purpose and continually could similarly result in cooler surface temperatures.
-
Marine cloud brightening. This idea involves adding particles to low-lying clouds over the ocean to cause the clouds to reflect more sunlight. Low clouds, particularly over dark ocean surfaces, scatter sunlight back to space that would otherwise reach and warm Earth’s surface. Adding particles could increase the surface area, lifetime, or reflective power of low-lying clouds, bouncing more sunlight back into space.
-
Cirrus cloud thinning. This idea seeks to reduce the thickness of ice clouds 4-8 miles (6-13 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. Cirrus clouds tend to trap more heat in the atmosphere than they reflect back to space. Thinning these clouds could allow more heat to escape from Earth’s atmosphere, producing a cooling effect.
However geoengineering is not without risks. All kinds of risks, in fact. I mean what could possibly go wrong?
Even if we could use solar geoengineering to reduce the average temperature of Earth, the cooling effects wouldn't be uniform across the globe. Inconsistent cooling could cause changes in precipitation patterns and in turn affect food and water security. For example, some models suggest that stratospheric aerosol injection could disrupt the Asian and African summer monsoons, which are crucial for agriculture. Meanwhile, the sulfur particles that some geoengineering methods use could cause air pollution and increase acid rain. Messing with the atmosphere could even turn the sky white.
Oy. Sounds rather risky.
So yeah, Marjorie Taylor Greene is technically correct but no, humans cannot create hurricanes nor can we direct them where we want (sorry, Alex). Hurricanes are governed by all kinds of global-scale factors not the least of which is rapid intensification due to human-caused climate change. Scientists were literally gobsmacked when Hurricane Milton strengthened from a Category 1 to a Cat 5 in less than a day which is pretty much unprecedented in climate science. This is entirely due to the massive amount of heat that’s being stored in the Gulf of Mexico where water temperatures are averaging around 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
But this does beg the question: if Democrats are able to create and direct hurricanes, why on EARTH would you want to mess with them? Because that would prove that Democrats are LITERALLY a force of nature.
(Crossposted from my Substack WokeAF. Come join, it’s free!)