In the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, misinformation about the severity of the storms and the government's response to them has run wild, putting the lives of FEMA workers at risk in states like North Carolina.
One of the more notable conspiracy theories is that the federal government has been controlling the weather for nefarious reasons such as targeting Republican areas or in an attempt to force people off of their land.
"Yes they can control the weather. It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said in a post on X on Oct. 3.
With anger at FEMA already running high based on misinformation pushed by Donald Trump that the agency is out of money because it spent disaster funds housing migrants, President Biden responded directly to Greene's claim.
"Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, is now saying the federal government is literally controlling the weather, we’re controlling the weather. It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s so stupid. It’s got to stop," Biden told reporters at the White House last week.
Several Republicans also criticized Greene.
"NEW FLASH —> Humans cannot create or control hurricanes," Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida wrote in a message on X. "Anyone who thinks they can, needs to have their head examined."
Rep. Chuck Edwards, a Republican who represents portions of western North Carolina including the hard hit town of Asheville, also tried to dispel the claims being pushed online by conspiracy theorists like Greene and Alex Jones of Infowars.
"Nobody can control the weather. Charles Konrad, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Southeast Regional Climate Center, has confirmed that no one has the technology or ability to geoengineer a hurricane," Edwards said on his congressional website. "Current geoengineering technology can serve as a large-scale intervention to mitigate the negative consequences of naturally occurring weather phenomena, but it cannot be used to create or manipulate hurricanes."
Project STORMFURY and cloud seeding
While there is no evidence that the Biden administration had a hand helping Helene or Milton to form or in steering the powerful storms to some predetermined region, the federal government did embark on a program between 1962 and 1983 that unsuccessfully tried to diminish the severity of hurricanes.
"Project STORMFURY sought to weaken tropical cyclones by flying aircraft into the storms and dispersing silver iodide through a process called cloud seeding," the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration states on its website.
The hypothesis was that the release of iodide, which has been found to be harmless to human health, would cause a hurricane’s moisture to freeze, thereby disrupting the further formation of the storm. Researchers believed that, if successful, the process would decrease “the maximum wind speeds by up to 30%,” NOAA stated.
But after more than 20 years of research, NOAA said, “it became clear that the results of seeding were almost indistinguishable from changes in hurricane intensity that occurred naturally. By 1983, Project STORMFURY officially ended.”
Cloud seeding operations have continued through government programs across the drought-plagued West in states like Utah and Idaho, with the Department of Agriculture in places like Texas, and through nonprofit research organizations like the Desert Research Institute in Nevada, but those have shown only limited success.
The role of climate change
There is another proven way that humans are having an impact on the planet’s weather: burning fossil fuels. We know that greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere trap heat, and that since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution temperatures on average have increased by more than 1.3 degrees Celsius. We also know that for every degree Celsius of temperature rise, 7% more moisture is added to the atmosphere.
“When it comes to precipitation, this is really one of the more slam-dunk climate change connections. The simple reality is that this just comes down to fundamental thermodynamics,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain told Yahoo News. “The water vapor holding capacity of the atmosphere increases exponentially as it gets warmer and that raises the ceiling on how intense precipitation can become. It doesn’t mean it rains more all the time everywhere, but it specifically does mean that when it does rain, it pours.”
Hurricanes, Swain said, are "heat engines that draw their energy from warm tropical oceans." The warmer the water, the more energy there is to fuel tropical cyclones, and when Helene passed through the Gulf, its water temperature was 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above average.
“It’s not a coincidence that the Gulf of Mexico,” Swain said, “where Helene formed, was record-warm this summer.”
After gathering a tremendous amount of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Helene moved inland, hitting the mountains of North Carolina, which helped unleash more than 2 feet of rain in less than 24 hours on ground already saturated from heavy rain the previous week.
“This was a tropical cyclone related event. We know that tropical cyclones running into mountainous regions is a big ‘uh-oh’ scenario,” Swain said.
But it's not just mountainous regions that should be concerned. Two weeks after Helene came ashore along Florida's Big Bend, Hurricane Milton made landfall further south, dumping more than 18 inches of rain on St. Petersburg in less than a day.
These events had nothing to do with cloud seeding, unless you count one of the proven affects of burning oil and gas over several decades.
“Essentially all kinds of extreme rain events are going to be becoming more intense in a warming climate, whether it’s an atmospheric river in California or an afternoon thunderstorm in the Midwest or a hurricane in the Southeast,” Swain said.
