SciCheck Digest
Experts say people cannot create or meaningfully alter hurricanes through existing weather modification techniques. That has not stopped a deluge of social media posts baselessly claiming or implying that Hurricanes Helene and Milton were intentionally created, steered or otherwise controlled by someone.
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Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26, followed by Hurricane Milton on Oct. 9. Amid the deaths and destruction from the hurricanes, social media posts spread bogus claims that someone had caused or altered the storms via some weather modification technique.
There is a real history of weather modification efforts, with some modest results in producing snow and rain through a technique called cloud seeding. However, it has never been shown to be possible to meaningfully modify hurricanes, nor is there any basis for the idea that someone manipulated Hurricanes Helene or Milton.
“Hurricane Helene was NOT a ‘naturally occurring’ weather event,” said some of the many baseless posts on the topic. “This event was entirely MANIPULATED by man, & guided into a certain direction, for a certain reason.”
While many posts were vague about who had purportedly controlled the hurricanes, others pointed a finger at the U.S. government.
“A hurricane as weather warfare,” read one post. “If you want to argue with me I’m happy to bury you in patents, gov contracts and tax dollars. You are looking at one of the most horrific events ever perpetrated by our government on its own people.”
Claims about Helene then morphed into claims about Milton. “Hurricane Milton is targeted geo-engineered storm being used as a weapon,” wrote Stew Peters, an internet personality who has spread numerous conspiracy theories, in an X post.
Among those adding fuel to these claims was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who unleashed a series of X posts implying purposeful modification of the storms. “Yes they can control the weather,” Greene posted on Oct. 3. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
Greene, who is a Republican from Georgia, which has been affected by the storms, didn’t explain who “they” are or why someone would want to cause a devastating hurricane. But earlier that day she had posted a map that has been connected to a claim that Hurricane Helene was targeted to disproportionately affect Republicans. In the days since, as another hurricane headed toward Florida, Greene continued to post about weather modification, doubling down on her suggestion. She has a history of spreading conspiracy theories and other misinformation, including about natural disasters.
Not only is there zero evidence that anyone attempted to alter the paths of the hurricanes, but it is implausible that someone could modify a hurricane, let alone in such a way to target specific groups.
“There is no scientific proof that any weather modification has been successful in hurricanes,” Katja Friedrich, who studies cloud and precipitation formation and modification at the University of Colorado Boulder, told us in an email.
President Joe Biden referenced Greene’s claims in an Oct. 9 press conference, saying the idea that “we’re controlling the weather” is “beyond ridiculous.” He continued, “It’s got to stop. In moments like this, there are no red or blue states.”
Greene also made fun of people who have implicated climate change in the hurricanes, ridiculing the idea that “cow farts” could cause them. Other social media posts also dismissed climate change as a possible contributor to the hurricanes, claiming, for instance, that “[w]eather modification crimes [are] hiding behind the label of Climate Change.”
But there is a good case that climate change made various aspects of Hurricanes Helene and Milton worse, and it’s clear that climate change will influence hurricane activity over the coming years. (Also for the record, methane emissions from livestock do contribute to climate change, but the majority of the methane produced by cows is emitted via burps, not farts.)
“Climate change didn’t cause these storms to occur but it plausibly altered the odds of them reaching certain thresholds of intensity, rapid intensification, or rainfall rates, for example,” Tom Knutson, a senior scientist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told us in an email.
Hurricane Modification Claims Lack Any Basis
People have a long history of trying to change the weather — not all of it well-intentioned — but the successes are limited.
Many posts, including some by Greene, mentioned or linked to sources referencing cloud seeding, the primary method used for weather modification.
In some U.S. states and countries, governments, utilities and companies pay for cloud seeding to enhance the snowpack in the mountains or to increase rainfall in dry regions. The technique relies on adding small particles to clouds to stimulate ice crystals or droplets to form, which can fall to the ground as rain or snow. In the U.S., ground-based machines or airplanes generally release silver iodide, nudging nearby clouds to release snow.
There have been questions about how well these programs work, since it can be hard to tell whether rain or snow after these operations would have fallen anyway. However, a 2018 study by Friedrich and her colleagues indicated that cloud seeding really can cause snow to fall, although it is unclear how much the technique can increase snow in various situations.
The method is not used to control hurricanes. “There is no way that these storms underwent cloud seeding,” Friedrich said.
Cloud seeding would not change the track of a weather system, she said. She explained that the technique “usually focuses on enhancing precipitation in precipitating clouds (rain or snow) and in breaking up large hailstones into smaller ones in thunderstorms to make them less impactful.” Nor have there been any experiments showing “cloud seeding in hurricanes produce more or less precipitation,” she said.
The U.S. government did try to use cloud seeding to mitigate hurricanes at various points beginning in the 1940s and ending in 1983 — a fact referenced by social media posts and in a Gateway Pundit article shared by Greene. But there isn’t evidence these programs were effective at modifying hurricanes, and some results initially interpreted as successes did not pan out.
The U.S. government also tried to secretly use cloud seeding to create extra rainfall and disrupt enemy supply chains during the Vietnam War, ultimately leading to an international treaty banning use of weather modification for military reasons. This history was also referenced in recent posts on weather modification, although it’s not clear whether this operation met its intended goal.
Citing a 2013 interview with physicist Michio Kaku on CBS News that has previously been misinterpreted, Greene also brought up the idea that lasers could control the weather. But Jérôme Kasparian, a physicist at the University of Geneva who has researched using lasers to increase rainfall and modify the path of lightning, told us that initiating and maintaining a hurricane using lasers would not be possible. “You would need to manipulate amounts of energy that are completely beyond what you could do,” he said.
Moreover, his own research on weather modification using lasers has been experimental, he said, and is not ready for routine use. “To the best of my knowledge the most advanced work in this direction with lasers is ours,” Kasparian said of his attempts to nudge clouds to produce rain with lasers. “We are far from getting raindrops,” he said, adding that his efforts to guide lightning with lasers also needs “a lot of work and development.”
Finally, some posts referenced the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks as a purported weather modification technique. But HAARP is a basic science research program aimed at understanding the highest parts of the atmosphere using radio waves. It has nothing to do with weather modification and could not alter hurricanes.
“Radio waves in the frequency ranges that HAARP transmits are not absorbed in either the troposphere or the stratosphere—the two levels of the atmosphere that produce Earth’s weather,” says an FAQ page on the HAARP website. “Since there is no interaction, there is no way to control the weather.”
Climate Change Is Real, Can Affect Hurricanes
Social media posts have also used the bogus claims about intentional weather modification as an opportunity to dismiss the reality of human-caused climate change.
As we have written many times, heat-trapping greenhouse gases produced by human activities have warmed the planet, leading to a variety of climate effects. The relationship between climate change and hurricanes is complex, but rising global temperatures already have influenced and will continue to influence Atlantic hurricanes.
Climate change causes sea level rise as hotter temperatures melt land ice and water warms and expands. Sea level rise, in combination with more coastal development, increases the risk of large storm surges and damage from hurricanes. Human-caused climate change has already elevated sea levels, and this has “very likely increased the impact of hurricanes relative to the case without sea level rise,” Knutson, the NOAA scientist, told us.
Climate change is also expected to lead to more intense Atlantic hurricanes, meaning hurricanes with greater wind speeds. And it has already boosted extreme rainfall, since warmer air holds more moisture — and possibly contributed to an increase in rapidly intensifying hurricanes — although this is not certain. Knutson said climate change potentially impacted Helene and Milton in each of these ways.
In the past, it was difficult to say whether and how climate change affected a particular storm, but increasingly, scientists are performing so-called attribution studies to quantify those impacts.
Several preliminary assessments of Hurricane Helene have been released, connecting the “catastrophic impacts” of the hurricane to climate change. Each report has found that climate change increased the storm’s total rainfall, and of the two reports that assessed wind speeds, both found that climate change made the hurricane more intense. An early report on Hurricane Milton similarly indicated that climate change made the hurricane wetter and windier.
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