The Climate Clowns

An outrageous new lie is being spread about hurricanes, and I can’t even

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene at the U.S. Capitol. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

I want to extend my heartfelt concerns and sympathies to the victims of the recent hurricanes in the Southeast. I know I speak for this entire community of readers when I say we are horrified by the devastation, and you have all been on our minds these past few terrible days and weeks.

As climate disasters increase in frequency and severity, we are faced with still another grave threat: misinformation, along with its more sinister sibling, disinformation. 

As strong evidence that the writers of 2024 have jumped the shark, we have to begin today’s discussion with a simple fact: The government cannot control the weather, let alone create catastrophic hurricanes that it can send at will.

Yet because of irresponsible conspiracy mongering by political leaders, with a healthy assist from online influencers and amplification by foreign actors, this bizarre claim became a top priority that many leaders, both Democratic and Republican, had to spend valuable time debunking, when they could have been focused on saving more lives and property.

It’s tempting to simply laugh, but just as with the insane and false claims about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, this disinformation also carries serious and dangerous consequences. In today’s piece, I discuss how we got to this point and how political leaders and experts are pushing back. I also will place this particularly weird claim in the larger context of everything else we are seeing to help make the otherwise nonsensical make a bit of perverted sense, at least in terms of the political value it contains for those seeking to undermine our democracy.

“They can control the weather.”

In a press conference yesterday, President Biden’s exasperation was evident as he shot down the newest conspiracy theories around relief efforts and hurricanes. Biden noted that “even one congresswoman” was “suggesting I control the weather and implying I’m sending it to red states.”

“This stuff is off the wall. It’s like out of a comic book,” Biden declared.

He’s talking of course about the Jewish Space Lasers QAnon lady, Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-Moscow), whose tweets around the hurricanes have reached new levels of both stupidity and dangerousness.

In one particularly off-the-wall tweet, viewed five million times as of this writing, Rep. Greene attached a video of a speech by CIA Director John Brennan from eight years back. Director Brennan at the time was discussing innovative ways to use aerosols to deflect the sun’s heat to reduce climate change. But in Greene’s smooth, hollow brain, that somehow became “Yes they can control the weather”—implying the hurricanes were manmade and not the long warned about by-product of an overheated ocean following decades of increased carbon in the atmosphere.

Note how she provides ample cover for her ignorance, telling her followers that anyone who counters or ridicules her claims “is lying to you” and that this is all part of some massive cover up and “the people” know it. (As Jimmy Kimmel pointed out last night on his program, Greene used to say bad weather was God’s way of punishing liberal sinners. Funny how that changes when it’s her region that is hit by it.)

Rep. Greene also posted a map of the areas affected by Hurricane Helene, with an overlay of an electoral map by political party, implying strongly that the hurricane was created by Democrats to hurt the political chances of the GOP. 

Notably, however, when Democrats presented the North Carolina legislature, which has a GOP supermajority, with a proposal to extend the time for affected voters to register and to allow absentee votes more time to arrive, not a single GOP legislator voted in favor of it.

Other big accounts on social media jumped on the absurd notion of politically driven hurricanes. This tweet, which also showed a placid coastline of Texas, was viewed a depressing 7.5 million times while claiming there was no hurricane there because (checks notes) “Texas is not a swing state.”

The community notes have sought to correct the factual and scientific record. In this case, users noted, “This post fails to take into account the distance between Florida and Texas. It also fails to take into account that these locations are on different jetstreams.” 

Pushing back on crazy

The rumors around government controlled hurricanes have become so rampant that representatives from both parties have had to spend valuable time addressing and debunking them.

As Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC) explained in a video to his followers, “The government did not create the hurricane. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say that, but here we are.”

Similarly, Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) wrote an open letter to his constituents, who live in the affected mountainous areas of the state, seeking to provide accurate information and debunk rumors. At the very top of it, Edwards noted,

Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock. 

1. Nobody can control the weather.

2. 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. 

   1. 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.

But despite the pleas for sanity and criticisms even from within her own party, Rep. Greene has not relented. Late Wednesday night, as Hurricane Milton was barreling down on Florida, Greene tweeted a particularly disingenuous argument, reposting an interview by physicist Michio Kaku who was marveling at the theoretical ability of scientists to use high powered lasers to bring rain to parched regions. Rep. Greene wrote,

“They” say this is disinformation.

“They” also say humans cause climate change. 

Is this not climate change?

This guy was all of the rest of us, as he flipped the script correctly.

Just to be clear, the amount of power behind a hurricane far exceeds any kind of energy humans can artificially produce. As one meteorologist sighed, “An average hurricane’s life cycle burns through the energy of roughly 10,000 nuclear bombs. The idea that we can even influence something like that, never mind direct it, is just so outlandish that it’s almost, sadly, funny.”

The dangers of “weather control” rumors

Lately, whenever there is a catastrophe or crisis, it’s usually the folks on the front lines trying to do the most good and deliver the most amount of useful information who become targets of hate and threats. We saw this during the pandemic with our frontline health workers and epidemiologists, and we’re seeing it with our climatologists and meteorologists today. 

Rolling Stone reported on this phenomenon, speaking to D.C.-based meteorologist Matthew Cappucci as he headed down to Florida:

“For me to post a hurricane forecast and for people to accuse me of creating the hurricane by working for some secret Illuminati entity is disappointing and distressing, and it’s resulting in a decrease in public trust,” says Cappucci. He says he hasn’t slept in multiple days and is exhausted. This last week he received hundreds of messages from people accusing him of modifying the weather and creating hurricanes from space lasers.

Cappucci says that he’s noticed an enormous change on social media in the last three months: “Seemingly overnight, ideas that once would have been ridiculed as very fringe, outlandish viewpoints are suddenly becoming mainstream and it’s making my job much more difficult.” 

But experts are worried about more than their own safety or the difficulty of their jobs. A sharp decrease in public trust during severe weather crises could lead to some terrifying outcomes. As Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), who served as director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management for two years, warned on MSNBC, “At some point in time, we’ll see people tell residents not to evacuate because the hurricane’s not really hitting you.”

If that sounds implausible, we’re already seeing versions of that from large, influential accounts on the right. The troll account Catturd (again, I can’t believe I have to write about this) declared last night that, due to the changing wind speeds of Hurricane Milton, “I’ll never listen to weather channel again.” As of today, that was viewed 2.4 million times.

Why lie about the weather?

There’s something particularly sad when the weather—one of the last, normal topics of conversation, even between people of divergent political views—is no longer uncontroversial. Victims of the hurricanes cannot even commiserate without the threat of political backlash.  

“How did you ride out the hurricane?

“You mean the one you Democrats sent here to destroy us?!”’

Never mind that this government weather machine seemed to batter the Gulf and the Caribbean during Trump’s presidency, and he never bothered to turn it off or order it to stop.

Our foreign adversaries have long viewed the ignorance of U.S. voters as an exploitable weakness. They understand that during crises, Americans historically have come together and stood united, helping each other out wherever we can without regard to political viewpoint. And that is precisely why they have targeted these crises now, to spread rumors about the government seizing lands, bulldozing whole towns and hundreds of bodies in massive cover ups, and apparently now even generating and directing the deadly hurricanes in the first place.

Bad political actors thrive where there is little common factual ground remaining for the public to stand upon. Their goal is to continue until it has all been swept away, the zone flooded from a storm surge of shit, to coin Steve Bannon’s infamous strategy.

And after all, paraphrasing the French writer Voltaire, if they can get them to believe absurdities, they can get them to commit atrocities.

But if there is anything to be gained here, it is this: These lies, by definition, have to grow bigger and more outrageous the closer they get to the heart of our civil society. At some point, a solid majority of the electorate will understand that MAGA extremism is nothing but a torrent of lies, designed to generate fear, mistrust and hate.

Whether it’s Sidney Powell warning bizarrely of Venezuelan communist election software, Trump blathering about immigrants eating the dogs and cats of Springfield, or Marjorie Three Names spouting off about government created and directed hurricanes, the nonstop lies, which grow ever more patently absurd, are forcing many in the GOP to reconsider their loyalty to that party. 

In a close election, it only takes a point or two of defections to deal a deathblow to the GOP’s hopes. There are growing signs that millions of former Republicans are finally deciding to move to higher ground, with many Haley voters deciding in the end not to support Trump.

Whether this political reckoning proves enough or arrives in time remains to be seen.