WLRN Public Media | By Jeff Cercone | PolitiFact
PublishedOctober 10, 2024 at 11:00 AM EDT
WLRN has partnered with PolitiFact to fact-check Florida politicians. The Pulitzer Prize-winning team seeks to present the true facts, unaffected by agenda or biases.
Amid the deluge of misinformation about Hurricanes Helene and Milton is this persistent claim: Someone (perhaps the government!) is controlling the weather and intentionally steering storms to hit somewhere.
An Oct. 6 Facebook post said Hurricane Milton, which made landfall onFlorida’s southwest coast the night of Oct. 9, was "created" and aimed at the state.
"They Create Hurricanes via cloud seeding, electro magnetic pulses then radiate and ionize them so they can intensify them and direct them where they want the Hurricane to go!" the post’s caption said.
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Claims that unknown figures, often governments, can somehow create and control the weather are not new. We debunked such claims after a deadly Turkey earthquake in 2023, after Hurricane Ian hit Florida in 2022 and after a Texas winter storm in 2021.
There are real weather modification programs, the most common of which is cloud seeding — a technique to increase rainfall or snow in drought-stricken regions by shooting silver iodide into clouds. But none can create or control a hurricane; such technology doesn’t exist, officials and experts say.
Helene left a trail of destruction in the southwest U.S. after landing in Florida Sept. 26 and Milton formed Oct. 5 in the Gulf of Mexico, quickly intensifying into a powerful hurricane.
Again, claims of shady forces geoengineering and controlling the storms surfaced, even among members of Congress, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posting on X, "yes they can control the weather." President Joe Biden on Oct. 9 called Greene’s comments "beyond ridiculous."
PolitiFact debunked several of those claims, including that "Hurricane Helene was the product of intentional weather modification" (it wasn’t), and that Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant proved Helene was created using cloud seeding (again, it wasn’t).
U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., took an opposite approach to Greene, releasing an Oct. 8 press release to debunk Hurricane Helene myths. In it, he said Charles Konrad, NOAA’s director of its Southeast Regional Climate Center, said "no one has the technology or ability to geoengineer a hurricane," nor to manipulate them.
Monica Allen, a public affairs director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Research division told PolitiFact on Oct. 8 for a previous article that hurricanes, including Helene and Milton, form on their own.
The "NOAA confirms that there are no weather modification activities that could have resulted in Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Milton," Allen said.
From 1962 through 1983, the NOAA unsuccessfully tried using cloud seeding in hurricanes — to reduce their intensity, not to create them — in Project Stormfury. The NOAA has not pursued weather modification since that program ended after mixed results, Allen said.
"There is no known way to geoengineer a hurricane," Mark Bourassa, meteorology professor at the Florida State University Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies, told PolitiFact. "Hurricanes are huge and would require enormous rates of energy input (e.g., atomic bombs won't bother them much) to form. If we could geoengineer a hurricane then there would be a lot of other weather that would be dealt with — which isn't happening."
A Facebook post’s claim that Hurricane Milton was created using cloud seeding and steered toward Florida describes something that’s technologically impossible, weather experts said. The claim is Pants on Fire!
Our Sources
- Facebook post, Oct. 6, 2024
- The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Hurricane modification?, accessed Oct. 9, 2024
- The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Project Stormfury, accessed Oct. 9, 2024
- DRI, Cloud seeding program, accessed Oct. 9, 2024
- NBC News, Biden shoots down Marjorie Taylor Greene's 'beyond ridiculous' conspiracy theory about controlling the weather, Oct. 9, 2024
- Rep. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., Debunking Helene Response Myths, Oct. 8, 2024
- PolitiFact, Hurricane Helene was not artificially created, despite what Alexa says, Oct. 8, 2024
- PolitiFact, Hurricane Helene was not a product of weather modification. That’s Pants on Fire!, Sept. 27, 2024
- PolitiFact, Video doesn’t prove Hurricane Milton was geoengineered. It’s from 2021 , Oct. 8, 2024
- PolitiFact, Hurricane Ian was a natural disaster, not a political conspiracy to devastate Floridians, Sept. 30, 2022
- PolitiFact, Biden did not plan winter storm as ‘an attack on Texas’, Feb. 16, 2021
- PolitiFact, Turkey-Syria earthquakes were natural disasters, not geoengineered, Feb. 15, 2023
