Can Humans Direct The Weather? Ask Marjorie Taylor Greene

The United States elects to its Congress a wide range of individuals with some bringing weird notions to the halls of government. One of these is Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene or MTG from the State of Georgia. She recently stated that Hurricane Helene which dumped massive amounts of rain on a path from Florida’s Gulf Coast through the states of Georgia and North Carolina was being controlled by “they,” meaning the Democratic Party or the Jews.

MTG posted a map showing the path of Hurricane Helene overlying Republican-dominated electoral districts. She told the press and followers on X, the social media site owned by Elon Musk, ” They control the weather” and that “anyone who says they don’t or makes fun of this, is lying to you. By the way, the people know it and hate all of you who try to cover it up.” How Hurricane Helene could be controlled and directed to follow such a precise path was not explained by the Congresswoman.

This wasn’t MTG’s first go at finding conspiracies behind natural events. In 2018 she stated that wildfire outbreaks in California were caused by Jewish space lasers. Her conspiracy theory involved a former California governor, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), and Rothschilds, Inc., a Jewish-founded company. She stated that they might have been behind blue beams of light seen near wildfire outbreaks in the Democratic-dominated state. The blue beams were the space lasers.

On both counts, was MTG out of her mind? I’ll leave you to pass judgment on whether a religion or political party can control a hurricane or unleash a forest fire. My conclusion is her conspiracy theories about weather and wildfires are whacky but that there is both a history and present human attempts to do some of what she claims is real.

Humans modifying the weather has proven to be tough. To do it on a small scale like the guy firing a cannon in the illustration that tops this posting has been tried. On the scale that MTG talks about, however, our present-day technology cannot accomplish such weather manipulation feats.

Today, humans continue to attempt to alter the weather. One method is cloud seeding, designed to induce rain in drought-prone areas, or as in the case of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, to remove air pollution by causing rain. Seeding clouds involves spraying them with silver iodide. Other weather-controlling substances include spraying dry ice to dissipate heavy fog. Other than these two and aerosol spraying in the high atmosphere, it pretty much exhausts our current bag of human weather tricks.

Back in the 1960s, however, there was a project called Stormfury, designed as an attempt to modify hurricanes. It lasted from 1962 to 1983. The theory behind it was based on a hypothesis that by seeding the eyewall of a hurricane we could alter convection currents inside the storm and change the angular momentum of the wind to decrease its speed. It was thought that reducing the wind velocity by 10% could weaken hurricanes. Four attempts were made with mixed results. In some, wind velocities were cut by between 10 and 30%. In others, there was no observable impact. The project concluded that observed variables had more to do with our lack of understanding of how hurricanes work than with what was recorded.

We do have some technology tools to help us with hurricanes today. AI-assisted weather modelling and advances in weather radar systems may not be able to modify the behaviour of a hurricane, but these do help us predict intensity and path. Even so, when Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida last week, we got the path slightly wrong which turned out to be fortunate for the Tampa Bay area even though the damage inflicted was significant. Helene’s predicted path was spot on but the rainfall amounts over the Asheville area of North Carolina were not.

What MTG has missed in her “conspiracy to commit weather” nonsense was just how much humans are contributing to the weather in the 21st century and the frequency of extreme events. If there is a conspiracy it isn’t coming from Jews and Democrats, but rather from polluters who continue to pump tens of billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere every year.

We have been part of an ongoing human-generated weather-altering experiment on this planet since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. We have infected it through our technological progress, the ever-increasing demand for energy, and our treating of air, water and land as garbage dumps.

If Earth were a living being we would describe our impact as an infection that first began mildly 150 years ago and that continues to get worse. The 1 billion of us who lived on the planet at the beginning of the 20th century now number over 8.5 billion and are heading to 10 billion by mid-century. We have become Earth’s virus and the fever the planet has caught is global warming. The hives Earth is breaking out in are hurricanes, tornadoes, and other severe weather events. The long-term symptoms include megadroughts, polar and alpine ice melts, and sea level rise.

Could MTG have drawn her inspiration about weather conspiracies from science fiction writers who have described controlling the weather in novels? Here are just a few of the apocalyptic tales I have read:

• In 1934, Francis Beeding, a pseudonym for two authors, John Leslie Palmer and Hilary St George Saunders, collaboratively wrote “The One Sane Man,” a novel about manipulating the weather to control politicians.
• J.G. Ballard’s 1962 novel, “The Drowned World,” described Earth in 2145 where attempts to stop climate change through weather manipulation produce unintended consequences.
• Ben Bova’s 1967 novel, “The Weathermakers” looks at the geopolitics of manipulating weather.
• More recently, Neal Stephenson’s, 2021 novel, “Termination Shock” describes a solar geoengineering experiment that runs amok.

Real weather manipulation attempts are happening today. In Dubai, lasers, not the Rothschild kind, have been fired from drones to try and induce rainfall. Meanwhile, a few scientists have attempted small-scale aerosol seeding of the stratosphere to deflect sunlight to lower atmospheric and surface land temperatures.

On Bill Maher’s “Real Time” television show last Friday, in talking about MTG’s accusations, suggested that voting for the political party that controls the weather would be smart to stay on its good side. Of course, Maher was referring to the Democrats.