Hurricane Milton spawns renewed weather modification conspiracy theories
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"Hurricane Milton is targeted geo-engineered storm being used as a weapon," says an October 7, 2024 X post from Stew Peters, a far-right radio host who has previously spread numerous conspiracy theories on various topics, including Hurricane Helene.
Some posts claim Milton, along with the devastating Helene in September, were part of "weather warfare geoengineering" and were "deliberately deployed against red states" likely to vote for Republican Donald Trump in the US presidential election.
Similar allegations about controlling or steering the storms swirled on Instagram, Threads, Facebook, TikTok and X.
Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also amplified similar conspiracy theories about Helene, which decimated large swaths of the southeastern United States. Some falsely attributed the storm to the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), a research project that is regularly the target of misinformation.
After growing into a powerful Category 5 hurricane, Milton made landfall October 9 on the Florida Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm, bringing ferocious winds to communities still reeling from Helene and leaving at least ten people dead and millions without power. Officials issued dozens of tornado warnings as the storm blew through, with several touching down.
Conspiracy theories about weather manipulation typically follow big storms, and the latest claims are similarly false.
"To be absolutely clear: There is no human-made technology capable of generating a storm like Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Milton, and no human-made technology capable of steering such a storm, or determining its path," said Andra Garner, an associate professor of environmental science at Rowan University (archived here), in an October 9 email.
"Any claims about some kind of weather manipulation technology being at play for storms like Helene or Milton are blatant nonsense, and dangerous lies."
Garner noted that "human-caused warming," however, does play a role in allowing storms like Helene and Milton to strengthen quickly over unusually warm ocean waters, "to produce exceptionally large storm surges that are made worse by rising sea levels, and to produce extreme rainfall."
Helene's torrential rain and powerful winds were made about 10 percent more intense due to climate change, according to a recent study from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.
Weather patents, 15-minute cities
Social media users have offered a variety of unrelated evidence to support conspiracy theories of weather modification.
Some suggest Milton was fabricated to "destroy" Tampa and create a "15-minute city."
The urban design concept, which aims to create areas with access to all needs within a short commute, is a common target of conspiracy theories (archived here).
Tampa has studied improving transportation infrastructure to "ensure that every Tampanian lives and works within 15 minutes of a robust, climate-ready public space," according to a city resilience report (archived here). But there is no evidence of plans to destroy neighborhoods.
Other social media users have promoted their claims of hurricane manipulation by pointing to decades-old weather modification patents. AFP debunked a similar narrative in 2022.
A keyword search on Google Patents reveals many of the applications shared online, including some for sound wave and jet plane methods of controlling the weather, were abandoned and never fulfilled (archived here and here).
No technology
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says on its website that while some hurricane modification research was conducted between the 1960s and 1980s, it was later abandoned after proving ineffective (archived here).
Christopher Rozoff, a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (archived here), previously told AFP that while methods such as "cloud seeding" can help increase rain and snow by introducing ice particles to certain clouds, they cannot affect major storms.
"We're talking about minuscule changes, like very small changes from turning a cloud into a little bit of extra precipitation," he said October 7. "When you're talking about something of the scale of a hurricane and the floods that come with that, cloud seeding couldn't possibly account for that."
(AFP / Cléa PÉCULIER, Sophie RAMIS)
Derrick Herndon, a former military meteorologist and a hurricane researcher at the University of Wisconsin (archived here), also told AFP in 2023 that weather modification is not feasible with hurricanes.
"A hurricane is large; it's hundreds of miles across, made up of thousands of thunderstorms," he said. "There's nothing in any technology we have that could modify anything on that scale ... The amount of material you would need is beyond our ability."
Read more of AFP's reporting on hurricane misinformation here.
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