Fact check: Can the government control the weather?
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene last month has reportedly cost more than 230 lives and over $47 billion in property loss. As Florida braces for Hurricane Milton — expected to be similarly ravaging — many social media users are suggesting the government may be controlling the weather.
“Yes they can control the weather,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Sunday. “Here is Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan talking about it. 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.”
Greene posted a video of a 2016 talk by then-CIA Director John Brennan at the Council on Foreign Relations during which he discussed weather modification, referred to as geoengineering. Brennan said he is particularly interested in stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), a method in which sulfates are shot into the atmosphere to reflect solar radiation back into space.
Nevertheless, mainstream media outlets have been insisting that geoengineering is a conspiracy theory and that the government cannot control the weather.
US Air Force whistleblower: ‘It’s very real’
Kristen Meghan spent nine years in the US Air Force working out of Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma. As her job was in bio-environmental engineering, she was tasked with overseeing chemicals that came onto the base. She had heard talk of the government modifying the weather but dismissed it as a conspiracy theory.
In 2008, Meghan noticed she was signing off on hazardous chemicals that were coming in from an unlisted contractor. She decided to conduct her own investigation using her experience as an industrial hygienist and environmental specialist. She has been blowing the whistle on geoengineering ever since.
“I realized [the geoengineering] was actually coming right out of my office as I was one of the people that was approving the chemicals,” she said in an interview.
“And it really shook the core of my oath, and I did a lot of sampling to a lot of investigation, and I blew the whistle and I got out. And I've now used my credentials, my oath, and my powers for good to help people understand it's very real. It's now openly admitted. There are multiple forms of weather modification.”
A video of the above interview was removed by YouTube.
Cloud seeding
Cloud seeding is a form of geoengineering in which pilots spray silver iodide into clouds to stimulate more severe rains or even snowfall. Water vapor freezes around the chemicals, eventually falling to the ground in the form of rain or snow. Salt crystals such as calcium chloride are used in warmer clouds.
Texas, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, New Mexico, California and Mexico all currently have cloud seeding programs underway, according to the Wall Street Journal. An experiment conducted in Idaho found that cloud seeding was able to elicit 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools more snow than usual.
Department of Defense aims to ‘own the weather’ by 2025
In 1996, the Department of Defense produced a report titled “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” in which researchers detailed how the Air Force could manipulate the weather by 2025. This included increasing rain to muddy an enemy’s terrain or reducing precipitation to allow for drier ground and easier troop mobility. It also involved “fog seeding” in which the military would be able to create fog.
Another weather modification technique proposed in the paper is creating storms by increasing latent heat release in the atmosphere and providing additional water vapor for cloud cell development.
The paper says an artificial ionosphere can be created through the “injection of chemical vapors and heating or charging via electromagnetic radiation or particle beams (such as ions, neutral particles, x-rays, MeV particles and energetic electrons).”
The report’s authors note that “many techniques to modify the upper atmosphere have been successfully demonstrated experimentally.”
Solar geoengineering
Globalists have been researching ways to change the Earth’s temperature by reducing the Sun’s rays, a method called solar geoengineering. The United States and European governments, along with organizations like the World Economic Forum (WEF), have been exploring strategies like solar radiation modification (SRM), which involves planes shooting aerosols into the atmosphere to divert the Sun’s rays.
Like former CIA Director Brennan, the WEF has also recommended stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI).
Last year, UNESCO held a symposium to discuss the impact of geoengineering methods such as carbon dioxide removal and SRM techniques.
Attempts to experiment with solar engineering have been forging ahead with the backing of wealthy financiers. Those include the Pritzker family, which owns the Hyatt Hotels Corporation and remains one of America’s top ten richest families.
The Pritzker fortune heavily funds Leftist causes such as gender ideology and the climate agenda. The Pritzker Innovation Fund was one of the sponsors of a recently canceled solar engineering experiment in Alameda, California. The experiment, planned by University of Washington researchers, aimed to alter clouds by spraying aerosols from an aircraft carrier in the San Francisco Bay.
Local officials shut down the experiment 20 minutes in, in part due to concerns about weather interruptions and “unintended consequences.” They have since rejected a request from the University of Washington to restart the study, according to Politico.
A similar experiment led by Harvard University researchers was also recently shut down in Sweden.
Geoengineering in warfare
According to the BBC, chemical warfare experiments have been carried out by spraying the atmosphere:
In the 1950s and 1960s, decades before the conspiracy theories were born, much of Britain was sprayed with airborne chemicals in a series of secret germ warfare tests. And in 1950, San Francisco was sprayed with a chemical agent from a ship to gauge the effects of a bioweapon attack on a populated area.
In September 2013, CBS ran a segment on weather modification. Michio Kaku, a physics professor and network contributor, told host Norah O’Donnell that the CIA used cloud seeding during the Vietnam War to manufacture monsoons “to wash out the Viet Cong.” Kaku was on the show to discuss how physicists were experimenting with lasers to cause storms.
O’Donnell herself recalled learning that China has used geoengineering, as did the USSR after the Chernobyl disaster, to create rain clouds.
Blocking the Sun
Another method of solar geoengineering is using balloons or umbrellas to block the Sun’s rays. In February, a group of scientists from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology said they may have discovered how.
Dr. Yoram Rozen, director of the university's Asher Space Research Institute, told the New York Times that a number of smaller solar shields may be used to block the Sun, thereby diffusing sunlight and "shading" the Earth.
Rozen and his team are creating a 100-foot prototype, which will cost between $10 and $20 million to construct. After they get the required funds, they can build one in three years. Trillions of dollars would be needed to construct the necessary number of shades, a cost Rozen plans to share among various nations.
White House: Climate requires human sacrifice
But even if the Sun is successfully blocked, the New York Times pointed out that this would not free humanity from making significant sacrifices in the name of climate change. All fossil fuels, including coal, gas, and oil, would still need to be eliminated according to climate activists. In fact, due to "excessive heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," people would still need to make lifestyle sacrifices even if climate change were resolved and global warming were stopped in its tracks, they say.
In a 44-page report last year, the White House acknowledged the dangers that would come from blotting out the sun, such as a decline in human health and disrupted food supplies. The government added, however, that those dangers must be weighed against the claimed hazards of climate change.
Fact check: True
Geoengineering is practiced by governments, NGOs, and scientists. It has also been openly discussed and acknowledged by mainstream media until recently. The claim that governments can control the weather is therefore true.
