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Hurricane Conspiracy Debunked
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0:00
Hey everyone. As you are aware, I’m no stranger to people falling for lies on the internet. But recently, something has been circulating that is so relentlessly idiotic, and has shockingly gained enough traction that I feel compelled to address it. Let’s talk a little bit about the weather, shall we? As most people are aware, Hurricane Helene ravaged the American southeast a few weeks ago, and then Hurricane Milton did the same very soon after,
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resulting in significant death tolls and absolutely catastrophic destruction of property. These natural disasters are tragedies, and one could argue that the response from Washington has left a lot to be desired. But as much as one can criticize the American government for a great many things, a conspiracy theory has been circulating that the government manufactured these hurricanes as a deliberate attack on those states, presumably for political purposes.
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Here's the sort of thing that’s been circulating on social media. Pushing Helene up the coast with NEXRAD, Doppler, misspelled of course, and HAARP. We will talk about what those are a little later. They cooked this one up. Who is they? The government? Meteorologists? Perhaps those pesky Jews again? Let’s play it safe and blame it on Jewish government meteorologists. Here’s the next one. A hurricane as weather warfare. Yes, not a natural disaster,
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they are pretending it’s a weapon, used by the government on its own people. And if you want to argue with this person, they will bury you in tax dollars. Sure, I’ll take your pile of money, internet weirdo. Surprising absolutely no one, the single dumbest person in the history of American politics, Marjorie Taylor Greene, decided to chime in. Climate change is the new COVID! Well, genius, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID came about in 2019, and we’ve been talking about
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climate change for at least 50 years, so that’s an insanely stupid thing to say even just based on raw chronology. But of course also for many other more important reasons, like the fact that they are both real things, and neither of them are “government-controlled”. But any narrative where politicians can play the victim of the nasty government will be spewed no matter how ridiculous, when we are this close to a general election, so this is
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what’s happening on the internet right now. And as a result of this frenzy, meterologists have been getting actual death threats. Not one of them once, many of them many times. That’s how out of hand this has gotten. Alabama meteorologist James Spann has said that he’s been “inundated” with misinformation and threatening messages like “Stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else.” Other meterologists, as a result of simply posting a hurricane forecast,
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get accused of creating the hurricane personally, and working for the Illuminati. Social media is infested with people calling for actual violence, saying that the people who created hurricane Milton should be killed. Here is one such tweet now, with a desperate meteorologist shouting into the abyss, only to have someone reflect the insanity right back to her as she can barely even finish her sentence. Her frustration here is palpable. Meanwhile other people are busy
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pulling demonstrably false claims right out of their asses. This jerk Stew Peters is pretending that Milton had some unprecedented trajectory that somehow proves it’s man-made. Hurricanes don’t form in the Gulf of Mexico and then hit Florida? Really? This other jerk Grant Cardone is doing the same thing. He’s been watching these since he was a kid! Fabricated anecdotal evidence is so powerful! In reality this is totally commonplace. Hurricanes Mindy, Emily, Debby,
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and many others, all formed in the Gulf and moved due east. There is nothing irregular about this. This data is freely available. These people just assert a blatant falsehood and it gets amplified by people who don’t lift a finger to see if it’s true or not, and then the amplified falsehood becomes more influential than actual facts. This is the post-truth era that we live in. The disinformation has gotten so bad that people are rejecting aid from FEMA, the federal emergency
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management agency, whose only purpose is to aid in the recovery from disasters like Hurricane Milton. Social media posts are instructing those ravaged by the storm to resist aid from FEMA, even in the form of armed militias, going so far as encouraging people to shoot FEMA workers. This is absolutely insane. It’s like having your house go up in flames, reading on social media that the
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fire department actually sprays gasoline on fires so you shouldn’t let them near you with the hose, and then shooting at firemen when they come to save you from your house fire. In light of all this, for the next few minutes we are going to explore how completely idiotic all of these claims are, and we are going to start as simply as possible. What is wind? If you are a person who believes that the government can manufacture hurricanes, but you can’t answer the
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question “What is wind?”, then you need to accept the fact that you have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about, and must therefore listen to me explain to you what wind is. Here we go. The atmosphere is full of molecules. I mean really full of them. There are about 10 trillion trillion molecules in every cubic meter of air. That adds up to about 10 to the 44 molecules in the entire atmosphere. Most of the atmosphere is diatomic molecules like nitrogen and oxygen,
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and the rest is carbon dioxide, monoatomic noble gases, water vapor, and some other stuff. Tiny molecules have such little mass that they float around instead of falling to the ground like big things. But they are still subject to gravity, which is why the atmosphere gets thinner and thinner with elevation. How fast do these molecules move? At room temperature they go around 300 to 400 meters per second, which is around 670 to 890 miles per hour. So pretty fast. In fact,
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everyone should know that temperature is merely a measure of the average kinetic energy of particles in a system, in this case atmospheric particles, so citing the outside temperature is simply a way of expressing how fast atmospheric particles are moving. But this movement is not uniform. Particles are not moving around all orderly in single file. This motion is very chaotic. Solar radiation reaches the Earth and excites atmospheric particles,
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but it does so unevenly, and at different rates depending on the nature of the surface being irradiated, whether water, different types of land, and so forth, which reflect a portion of that energy back up to the air again. And of course the Earth is rotating, so different parts of the Earth are being irradiated by the sun throughout the day, creating a natural heating/cooling cycle. Certain sections of the atmosphere are being warmed moreso
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than others at any given time, and when gases are heated they expand. This creates pressure differentials. Pressure is the force exerted by the particles in a system, and the laws of thermodynamics dictate that particles will move from areas of higher pressure to lower pressure, which essentially just means that particles will spread out. So when hotter air expands and rises, due to its decreased density, cooler denser air will rush in to replace it. That’s wind. Earth’s
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atmosphere is an incredibly chaotic system with an unimaginable number of particles responding to a variety of energy inputs and obeying pressure differentials. Wind will speed up, then slow down due to friction as winds converge near low pressure areas. It’s rather complicated and very difficult to predict, though we’ve gotten better at it over the past few decades. Now that was obviously highly simplified, and any professional meterologist could spend an entire
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week expanding on what I just told you, but that’s the gist of it. Now let’s take those concepts and talk about hurricanes. How do they form? The principles are the same in the sense that it’s just atmospheric particles obeying pressure differentials. Specifically we are talking about warm, moist air over tropical waters at a temperature above 27 degrees Celsius, or about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, as a result of the evaporation of water in those hot areas. This
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hot and humid air will rapidly rise, creating a low pressure area that is filled by surrounding cooler air. In the meanwhile, the hotter air that rose begins to cool and condense into clouds, releasing heat, which warms the surrounding air and reinforces the effect, until a storm begins to form. The rotation of the Earth generates what is called the Coriolis effect or Coriolis force, which causes a deflection in the path of atmospheric particles. The ramification of this
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is that a nascent storm will begin rotating, with the direction of rotation depending on whether the storm is in the northern or southern hemisphere. The magnitude of this Coriolis force is strongest right near the equator, which is why hurricanes only form in tropical zones between 5 and 20 degrees of latitude. These storms grow in intensity, particularly over open ocean, and once winds reach 74 miles per hour, it is referred to as a category one hurricane.
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This scale, the Saffir-Simpson scale, goes up to category five, which would involve winds above 155 miles per hour, implying large scale destruction to any civilized area it touches. So let’s review. Hurricanes form over warm tropical waters, and they form specifically because the water is warm, such that an appreciable amount of it evaporates, and that hot humid air rises, generating pressure differentials and forming clouds, which create a
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storm, and being near the equator, the Coriolis force causes the storm to rotate. In a nutshell, that’s what a hurricane is. To be clear, the word hurricane describes this phenomenon in the region of the Atlantic or Eastern Pacific Oceans. In other parts of the world they are called cyclones or typhoons, but these are all different words describing the same phenomenon. So, now that we know what hurricanes are, the next logical question for our purposes here is:
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How in the hell would any government control this process? And without just blindly shouting “lasers” and leaving it at that, since we now know how hurricanes form. We are talking about hot, humid air over tropical bodies of water. Did the American government put a huge heater at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico? And of course it’s much harder to tackle than that. We aren’t just talking about the generation of a hurricane, but the ability to control and direct it. Remember,
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we are describing quadrillions and quintillions of atmospheric particles simply obeying pressure differentials, and exerting the power of tens of thousands of nuclear bombs. How does one control the behavior of this system, exactly? Specifically. Mechanistically. Can you prod it with a stick and point it to where you want it to go? Can you shout at all the molecules angrily and give them coordinates to attack like a game of Battleship? Of course not.
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It’s air. And these storms are tremendously more powerful than anything we can hope to even lightly influence at our current level of technology, just like we can’t control tidal waves or earthquakes or any other natural disaster. Conspiracy theorists have no ability to describe actual meteorological concepts, so they resort to simply listing random federal programs or technologies that most people are unfamiliar with. Let’s return to that Instagram post. NEXRAD,
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Doppler, and HAARP. What are these things? NEXRAD is next generation weather radar. Same with Doppler, this is describing radar technology. This is equipment for detecting weather and producing information about weather. They watch the weather. They don’t create anything. It is about detecting wind and precipitation, and this data is processed to map the motion and patterns surrounding wind and precipitation. Studying the weather and controlling the weather are not the
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same thing. You can study a tree, it doesn’t mean you can conjure up a tree out of thin air. You can study the stars, it doesn’t mean you can build a star in your garage. Then there is HAARP, or the high-frequency active auroral research program, which studies the ionosphere with radio waves. The ionosphere is a part of the upper atmosphere which is very thin but contains many charged particles. They are charged due to collisions
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with particles from the solar wind. This layer of the atmosphere reflects and modifies radio waves which are used for communication, so we study it. We like to study things. Conspiracy theorists cite the energies involved, which again are for radio waves, the least energetic portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and they are pretty big pulses for an antenna, but they are absolutely nothing compared to even a single flash of lightning, and there are 50 to
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100 of those per second in Earth’s atmosphere. Atmospheric pressure in the ionosphere is less than one millionth of atmospheric pressure on the ground. That’s how sparse it is. It has nothing to do with the weather all the way down here. HAARP does not do anything to the weather, period. In general, vaguely gesturing at scientific equipment and fear-mongering about it is infantile. The idea that the public would be upset about scientists trying to understand geological
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and meterological phenomena is insane. Doppler radar is just pulses of energy reflecting off of things and coming back to a detector for analysis. Being upset about this is like being upset about dolphins using echolocation. Conspiracy theorists will play a numbers game, with the most powerful radar systems sending out pulses with 750,000 watts of electromagnetic energy, and marvel at how
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powerful this is. But is it? The average lightning bolt contains a billion watts of power. That’s a gigawatt, kind of like the jiggawatts that Doc Brown was talking about, but pronounced correctly. So how can a pulse like this be powerful enough to push masses of air around? Beyond the fact that it simply isn’t, the much more difficult question is how you would not only move air, but control its motion. It’s ridiculous enough to pretend that this technology can generate a storm,
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but how is someone supposed to steer this thing? We are talking about atmospheric particles. How are they manipulated on the molecular level? Nobody who pushes these fringe ideas even knows what molecules are, let alone meteorological concepts. Storms such as these are influenced exclusively by large scale pressure differentials in the atmosphere. That’s all there is to it. So to anyone who has been regurgitating misinformation regarding HAARP or other scientific
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endeavors, admit that you are unable to answer this question regarding mechanism is any coherent manner whatsoever. Admit that you’ve been duped and fell for a story that you enjoyed due to anti-establishment bias. End of story. Of course the conspiracy theorist will exclaim that there are plenty of examples of geoengineering. They insist that there are so, so many things we can point to, like cloud seeding, and also so many others that they simply don’t
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have the time to list. In other words, only cloud seeding. What is cloud seeding? Well for context, clouds form when water vapor in the atmosphere cools and consdenses into liquid water or ice crystals. Hot water evaporates, cool water vapor condenses. Basic chemistry. When the condensation is to a degree that only condensation nuclei form, or just very tiny water droplets or ice crystals, they can remain afloat as clouds due to the very low density. Only when the air
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becomes saturated will the water fall back to the ground as precipitation. Once we understood the processes of cloud formation and precipitation, we figured out a way to increase the likelihood that precipitation would occur. Cloud seeding involves releasing small particles into a cloud that can act as seeds for further condensation. Typically these are tiny crystals of silver iodide, an ionic compound. Water molecules can crystallize around these seeds, thus enabling
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the cloud to more rapidly reach the point of saturation where precipitation will occur. Now what does cloud seeding have to do with hurricane formation? Nothing whatsoever. What other examples can conspiracy theorists point to that qualify as weather modification? None whatsoever. Helping a cloud rain is not even remotely related to generating an enormous destructive hurricane. It is absolutely impossible for human beings to control the weather on such a
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large scale, at least with our current level of technological advancement. It’s just too complex and chaotic a system. Conspiracy theorists will of course pretend that such a thing has already been done. Operation Popeye made monsoons during the Vietnam War, they’ll say. No, it didn’t. That was just cloud seeding. We’ve never done anything more sophisticated than cloud seeding in the context of manipulating weather. And yet they will claim otherwise. They’ll
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reference this interview with Michio Kaku on CBS from 2013 where he talks about some experimental tech from a particular research group regarding lasers. We physicists are firing trillion watt lasers into the sky to actually precipitate rain clouds and actually bring down lightning bolts. Kaku is no stranger to offering whatever sensationalist news he has to in order to get interviews, but he is referencing a real thing,
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which again is experimental and as of yet unsuccessful in doing anything significant, like generating rain or lightning. And this is frontier research, so nothing being spoken about here is relevant to the conversation whatsoever. Beyond all of this paranoia, a very important point needs to be made, one which highlights the extreme hypocrisy surrounding this brand of conspiratorial thought. It goes without saying that 100% of the people regurgitating this
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narrative regarding the government controlling the weather are climate change deniers. Despite essentially unanimous agreement among researchers all over the world who study Earth’s climate that man-made climate change is real, they will claim it’s all just a hoax from liberals to curtail some kind of personal freedom or another. The irony of this stance is palpable. These people are proposing that humans are not affecting the overall climate over many decades due to
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industrial emissions, because we simply don’t have the ability to influence climate in that manner, yet we can manipulate the weather in ways that are so profound that we can conjure up a hurricane out of nothing and tell it where to go. It’s like, pick a fucking lane. Can we manipulate the climate or not? This is exactly the same as young earth creationists who pretend that gradual evolution over millions of years is impossible, but cartoonish ultra-rapid evolution
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of the handful of kinds that stepped off of Noah’s ark to produce the millions of species we have today can occur in a few centuries. Both groups are denying well-understood gradual processes and baselessly affirming nearly instantaneous magical versions of those very same concepts. The ultimate irony, of course, lies in the fact that man-made climate change is actually contributing to the greater frequency and severity of hurricanes,
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as well as wildfires and so many other disasters. We know this for a fact. As we stated, hurricanes occur due to warm oceans. Global warming exacerbates this, since a warmer atmosphere causes even more evaporation. More rapid melting of polar ice caps causes sea level rise, which in turn can increase the damage caused by coastal storms due to intensified storm surges. This warming can also cause tropical storms to occur at latitudes slightly farther from
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the equator than was previously feasible, therefore allowing storms to retain their severity for longer in their trajectory. And indeed, dangerous storms are becoming more common. Highly damaging hurricanes are three times more frequent now than they were 100 years ago, and twice as frequent since only 1980. Storms with Milton’s wind speeds are 40% more frequent, and these types of storms are about 5 meters per second more intense due to
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1.3 degrees Celsius of global warming. Elevated sea levels and increased sea surface temperatures. That’s why this is happening. The data is crystal clear. Small changes in temperature result in a significant amount of additional ocean water evaporation, ice cap melting, disruption of ocean currents, sea level rise, and so many other things that have catastrophic effects. Climate change is intensifying hurricanes. There is no doubt about this.
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While the science is clear as day, the general public remains unconvinced. Carefully crafted propaganda continues to polarize people against basic scientific principles and irrefutable facts. What will it take for these people to snap out of it? At some point in the decades to come, coastal cities will start to become partially submerged due to continually rising sea levels. It’s going to happen. Will that snap people out of it? What about the increasing frequency and
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severity of these storms, wildfires, and other disasters? Will that snap people out of it? Or will people just continue to double, triple, and quadruple down on idiotic conspiracy theories at every turn. Liberals are using aborted fetuses to make wizard cloaks for trans babies with magical hurricane powers! There is absolutely nothing on the internet that surprises me anymore. Things that would have been ridiculed as fringe and outlandish 30 years ago are now immediately
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and blindly accepted by millions of people as self-evident truths without asking for so much as a crumb of evidence. Anyone saying that the government can make hurricanes should be laughed at. It’s objectively a dumb thing to say. And yet people like this are growing in both number and volume. Pundits and politicians nurture these delusions for financial and political gain, and clickbait media is crafted to corroborate these false narratives.
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For the love of all that is holy, for the sake of the republic, for the sake of the human species, everyone please stop being so gullible. Stop being so credulous. Exercise a modicum of skepticism. When you read something on the internet, and in particular if it triggers your identity-affirming pleasure centers, stop and think. HOW DO I KNOW THIS IS TRUE? When someone tells you, hey look at the trajectory of this hurricane, it’s unprecedented! No major storm has ever done
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this before! Do not just blindly accept it. At the absolute least, google it. See what turns up. If you receive contradictory information, look at it. Consider it. Use critical thinking skills. Even if you don’t make a firm decision as to which source to trust, you can at least suspend your credulity and remain neutral. If we do not gain this skill as a species, I fear for our immediate future. We
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are not nature’s masters. We are its stewards. With the intellect we’ve evolved comes the responsibility of exercising wisdom and taking our fate into our own hands. In light of this, we need a complete sea change in the way people interface with information, and reality in general, or we will not see the 22nd century. Our current path is one of self-annihilation. And we probably deserve it. But I’m holding out for something better. Sorry to get dark on you at the end there,
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but it’s difficult to process this situation any other way. The government is not creating hurricanes. That you don’t like the government is not enough to make it possible for them to create hurricanes. Please tell your friends, and I’ll see you next time.
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