How "The Government" controls the weather — according to one insane Congressperson

She is calling Hurricane Helene a false flag attack.

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A bit of what Hurricane Helene wrought. ☹️

And of course you already knew who I was talking about, Marjorie Taylor Greene, crazy person extraordinaire, whose only qualification for serving in Congress is being an extreme conspiracy theorist. Here is what she tweeted out after over 200 people were killed in Hurricane Helene and hundreds more remain missing:

You already knew she was nuts — but did you know she was this nuts?

In essence, she’s calling it a False Flag attack, not unlike what Alex Jones did with the Sandy Hook school shooting — an accusation that cost him a $1.5 billion settlement. Smart example to follow, Marge.

(If you feel she was talking about something else, no. In context with the rest of her tweets, she is explicitly claiming Democrats can control the weather, and that’s what caused Hurricane Helene.)

It only takes 5 minutes of serious Googling to learn that there is no technology capable of controlling the weather — but since Marge’s only trusted source of information appears to be YouTube conspiracy videos made by people even dumber than she is, we can understand why she believes this.

In case there are any people out there rational enough to be open to factual information, and wondering if what she says is true, I’ve put together a few points.

• How would we power our Evil Weather Machine? The amount of energy released in a hurricane averages 52 petajoules per day. The world’s largest power generation station, the Three Gorges Dam in China, has a maximum generating capacity of 1.9 petajoules per day. That’s not going to do it, is it? Let’s take the most powerful thing we can engineer: a nuclear bomb, and pretend that we could magically capture all the energy it releases to power our Evil Weather Machine. A 1 megaton bomb releases releases 4.2 petajoules in a few seconds. So we would need to detonate one about every two hours to match the power output of a hurricane. Seems like designing and powering a machine that could generate a hurricane might be a little harder than we thought. But Marge dismisses this math as “ridiculous” so I guess we need more reasons.

• Why haven’t there been any whistleblowers? The notion that we have the technology to create hurricanes at will means that a lot of people were involved in designing, building, and even deploying it, for a long time. Why has there never been a whistleblower? We have math for this — see “On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs” published in PLoS One — and it’s essentially statistically impossible for the Evil Weather Machine to have been kept a secret.

• Why has nobody used this in warfare? Shoot, if we could crank up this machine and have it fight our wars for us without having to deploy a single troop or weapon, we’d be using it all the time. Why do you think we haven’t? Because it cannot exist.

• Why haven’t we used our Evil Weather Machine to stop hurricanes? Marge’s subsequent tweets indicated that she believed the Evil Weather Machine was targeted to devastate regions where there are a lot of Republican voters, in some kind of cockamamied scheme to make it too difficult for them to get to the polls, and to flip those states Democratic in the upcoming election. Right. But wouldn’t we also use it for good? Like, to prevent Hurricane Katrina which killed 1,836 people in 2005. Of course we would. Why didn’t we? Because it cannot exist.

• Is she thinking of cloud seeding? Cloud seeding does not produce significant results, and never has — at best it can condense a small amount of moisture out of the air today at the expense of whatever rain might have fallen naturally. I had to debunk this a few months ago when conspiracy theorists like Marge decided UAE’s quixotic cloud seeding program cause the torrential rains and flooding. See my piece on that here which covers why cloud seeding doesn’t do anything and why so many people believe it does.

• Is she thinking of HAARP? HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Alaska and operated by the University of Alaska, transmits radio frequency up into the ionosphere, which can weakly excite charged particles and is useful for a variety of atmospheric experiments. Conspiracy theorists have long believed HAARP can be used for mind control, to create targeted earthquakes, and to create hurricanes like Helene. I did a full Skeptoid episode on it some time ago if you want to learn more. But here’s the only thing that matters: radio can only interact with charged particles which are found in the ionosphere. Hurricanes are formed in the troposphere (and to a lesser degree the stratosphere), like all weather; and with which HAARP physically cannot interact. Also HAARP can only affect a tiny patch of the ionosphere directly above it; Helene was nowhere near Alaska.

So, yeah. The entire conspiracy theory is — to borrow Marge’s term — ridiculous.