NOAA Fact Check Dishearteningly Necessary, Not That Millions Of Wackos Would Believe Actual Facts, Science

NOAA launched a web page meant to debunk lots of
wild conspiracy theories about the weather. 
Great effort, but large portions of the population
chose to believe things that defy basic physics. 

 With all the deeply crazy conspiracy theories about the weather that an alarmingly large number of people believe, NOAA recently had to post a page on its web site debunking the whacko ideas out there.  

The NOAA debunking info is a  mindnumbingly Captain Obvious web page, but I don't blame them. We live in an idiocracy, a society increasingly controlled by stupid people. Or at least willfully ignorant ones. 

I don't know if NOAA's conspiracy debunking page will do much good, because people cling to their out there ideas like their life depended on it. Never mind if what they think is going on defies basic laws of physics. 

 For the record, here's some facts that NOAA provides. The meteorologists there tell us they can't control or steer hurricanes. They don't do cloud seeding, though some private companies do that to produce a little rain in highly local areas.

Also, have you ever seen NOAA Doppler radar installations? They look like a giant white snowball atop a radio tower. This now very commonly used radar is really good at peering inside storms, helping in many ways.  One great example is how Doppler radar finds shifting winds inside a severe thunderstorm to determine whether a tornado is forming so meteorologists can warn us if they do find something suspicious. 

But nope! NOAA has to try and debunk all those who are saying those Doppler radar towers are somehow steering hurricanes and targeting specific communities. As if some random National Weather Service meteorologist decided they had a bad vacation experience in Fort Myers and decided to smite the city with a hurricane as revenge. 

NOAA also sees fit to debunk something called HAARP.  This one is an old classic.

The conspiracy theory behind HAARP has been going for years now. It's supposedly the mechanism in which the evil government controls the weather, or sprays us with mind control chemicals or ensures child trafficking can go on, or gawd knows what else.

Sigh. 

There actually is such a thing as HAARP.  It's a small little National Science Foundation-funded research center in remote Gakona, Alaska that is focusing on the ionosphere, which is 30 to 600 miles above the Earth's surface - and above the Earth's weather.  HAARP is basically a large radio transmitter. 

REACTION

NOAA posted on X a link to their conspiracy debunking page and as you can imagine, the comments on the post were depressing as hell.

I still can't get over how people create entire new realities from thin air. 

There's a ton of breathless responses about how "they" are controlling the weather and NOAA is lying. As if they're some top secret organization that's somehow mustering the energy of 10,000 atomic bombs to steer hurricanes into the United States without a bunch of people noticing it.  

Somehow, a Hurricane Helene or a Hurricane Milton is "proof" of some grand conspiracy, rather than hurricanes just following the laws of physics, like they always do. 

Many of the conspiracy comments conflate cloud seeding, which as I previously noted can produce some rain in very local areas, to this Huge Project to flood out vast sections of the United States. Or something. It's never clear what these conspiracy theorists are getting at. 

I also hardly see any of these people explain why they think the government is steering storms and just making life miserable on purpose. 

Sales of tin hats these days must be at record high levels. 

Other people posted photos of jet contrails and cirrus clouds as somehow "proof" of weather modification. Normal people just note that the photos are just standard issue clouds that you see them all the time.

One response to NOAA on X showed time stamped videos showing how NOAA or the U.S. government "controls" the weather. The videos start at around 7:30 in the morning show a few jet contrails and cirrus clouds. As the morning goes on in this video series, the clouds gradually lower and thicken, until by 2 p.m. it looks like it's going to rain.

You can't get it through this person's head that what they documented was the approach of some type of weather system, probably a run-of-the-mill warm front. 

This same person posted dozens and dozens of photos of various clouds "showing" government weather control. Literally all of the photos show the type of clouds we've all seen hundreds of times in the sky. By the way, the jet contrails she keeps showing consist of either water vapor or more likely ice crystals. 

It all goes on and on. 

What's completely ignored in these theories is that humans are actually controlling the weather in one way. At least sort of.

It's called climate change.  Which of obviously not something that people are directing at any one group. But it is affecting all of us. 

There is plenty of evidence that because of human-caused  climate change, storms are in general getting worse, precipitation is getting heavier in some storms and record heat waves have gotten much more common place. Hell, just this week, dozens if not hundreds of record high temperatures across the United States. 

I've actually got a conspiracy theory of my own.  

The people who make up and embrace these crazy notions of weather control understand they - fairly or not - lead an unremarkable life that maybe is to them a little boring. Not to say my life is a James Bond style thrill every second of my existence. I'm definitely nothing special. But I like to live in reality, thank you. Or at least look for reliable evidence if somebody throws a theory or "fact" out there. 

I wonder if some of these conspiracy theories with pedestrian lives imagine placing  themselves in a made up bad TV drama about some mad scientist bent on destroying the world through weather modification, atmospheric mind control, whatever they come up with. 

Maybe they picture themselves as real-life Columbus or Matlocks, you know the underestimated character who figures out what is really going on and brings the villains to justice. 

All this is encouraged by people - supposed leaders - who are actually trying to gain control.  Many of the people feeding the conspiracy theory this steady diet of nonsense have their own aims. Not to control the weather, they know they can't do that. 

But feeding the conspiracy beast earns them money, power, status, autocracy in some cases  

And people are falling for these distractions hook, line and sinker.