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| Marjorie Taylor Greene, ever the enthusiastic purveyor of conspiracy theories, held quite a recent Congressional hearing on weather modification. We give the play by play. |
Her latest was leading a House hearing on weather modification, or more precisely, weird weather conspiracy theories.
Greene is seeking a federal ban on geoengineering and weather modification. She's among those who appear to think like horrible disasters like Hurricane Helene were not regular events or climate change-driven calamities, but some insidious government plot.
Hence here hearing earlier this month. She announced:
"Today's advocates of geoengineering don't just want to address droughts or improve conditions for agriculture......They want to control the Earth's climate to address the fake climate change hoax to head off global warming. That of course, requires massive interventions."
Of course, pretty much every scientist will tell you climate change is not "fake" or a "hoax" and is the real problem behind many of the weird weather extremes the world has been experiencing. But to Greene's mind, we need to stop making sense, to take a page from an old Talking Heads album and concert movies.
As ABC notes, there have been no efforts to modify the climate on a global scale, mostly because there's no technology to make that possible.
Then we get into the "science" part of the hearing. And I use that term "science: more loosely than I ever have before. Greene gave us this dire warning:
"One (intervention) is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Yes, the same carbon dioxide that keeps plants alive and prevents mass starvation."
Of course the problem isn't that there's carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's just that humanity has pumped too much of it into the air. The whole burning fossil fuel thing. There are no mad scientists out there bent on removing all the carbon dioxide from the air to kill us all.
There's been some tentative efforts to research efforts that would remove some of the CO2 from the air, but that hasn't really been effective at all yet.
"Another method they want to use it to block the rays of the sun from hitting the Earth. You heard that right. Yes, the same sun that makes all life possible on Earth."
Sigh, again, there are no mad scientist trying to block all sunlight and kill us all. As always with these whackadoodle statements, if you dig deep enough you find the tiniest kernel of truth amid the word salad.
The idea of using technologies to reflect a portion of sunlight back into space to lower temperatures around the world has been around for decades. But there has been almost no real-world experiments with this.
The Biden White House in 2023 produced a paper on this idea, known as solar radiation modification, but it was a general research roadmap which has so far gone nowhere to speak of.
No Marjorie Taylor Green hearing would be complete without her and like minded minions bringing up chemtrails. Repeatedly. Sigh.
Chemtrails are fictional sprays coming out of aircraft, dreamed up by conspiracy theorists. There's plenty of those theories, including ideas that the government is trying to poison the populace or do mind control on everybody or some bizarre thing,
What all these people think are chemtrails is just water vapor from the exhaust of jet engines.
You know all that steam you see coming out of car tailpipes on frigid winter mornings? It's basically the same thing coming out of planes. Except often that water freezes and forms white streaks in the sky. They're just high level clouds.
But wispy clouds are boring. Coming up with wild stories about covert government operations spraying us all into oblivion is much more sexy.
Some of Greene's cohorts came up with some wild bits of "information" which were, well, dubious to put it extremely politely. Rep. Brian Jack, R-GA claimed a release of dry ice into a 1947 hurricane steered the storm into Georgia.
It's true that the government released dry ice into a 1947 hurricane as an experiment. It's also true the storm made a hard left turn and came ashore near Savannah, Georgia. But the reason it did so was not the dry ice. It was steering currents in the atmosphere that would have been there with or without the dry ice.
Besides, that hurricane started its westward turn before planes dumped anything into the storm.
Also, experiments in the era also showed that dumping dry ice, or the more modern silver iodide used in clouds seeding failed to change the strength of hurricanes. They're much too powerful to succumb to human intervention, at least so far.
Another one, Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, said that Al Gore's estimation of when the polar ice cap was wrong, so therefore basically all climate science was wrong.
In reality, there's an alleged quote by Gore from 2009 that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013, which of course has not happened.
Gore did not actually say that, but he did at the time accidentally misrepresented data when he suggest some models gave a 75 percent chance the Arctic would be ice-free in the summertime by 2014 to 2019. That's not exactly what researchers said, as they generally weren't giving a timeline as to when that would happen.
But, apparently, if one person - Gore - got his facts mixed up on one aspect of climate change, then the whole idea of climate change is apparently false.
Melanie Stansbury, D-NM, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee that held the hearing, did come up with one gem that I would rate as absolutely factually true.
She said: "There's a more insidious issue here, which I think we've already heard in some of the comments, which is using the platform of Congress to propel anti-science theories to platform climate denialism and to ultimately put our communities at risk by continuing to put out disinformation."
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