Two Memphis City Councilors, And A Scary Number Of Other People Say Storm Dropped "Man-Made" Snow

The black stuff left on snow then
trying to melt it with a lighter is
just partly combusted material from the
lighter, not some nefarious plot
in the snow. Despite this fact, 
conspiracy theorists falsely
insist there is something "wrong"
with innocent snow and sleet. 

We've just gotten two big snow and ice storms in the southern United States in a little over a week. 

Which you'd think is bad enough. 

Now we have a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork, including two Memphis City Councilors, telling us all that snow and sleet and ice was fake. Man made for some damn reason none of these nutcases are clear about. 

Our city councilors from Memphis are Pearl Walker and Yolanda Cooper Sutton who took to social media to explain to us the storms weren't meteorology. They were apparently.... oh, who knows what.  

 As memphisflyer.com tells us :

"Cooper Sutton posted a video showing who she says is her husband attempting to melt a chunk of ice with a light. 'It's not melting  (it stinks) the you set fire to it OMG, Jesus Christ what is happening!!!"

The video is a slo-mo showing flame licking snow blue no water drips. Cooper Sutton says "This is not melting" she said. "What is falling from the sky hitting the ground?"

Her colleague on the City Council, Walker, responded to Cooper Sutton's post with the words "Man Made"

OK, I'll take off their tin hats and put on my Captain Obvious hat and explain it.. 

I wasn't there for their little science experiment, but I imagine the smell came from the butane lighter they were using.   There's not much water in a handful of snow, so not much water would drip from it. What little was there probably soaked into the tiny air spaces within the piece of snow. There's a lot of air in there, even if it's hard packed snow.  

Anyway, our friendly Memphis councilors got blow back immediately. 

A local activist named Hunter Demster decided to wade into the social media thread with this reasonable comment: "(Disheartening) to see several sitting Memphis City Council members literally pushing conspiracy theories about 'man made' sow," Demster wrote on Facebook. "Sigh......We are screwed as a species."

That just encouraged more people to double down on the conspiracy, and other to deride it. 

Cooper-Sutton later told WREG she meant her social media statements as light-hearted posts shared with family and friends. She went on to say how much she's done for the community and that she was getting death threats for questioning whether the snow was fake.

I'm sure Cooper-Sutton does a lot for Memphis, and anyone who sends out death threats to someone just because they have a very odd false, unscientific is way over the top. Don't do that! Death threats over this are much dumber than thinking the snow was manmade. 

Still, I have a lot of questions for our esteemed city council members.

If that was a manufactured material that resembles snow, who made it? And how did they make so much? Why? If somebody is sending a message by making that stuff, what is the message? Are there any whistleblowers who could help? Documents? Any other kind of proof? If this stuff didn't melt when you brought it in, why is it slowly melting outdoors when the temperature rises above freezing?  

Many people around Memphis said the stuff that fell on the city in late January  felt different to the touch than in most past winter storms. These many people are right. When Memphis does get winter storms, more often than not it's either the powdery snow that blows around, or wet, heavy cement. 

This stuff felt like small, heavy granules. Because they were. Almost everything that came out of the sky during that storm over Memphis was sleet. 

It wasn't just our city councilors. A now-apparently deleted post on the social media site Threads asked "So what chemicals are in that white stuff on the ground that's called SNOW? I have never seen ice or snow that doesn't break or melt in my life. Now if I'm asking a crazy question just let me know."

Well, I wouldn't call the question crazy, but again, it's not chemicals, either. Where this person was probably got a little snow a lot of sleet and a little freezing rain to turn the mess into something I'd call snowcrete.  

Concrete consists of gravel aggregate and a cement-like water slurry that binds it all together. In the case f that big storm, a bunch of sleet became the aggregate and the freezing rain the cement slurry to form the "snowcrete," 

In other words, millions of people experienced was just a big, strange, oddly widespread mixed precipitation storm 

There's also a TON of videos on line of people, like the Memphis City Councilors, putting the flame of a lighter to the snow. It leaves a black mark every time. That wasn't caused by a weird plastic substance in the snow, which the tin hat crowd would have you believe.   It was soot from incomplete combustion of the butane in the lighter. 

This is just little ole me telling the world to relax, there's no conspiracy to create storms of plastic pellets or chemicals to terrorize the public. The only terror was the amount of sleet and freezing rain, composed purely of frozen or freezing water that came out of the sky. Like it does in every winter storm. 

There are so many conspiracy nuts out there, that my little voice won't make a dent in all this. But I have to try anyway.  

Marjorie Taylor Greene's Hearing On "Weather Modification" Goes As You'd Expect

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. 

While the madness of Trump and late night TV and First Amendment violations and other general stupidity was going on, our friend Marjorie Taylor "Jewish Space Lasers" Greene was hard at work. 

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."

 

Whack Job Conspiracy Theories Over Hurricanes Exhausting And Endangering Meteorologists

The nation's sizable tin foil hat brigade is torturing
meteorologists with whackadoodle conspiracy 
theories about hurricanes and government
weather control. People will believe anything, huh?

 The false information and conspiracy theories I wrote about the other day seemed to have spawned even more out-there wacky stories about weather control and more weird stuff.   

Social media has been rife with stories people make up out of thin air that the government, or meteorologist or somebody is creating huge hurricanes and steering them toward the United States for nefarious purposes.

Just in the past few months, it seems the madness got much worse. 

Instead of blaming meteorologists for inaccurate forecasts, it's now apparently their fault if a bad storm hits, because somehow, through dark magic or something, these meteorologists are steering hurricanes toward United States coastlines,. Or they're at least covering up for the government. 

The wackos think meteorologists are attacking us with bad weather, for gawd knows what reason. We've become a nation of idiots. 

Even a sitting U.S. House member, Marjorie Taylor Greene has joined the chorus. though I have to admit she's never been much of a reliable source. 

In any event, Greene, ever the scientist, posted the following gem on X:

"Yes they can control the weather, It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done."

Apparently "they" - who ever "they" are - decided to unleash a flood of epic proportions on a section of the nation that is generally more likely to vote Republican than Democrat.  Apparently evil forces somehow steered two dangerous hurricane over the Southeast to suppress the vote in red counties to boost Kamala Harris. 

I wonder if the people supposedly steering hurricanes like this are the same people responsible for the Jewish Space Lasers?

The conspiracy theories would be hilarious, ore at least eye rolling if they weren't so dangerous.

As The Guardian reports:

"Katie Nickolaou a Michigan-based meteorologist, said she and her colleagues have borne the brunt of much of these conspiracies, having received messages claiming there are category 6 hurricanes (there aren't) and even that scientists should be killed and radar equipment be demolished.

'I've never seen a storm garner so much misinformation, and we have just been putting out fires of wrong information everywhere,' Nickolaou said. 

'I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather.  I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and we can't hope to control that. But it's taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed."

Meteorologist Matthew Cappucci, quoted in Rolling Stone, said he noticed a huge change on social media over the past few months. 

"Seemingly overnight, ideas that once would have been ridiculed as very fringe, outlandish viewpoints are suddenly becoming mainstream, and it's making my job more difficult," he said.

Alabama meteorologist James Spann, with nearly five decades of weather forecasting under his belt, said he's never seen anything like the current climate. Spann told Rolling Stone he's "inundated" with misinformation and threatening messages like "Stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else."

To be Captain Obvious here, both hurricanes Helene and Milton formed the way they did due to atmospheric and ocean water conditions favorable for such storm development.  

Those favorable conditions were not created by humans, unless you quite fairly want to include the influence of human-caused climate change. 

That human induced climate change contributed to the unusually hot water in the Gulf of Mexico, which in turn helped give the twin hurricanes a boost . 

Steering winds in the upper atmosphere steered the hurricanes toward Florida. An unusual but NOT man-made weather pattern pulled Helene up  into North Carolina.  There was no secret cabal of meteorologists steering the storm.  Mostly because humans don't have any ability to steer a hurricane. At all. 

WHY THE CONSPIRACIES?

To go deeper into the rabbit hole, we should probably figure out what conspiracy theorists think is the reason meteorologists and the government are steering hurricanes. 

The leading theory, as mentioned, seems to be forces aligned against Donald Trump are pushing the storms into areas more likely to vote for him rather than Democrat Kamala Harris. 

It is true that Trump seems likely to do better at the ballot box in northwest Florida, and western North Carolina than Harris would. 

But if I go along with their tin foil hat arguments just for fun,  how would you explain why Hurricane Helene blasted through Atlanta, Georgia, a democratic stronghold?. Plus not everyone in Sarasota, Florida or Ashville, North Carolina favors Trump.

Probably most of the conspiracy theories are from people who've gone under the thrall of Trump and QAnon and other dicey sources of so-called information.  These groups instill distrust in all institutions, including science, leading to the rampant conspiracy theories and threats.

Most of the people who originate and spread these kooky ideas probably don't actually believe them.  But misinformation and conspiracies and threats have long been in the authoritarians' playbook. Distract a gullible population with nonsense so they can so their real dirty work.

It's really a divide and conquer strategy, as the Associated Press explains:

"...even when they fail to convince people, the conspiracy theories embraced by these groups contribute to mounting distrust of authorities and democratic institutions, causing people to reject reliable sources of information while encouraging division and suspicion."

Once they do that, the authoritarian types can step in and take power, and by the time we realize we're screwed, it's too late.

The purveyors of the conspiracy theories have already gained more strength in part because of the existence of AI, which can quickly and easily produce convincing content that looks "real" and convincing.

It doesn't help that players like Russia and China and Iran have bot farms that flood social media with conspiracies and lies that a malleable public that lacks critical thinking would readily absorb. Then you have people like Elon Musk, who doesn't seem to give a crap about the stuff that goes on  his platform X, formerly Twitter, as long as it boosts his buddy Donald Trump. 

Birds of a feather flock together, ya know. 

So the meteorologist being tortured by conspiracy whack jobs is just a small part of the big, big problem.

For all of you who live in the real world and not the crazy town of the conspiracy nut jobs, one word of advice: Vote wisely this year.  

Turkish Earthquake Tragedy Brings Cold Weather Risks; Strange Lights, And Weird Conspiracies

A still from a video taken during the giant earthquake
in Turkey earlier this week. That blue in the sky is
a large power flash, as either a transformer or 
transmission line failed during the quake. 

The news, as most of us know, has been gawd awful coming out of Turkey and Syria.

A 7.8 earthquake, and a series of powerful aftershocks has left widespread devastation and thousands of people dead. It's one of the world's worst earthquake disasters in memory. At last count, 11,000 people were thought to have perished. 

An earthquake isn't a meteorological or climate issue, so it's not a topic I usually cover in this blog thingy. But there are weather-related issues that further endanger victims. And there's questions about some odd phenomenon people saw in the sky. 

Plus, this calamity is bringing out the nut jobs, as disasters tend to do. We'll get into that in a bit. 

BAD WEATHER WORSENS THINGS

The biggest worry I have is how cold it is in the earthquake zone. Since the earthquake hit, daytime temperatures have generally been just above freezing, while nighttime lows have been close to 20 degrees.

People awaiting rescue beneath the rubble are already under extreme physical stress, as you might imagine. The cold makes it worse. Remember, the earthquake hit before dawn. People were in bed, certainly not dressed for winter. 

These survivors can easily die of hypothermia, or freeze to death under these conditions. 

Hope is obviously fading for finding more survivors.

The cold can slow down rescue efforts, too.  Even worse, as Fox Weather reports, patches of freezing rain and sleet are roaming the heart of the earthquake zone. The northern part of the disaster area is experiencing moderate snow.

The ice that's accumulating can only make the rescue effort more difficult. It could also slow down the aid flowing in from foreign nations, including the United States. 

In the second half of this week, precipitation should end in the disaster zone, but overnight lows will continue to drop to near 20 degrees, while daytime highs only get up to the 35-40 degree range. 

Thousands of survivors are also outdoors in the frigid weather, since emergency shelters are lacking and so many buildings are destroyed. There could be additional deaths because of inadequate shelter in the aftermath of the quake. 

This is as bad as a situation can get. 

ODD LIGHTS

Video taken during the first and strongest earthquake, at 4:17 a.m. local time,  show frequent flashes of light in the sky as the earth shook violently. 

I'm quite sure all, or almost all of those flashing lights were power lines snapping, transformers collapsing and power substations suffering damage during the shaking. 

Those power flashes look like lightning, but it was the power grid collapsing. You can see in some of the videos neighborhoods losing power at the time of nearby flashes.

You see the same sort of thing in the United States and elsewhere during nighttime tornadoes or extreme winds. 

Still, it's possible some of the flashes could have come from other sources. 

According to the U.S. Geological Survey:

"Phenomena such as sheet lightning, balls of light, streamers and steady glows reported in association with earthquakes are called earthquake lights (EQL). Geophysicists differ on the extent to which they think individual reports of unusual lighting near the time and epicenter of an earthquake actually represent EQL; some doubt that any of the reports constitute solid evidence for EQL, whereas others think that at least some reports plausibly correspond to EQL"

Whatever might or might not be going on with lights during earthquakes remains a mystery.  

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

The earthquake was really dumb, awful luck. 

Like almost all earthquakes, this one occurred along a fault. Plates of the earth crusts beneath the surface are ever so slowly grinding past each other. Sometimes, parts of the fault get stuck. Pressure builds and builds, and finally the sticking point breaks. And you get an earthquake. Some of them are huge, like this one.

It's all basic geology and physics, tragic as it is. 

This one hit in an area that doesn't have a recent history of enormous quakes. Building codes weren't up to date. So a lot of structures collapsed. This just made everything worse.

 Lots of people have intense anxiety about the state of the world. Institutions they should trust have let them down. So, as Scientific American states:

"In such situations, a conspiracy theory can provide comfort by identifying a convenient scapegoat and thereby making the world seem more straightforward and controllable,"

There's apparently no limit to how outlandish these conspiracy theories can get. People will believe anything. 

Against that backdrop, grifters gotta grift.  

These scammers get on social media to promote the most outlandish conspiracies, knowing that will generate tons of clicks. Which means revenue. And they're convincing emotionally vulnerable people to believe the conspiracies, alienating them further from friends and families.

Plus, the conspiracy theories are endangering innocent people by making them targets of people who believe these whacked out stories. 

I don't know how to combat this, other than mock these scumbags. 

So, apparently, the "globalists" are mad that Turkey wasn't thrilled with the idea of Sweden and Finland  joining NATO.

Which inspired the "globalists" including the United States to trigger the earthquake, through HARRP, whatever that is, or a nuclear detonator deep within the ground to trigger the quake.

The wacko grifters don't explain how the U.S. or somebody else would insert a giant nuclear device beneath the ground in Turkey and Syria without somebody in  either nation noticing. 

The HARRP crowd seems to be let on Twitter by some moron who goes by the name of Snezhina Boahen.  

Here's their genius post:  

As even the now loose-goosy Twitter alerts us after that post, those lightning flashes are, as noted above, the power grid failing in the earthquake. 

I'm also comforted by the fact that this post was met with tons of derision in the comments. 

The conspiracy theories get tragic-comic.  The most outlandish one is that God killed all those people in Turkey and Syria because he was mad at Sam Smith for performing a song with a satanic theme during the Grammys.  I wish I was making this up. 

The God I believe in doesn't do mass murders because he gives two thumbs down for a brief awards show performance. But maybe that's just me. 

Sigh. The Texas February Snow Wasn't Some Strange Plot By Bill Gates

If you put a lighter flame against a snow ball, soot will get
on the snowball. It doesn't mean it isn't snow. Jeez! 

As always, the conspiracy theorists are at it again.  A lot of people live in some strange alternate "reality" where everything is a physically impossible plot by villains to, to, I don't know. The purpose of these weird theories is never clear.  

I'm bringing this up because there's wackos out there who are sure the snow that fell in Texas last month wasn't really snow. It was supposedly something else, deposited for unclear reasons. 

This comes up every time it snows or ice storms hit places that usually escape such winter weather. 

And yes, I'm going to mercilessly mock the conspiracists. There's no getting through to them, ranters are going to rant. 

This time Reuters saw fit to run a fact check on this.  I don't know what good this will do - it won't convince the conspiracy wackos. But, it's fun to roll our eyes at these suckers that are truly born every minute. 

The favorite trick among the conspiracy minded is to hold a cigarette lighter's flame to a snowball to "prove" it's not really snow. This one has been around since at least 2014.

If you do the cigarette lighter trick with snow, it won't be immediately apparent it's melting, and the flame will leave a sooty smudge on the snow.  

So, for the record, according to Reuters:

"(Astronomer Phil) Plait explained that the snow does melt, but it doesn't appear to drip because the remaining snow, which is porous, absorbs the water."

Additionally, under a flame, snow can sublimate, which is a fancy word meaning it goes straight from ice to water vapor without melting into plain water first. 

And that soot on the snowball?  "Plait further explained the chemical process behind the dark mark: It's  not that snowball is scorching or burning, but it's soot adhering to the snowball."

Of course any dummy in Texas would have observed that once it warmed up, you could see the snow melt outdoors and the melt water running down countless storm drains in the Lone Star State. But that would make too much sense. 

By the way, Bill Gates always seems to be the bad guy in these scenarios.  And that just makes the silly more depressing.  If he's such a super-brained villain who wants to control us somehow, wouldn't he do it with something other than fake snow?

As Popular Mechanics tells us:

"Bill Gates is many things - billionaire, philanthropist, synthetic beef advocate - but conspiracy theorists think he and the Chinese government might both benefit from a world where people are blanketed by pretend snow. You'd just think if someone could seed clouds and control the weather, they'd use real snow instead of some kind of slush that has metal in it."

Of course, there are those that thought that Gates, or Joe Biden or somebody controlled the weather to make Texas and surrounding areas freeze.

Even if Gates or Biden could do that - which they can't - why didn't they keep the freeze going to really punish their so called enemies. A week after the cold wave the weather was warm and gorgeous. By the way, as I've explained before, the Arctic freeze was caused by the jet stream, and things up in the Arctic doing weird things. 

To the extent that humans caused it, the only way you could say that is the fact greenhouse gas-induced climate change might have had a role in the rough weather. The operative word here being "might"

It's unclear exactly what Gates or Biden or George Soros or whoever hoped to gain by dumping fake snow or bad weather on Texas, at least in the conspiracy minds.  It goes all over the place.  Biden was pissed that a few Texas were talking about seceding. 5G is always a big one.  The life saving Covid vaccines are really a plot by Gates to inject us with nanoparticles to control our minds, for what I have no idea. 

As if Bill Gates really cares what random Texan thinks. 

The massive power failures that cut electricity to more than 4 million Texans also seems to be fodder for conspiracy. Those power failures were largely caused by the agency that manages Texas electricity - ERCOT - did not plan for the effects of wintry weather on the state's grid. 

Alex Jones, always one to give us some weird fantasy, said Biden blocked the U.S. Department of Energy from increasing power during the storm.

Turns out the Energy Department did the exact opposite:  As the Independent reported. Acting U.S. Energy Secretary David Huizenga, quickly approve a request from ERCOT to temporarily exceed emissions limits to gain more capacity. 

The "fake" snow in Texas has long since melted, I guess proving it wasn't so fake after all. I do forecast, though, a 100% chance of more conspiracy theories from the gullible the next time the weather gets weird. Count on it. 

There really is a sucker born every minute. 

 

Weather Improved But Western Fires Still Rage; Death Toll Rising

It's not as windy as it was along the West Coast as it was earlier in the week, but wildfires rage on nonetheless, as they are too big to contain without at least days, if not weeks of work.

The death toll from the mega fires has reached 14, and that is sure to rise.  It has been unsafe to search areas where fires raced through over the past few days, and it seems not everybody made it out in time across parts of California, Oregon and Washington. The fires were just too intense and too fast for some. 

One of the western forest fires. Authorities are
only now beginning to search fire zones for
casualties. Also, conspiracy theorists spreading
rumors are making emergency workers'
jobs harder.

One example of the reach and extent of these fires is this stat from Oregon:  Half a million people have fled fires in that state. That's more than 10 percent of the state's population. 

The wildfire smoke continues to choke the West Coast and it's going to last.  Strong east winds pushed the smoke through big coastal or near coastal cities like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland.  The wind has shifted, and all that smoke that was pushed out into the air above the Pacific Ocean is now coming back on shore. 

The city of Portland has declared a state of emergency, since many of the city's firefighters have left to fight blazes elsewhere. The air is unhealthy due to the smoke, and new fires could break out in and around Portland since it's so dry there. 

A brief change in the weather pattern might bring a little rain to the Pacific Northwest next week, but then it will probably go back to warm and dry again. Any rain that does fall next week won't be enough to help much. 

In California, at least 2,000 structures, including homes, have been destroyed.  Oroville, population 19,000 is threatened.  At least one small town in the area, Berry Creek, population about 500, was pretty much destroyed. Evacuation zones sadly include part of the town of Paradise, which was largely wiped out by that now famous 2018 wildfire, the deadliest in California history  

Another dismaying thing about the fires is a sad reflection of our society at large:  There's lots of false rumors about the fires, which is normal, I guess. What's not normal is the huge amount of people who are buying these false narratives hook, line and sinker. 

PT Barnum allegedly always said there's a sucker born every minute. I just didn't realize there were that many suckers. 

For the record: Neither the left wing Antifa nor the right wing Proud Boys are setting fires in the West. The government is not using secret weapons to start fires in turn to sow panic.  

One popular Facebook page falsely states that federal agents are investigating fires as a "coordinated attack" by Antifa.  Law enforcement agencies stress this report is absolutely false. I'm not naming the publication because I don't want to call even more attention to them. 

There is one large fire in Oregon that was likely started by an arsonist, but police said the leads they are following all point away from any political motivation with this crime. 

According to USA Today:

The Douglas County Sheriff's Office posted a plea on its Facebook that community members stop spreading rumors about antifa.

'Rumor spread just like wildfire and now our 911 dispatchers and professional staff are being overrun with requests for information and inquiries on an UTRUE rumor that 6 Antifa members have been arrested for setting fires in DOUGLAS COUNTY, OREGON,' its post read. 'THIS IS NOT TRUE!'"

 Many of the fires are likely human caused, but were caused not by individuals with an agenda, but by stupid, careless people with their discarded cigarettes, abandoned camp fires and such. Many fires started from power lines downed by high winds. 

Latching on to false conspiracy theories takes resources away from authorities who need to focus on fighting the fires and preventing new ones. So stop it!