AI Images For Weather Disasters Now Prevailant, Risks Misinformation And Misrepresenting Victims' Needs

An AI image of Nashville's recent
ice storm. It doesn't look like this
and this image has been used to
"show" what it's like in the ice
storm south. Fake images like
this can foster mistrust in 
disaster news, and potentially
direct aid to the wrong places. 

 Each big disaster has just an iconic image or two, ones that capture the breadth and emotion and tragedy of the event. 

The big Lost Angeles wildfires in January, 2025 has the vintage blue Volkswagen bus gleaming seemingly unscathed in a large, completely leveled, blackened neighborhood. Or the resort towns in western North Carolina wiped out by Hurricane Helene. Or, here in Vermont, downtown Montpelier inundated by the summer floods of 2023. 

Now, we have that horrible ice storm in the south. I've seen so many dramatic photos and videos of collapsed trees, tangled, destroyed electrical systems, damaged houses and highways that resemble miles long skating rinks, 

But the photos that arguably circulating the most on social media do not at all capture the real tragedy, scariness and power of the ice storm. 

The photos I see the most are AI generated. Definitely not the real deal. 

One account on Facebook called Meanwhile in Delco posts a lot of AI generated images of bad weather, and really went to town with the southern Ice Storm. Sometimes images from this account and others get a community note explaining that it's a fake image. 

But most of the time, when I see the AI images the comments are all, "OMG the destruction!" and "Pray for Nashville."

I'm 100 percent in favor of praying for Nashville and anybody else affected by the winter storm. However, I don't think AI helps. 

One person posted this genuinely thoughtful comment under one of Delco's  AI-generated Nashville ice storm images. She wrote: "For those saying this is AI... Does it really matter since this is scary close to what Nashville and the surrounding areas are surviving through the week? 

My answer is a respectful yes. It does matter. 

DANGERS OF AI PICS

Fake images breed distrust.  If it gets hard to tell which images of a disaster are fake and which are real, you start to lose trust in everything. Some people might wonder if the whole ice storm disaster is fake. AI, used incorrectly, can hurt, rather than help recovery efforts after disasters.

I'm picking on Meanwhile in Delco, but that Facebook account holder doesn't' seem intent on causing harm. The text parts of their posts seem accurate when they discuss power outages, recovery efforts or storms elsewhere. So overall, they're probably doing a little more good than harm. Or at least they're not adding much to the chaos. I've seen a LOT worse on Facebook.

But other people on social media can use AI to be misleading. Here's a theoretical: The winter storm was huge and caused misery and danger really from New Mexico to Maine, right?

I can envision efforts to use AI to exaggerate the effects of a particular storm in one area, while saying other areas that were hit hard are fine. For example, somebody could post AI images of New Orleans just obliterated by an ice storm, even though they're fine, while posting AI images of Nashville looking just ducky.  

Imagine this was being done by a crook who wants to use the sympathy of social media viewers to steer donations toward New Orleans (really the crook's pocket) and away from Nashville, which really needs the help. 

I know in the real world under my scenario, Nashville would still be getting help. But a little bit of that potential aid could get diverted from Nashville, or other areas of the South that were blasted by the ice storm. And the crook with the AI account would pocket the money.

My dream is to require all AI images to clearly state they are in fact AI.  I'd like to see that rule in social media terms and conditions. But, their algorithms are so bad that such a rule would probably ban real, unadulterated photos, or legitimate AI art that is not pretending to be news.

So yea, a solution to this isn't easy. 

Don't get me wrong. There's a place for AI on social media and elsewhere. It can be entertaining, even illuminating at times. 

But if there's some weather event or disaster somewhere, I, and I think most people, want to know what really happened. Not just some AI representation that at best is a guess, and at worst, a scam. 

 

To The Trump Team, Climate Change Is "Benefitting" Mankind

Under the Trump administration, the Environmental
Protection Agency isn't protecting anything, 
except maybe the fossil fuel industry. 

 In the Trump world, up is down, down is up and everything is half ass backwards. 

E&E News By Politico has the deets:

"President Trump has long rejected climate science.

Now, his administration is grappling with how to assemble a body of federal climate research to show a warming world is benefitting humanity. The claims would be highly misleading and ignore decades of scientific research that shows climate change will have increasingly dire effects."

As I previously reported, the Trump administration has scrubbed climate information from a variety of web sites and fired numerous climate scientists. 

Also, as I have noted before, the Trumpers want to remove something called an endangerment finding from the EPA.  That document requires the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

As E&E News reports, legal experts think the federal courts would frown on getting rid of that endangerment finding. The Supreme Court has rejected three challenges to the endangerment finding. 

To get around that, Trump and the EPA would just come up with a new document, one that falsely says that climate change is a bunch of hooey,  

They could do that by finding "experts" who falsely claim that climate change is not a biggie.  Or they can pick apart existing U.S. and international climate reports, offering dubious counter arguments to those reports.  

And they could produce a new National Climate Assessment written by unqualified Trump minions and fossil fuel industry hacks. 

Of course, these morons would be up against a continued onslaught of new reports and findings describing why climate change is bad. I mean, every time I turn around, there's some new study that says climate change will worsen X, Y and Z.  

I never hear any serious person say climate change is going to create more joy, happiness, rainbows and puppy dogs.  But, that doesn't matter. All the climate deniers have to do is go before a Trump-appointed "judge" who's a total suck up to Dear Leader. From there, all bets are off. Such a "judge" could well go along with the Trump fantasy narrative. 

That fantasy narrative has already taken shape. 

David Legates, who was briefly a NOAA mucky muck during the first Trump administration, has these revisionist thoughts on greenhouse gases. 

"I'm pretty certain that what we're going to conclude from what we know now is that carbon dioxide is not an evil gas......Rather, it's a gas beneficial to life on Earth. It'll increase temperatures slightly, and warmer temperatures are certainly better than colder temperatures."

Spoken like a dude who's sick of winter where he lives but has no idea how science works.  

So let's do Science 101 for this guy. 

Fine, it's true, we need carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, since as those of you who went through Grade School science know, plants need CO2 to survive. Since us humans need plants to survive, a certain amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is truly a good thing.

Also, it's basic physics that if you increase CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, you're going to increase the temperature of said atmosphere. 

Teasing apart Legate's words, it appears he also thinks climate change is good because fewer people would die of cold weather. Which might actually be true. But what about all the extra people that keep dying of heat related causes because heat waves keep getting hotter?

I guess they don't count. 

As you'd expect, serious climate scientists are appalled by all this.  E&E News got this quote from the ever-reliable (and smart and relatable) climate scientist Michael Mann:

"What the Trump administration is trying to do amounts to nothing more than trying to pollute the process with ideologically-motivated antiscoience.,....It means the U.S. federal government is now at war with humanity."

We know, of course, despite any criticism, the Trump gang will soldier on. 

While climate change keeps biting us "little people" in the ass, our billionaire overlords can rest easy, protecting in their little cocoons as they keep raking in blood money from the fossil fuel industry.  

Trump Continues To Combat Climate Efforts On Many Fronts

Unsure whether climate change was messing up his hair 
here, but President Trump does not believe that climate
change exists, and is scrubbing away almost all the
work the federal government has done in combating
this threat to the world. 

 We saw how the Trump administration fired hundreds of NOAA workers, harming both weather forecasting and efforts to combat climate change.  

But that's not the only front in Trump's battle against climate change efforts. 

Federal websites have been scrubbed of climate information and data. Government scientists who still have jobs have been banned from collaborating on climate issues with experts in other nations. 

TAKING AWAY THE TOOLS

There is push back, of course. Environmental groups have sued the Department of Agriculture over the removal of climate information from its web sites. 

Per Courthouse News Service

"Filing suit in Manhattan federal court, the groups accused Trump's USDA of abruptly deleting climate-related policies, datasets and resources from its websites in violation of the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires federal agencies to provide adequate advance public notice when substantially modifying or terminating 'significant information dissemination products.'"

The complaint states:

"In ordering staff to unpublish these webpages, USDA failed to consider how removing these resources would harm farmers, farm advisors, land managers, researchers and other members of the public, and thus failed to engage in reasoned decision-making, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act."

That's just. Regular folks, the ones Trump falsely claims to champion, need this data to run farms and other enterprises. 

"By wiping critical climate resources from the USDA's website, the Trump administration has deliberately stripped farmers and ranchers of the vital tools they need to confront the escalating extreme weather threats like droughts and floods," Midwest director the Environmental Working Group Anne Schechinger wrote in a statement. 

MAJOR CLIMATE REPORT HOBBLED 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a United Nations body that makes regular assessments about the state of the warming world. The last detailed assessment came out in 2023.

These reports try to synthesize the latest human understanding of climate change and what can be done to stop it. 

Per the Washington Post:

"Katherine Calvin, NASA's chief scientist and senior climate advisor, has been barred from traveling China to meet with colleagues on work related to the next major report from the IPCC......The next report is expected in 2029, and Calvin is leading one of the three major IPCC working groups.

NASA also terminated its contract with a U.S.-based group of scientists and staff who were working closely with Calvin to coordinate global efforts to craft the next assessment, essentially leaving one-third of the IPCCs next report adrift, with no staff assigned to pull it together."

Par for the course, Trump administration won't comment about this to the media, and won't clarify what they're doing, and so far won't tell any IPCC staff what the status of U.S. employees is regarding the report and work on climate change. 

REGULATIONS DISAPPEARING

A key Environmental Protection Agency scientific finding from a decade and a half ago supports the agency's efforts to combat climate change. Apparently, that scientific finding - factual as it is - does not work for the Trump administration. 

Because, I'm sure they're thinking, 'facts are stupid, especially when they get away with our money grubbing grifting political agenda. 

Per the Washington Post:

"The 2009 'endangerment finding' cleared the way for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act by concluding that the planet-warming gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. The Obama and Biden administrations used that determination to set strict limits on emissions from cars and power plants."

WaPo says EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has been urging the White House to get rid of that scientific finding, and I'm sure Trump will agree with Zeldin on that point. 

With the science removed and replaced by pseudo-science, to put it mildly, the nation continues to abandon climate change efforts just when they were starting to have an effect.  

Like I noted when Trump and his at-least-for-now bosom buddy Elon Musk ditched all those NOAA and FEMA workers, Trump and his oligarchs don't really care how many people die in climate-related disasters or other misfortunes created by their stupidity and selfishness.

As we've seen with the health care industry, it's all about making more billions for the existing billionaires and oligarchs. Needless deaths are - to them anyway - the cost of doing business.