![]() ![]() The evidence? According to a county memo, Culverson County, far on the west end of Texas, engaged in cloud-seeding on August 25, the day that Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Houston. This is the subject of a 20-minute YouTube video by cloud-seeding enthusiast Jim Lee. Which is how we get to Hurricane Harvey: Clearly a product of cloud-seeding, Dahl tells me. He’s observed it happening before a rainstorm in California where he lives, he says - clear evidence that the clouds are being engineered to produce rainstorms. He asks me whether I’ve ever seen a blue sky “become cloudy from jets,” which I tell him I have not, but I also admit that I don’t spend significant time staring upwards. While he doesn’t align with the more extreme beliefs within cloud trutherism, he finds the explanation of how climate change creates more extreme weather events to be “too abstract.” He believes climatologists aren’t paying enough attention to the role of cloud seeding - a real practice involving spraying clouds from above with silver iodide that (usually) local governments use to stimulate rain and snow in cases of, for example, extreme drought - and the water component of aircraft emissions, which he sees as the primary causes of climate change.ĭahl describes how his time as a former navigator in the Navy involved a lot of skygazing - and noticed, he says, more and more aircraft trails across the sky. ![]() Here's Howĭahl, a web designer in California with an implausibly perfect radio voice, does accept that climate change is real. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. The moment you do that, you have to figure out how to justify that to yourself.” Or you say, ‘the problem doesn’t exist!’ You deny the problem. “You can either accept the science and say, ‘we have to deal with this problem,’ and then look for the solutions least offensive to your worldview. You basically have two choices when it comes to a daunting problem like climate change, says Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor at the University of Bristol who studies the psychology and cognitive theory of conspiracy theories. The scientists are wrong, and, depending on what part of the internet you land upon, part of a nefarious global plot to control the climate. ![]() It’s worth mentioning here that the carbon impact of air travel is to blame for a significant portion of emissions, but that’s not the Cloud Truther cause.Īdherents’ beliefs range from the somewhat benign (cloud-seeding projects are having runaway and largely ignored effects on the climate) to the extreme (the government is secretly using aircraft for geoengineering and spraying its citizens with disease-causing chemicals), but it all boils down to: It can’t just be carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases. It is not your standard climate denial, but rather a persistent belief that airplanes are the real and ignored cause of climate change. Wolf is a cloud truther.Ĭloud Trutherism (my own term for it) is one of many conspiracy theories surrounding climate change. To summarize: It’s all controlled by men! So I was alarmed to learn that the influential feminist scholar has turned to shaping ideas about who controls the weather - specifically, by tweeting relentlessly about covert chemical spraying, unfamiliar cloud patterns, and schemes to manipulate the weather. When I was 18, Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth shaped my ideas about sex, attractiveness, and life as a woman. ![]()
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