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‘Weather weapon' and more: After Texas floods, a flurry of conspiracy theories emerge
Water rises from severe flooding along the Guadalupe River.in Kerr County, Texas on Friday. AP
The tragedy in Texas has left over 100 dead including some young girls.
Even now, the search for missing people continues.
But that has not stopped some from going online and spreading rumours and conspiracy theories about the matter.
Some have even claimed that 'weather weapons' have been deployed against Texas.
But what happened? What do we know?
Let's take a closer look:
'When was last cloud seeding?'
It began with a number of people on the far-right and within the Q-Anon community taking to social media.
They blamed cloud seeding – which is done to encourage rain by adding silver iodide or dry ice to a cloud – for the flash floods.
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'I need someone to look into who was responsible for this,' far-right figure and ex-special forces commander Pete Chambers wrote. 'When was the last cloud seeding?'
'Anyone able to answer this?' asked Mike Flynn, a Q-Anon figure and former NSA in the Trump administration.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, famous for coining the phrase 'Jewish space lasers', joined the fray.
Marjorie Taylor Greene earlier suggested that 'lasers or blue beams of light' from 'space solar generators' in the sky started wildfires. Reuters
'I am introducing a bill that prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity', Greene wrote on X.
'It will be a felony offence.'
Right-wing influencer Gabrielle Yoder too pointed the finger at cloud seeding – specifically to cloudseeding company Rainmaker.
As did Flynn, who wrote on X, 'anyone who calls this out as a conspiracy theory can go F themselves'.
'Weather weapon deployed'
Others claimed some sort of weather weapon had been deployed.
Michael Meyer, the founder of extremist Veterans on Patrol, wrote on Telegram, 'Due to the recent weather weapon deployed against Texas, which resulted in a high number of child murders, efforts to eliminate this military treason are being escalated.'
'Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake,' Kandiss Taylor, who plans to run as a GOP candidate, wrote on X.
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That doesn't even seem natural,' Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director of Women for America First, added.
Experts, of course, dismissed such claims.
'It is not physically possible or possible within the laws of atmospheric chemistry to cloud seed at a scale that would cause an event like \[the Texas flooding\] to occur,' Matt Lanza, a digital meteorologist based in Houston, told Wired.
Senator Ted Cruz was among those rebuffing the conspiracy theories.
'The meteorological ingredients [for the storm] were already there, and cloud seeding could not have played a role,' Lanza added.
'I am trying to be as transparent as possible, because this is an incredibly controversial subject but isn't actually as regulated and discussed transparently as it ought to be by the federal government,' Doricko added. 'Just for the record, I'm not a deep state plant from either Bill Gates or Palantir, Peter Thiel or Bill Clinton.'
Among those rebuffing the conspiracy theories was Senator Ted Cruz.
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'To the best of my knowledge, there is zero evidence of anything related to anything like weather modification,' Cruz was quoted as saying. 'Look, the internet can be a strange place. People can come up with all sorts of crazy theories.'
'There's a time to have political fights. There's a time to disagree. This is not that time,' Cruz added.
Some on the left mocked these claims from the right.
One, using a famous Simpsons meme of Principal Skinner, asked if the Trump funding cuts were responsible for the tragedy.
'No, it must have been Democrats using a weather modification machine,' the caption stated.
What do experts say?
However, experts say that claiming those blaming cuts at the National Weather Service (NWS) by the Trump administration aren't correct either.
There have been claims that (weather agencies) did not foresee catastrophic (Texas) floods – but that's simply not true," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, wrote on X rival Bluesky.
'This was undoubtedly an extreme event but messaging rapidly escalated beginning (around) 12 (hours) prior…Locations that flooded catastrophically had at least 1-2+ hours of direct warning from NWS.'
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'This truly was a sudden & massive event and occurred at worst possible time (middle of the night). But (the) problem, once again, was not a bad weather prediction: it was one of 'last mile' forecast/warning dissemination,' Swain added.
Search and recovery workers dig through debris looking for any survivors or remains of people swept up in the flash flooding at Camp Mystic in Hunt, Texas. AFP
'False claims from both the left and right have spread widely on social media following the catastrophic floods in Texas,' Sarah Komar and Nicole Dirks from the disinformation watchdog NewsGuard wrote. 'When extreme weather events occur, conspiracy theories about humans creating or controlling them often soon follow.'
Even the media fell victim to such stories
Kerr County Lead, a local outlet, was forced to retract a false story about the miracle rescue of two girls who clung to a tree in the floods. The story first surfaced in social media posts that quickly went viral, but a local official said the reports were '100 per cent inaccurate.'
'Like everyone, we wanted this story to be true, but it's a classic tale of misinformation that consumes all of us during a natural disaster,' Louis Amestoy, Kerr County Lead's editor, wrote in a note to readers on Sunday. 'Unfortunately, the story is not true and we are retracting it.'
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