No, the government cannot control the weather

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the 2024 movie “Twisters.”

WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) — The 2024 Atlantic Hurricane season has been busy and devastating.

Ten hurricanes have formed since the season began on June 1. The most recent, Milton and Helene, left billions of dollars in damage to the Southeast United States. The season doesn’t end until Nov. 30.

Since Helene and Milton struck, conspiracy theories about the Hurricanes have abounded online. They range from conspiracies about government agency response to accusations that The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has the ability to control and direct hurricanes.

Misinformation is so abundant that Republican Congressman Chuck Edwards of North Carolina issued a press release debunking conspiracy theories. On Wednesday, NOAA itself published an article that went step by step through conspiracies about the hurricanes and explained why they were false.

Understanding hurricanes, how they form, and what forces act on them is important to fully understand why it is impossible to control them.

Understanding Hurricanes

We tend to think of Hurricanes as one giant storm, but that’s not accurate. A hurricane is a giant system of storms that travel together. A simple way to think of them is to compare them to those lines of thunderstorms that regularly push through Kansas and the rest of the plains, like this one from June 18 of this year:

Hurricanes form when warm waters heat the air above them. That warm, moist air rises, where it condenses, cools, and forms clouds.

That rising moist air also spins as it rises due to something called the Coriolis Effect or Force. In the Northern Hemisphere, it spins counter-clockwise, but it spins clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

Under the right conditions, it can eventually turn into a tropical storm and later a hurricane. High and low-pressure systems then “push” the hurricane in different directions.

In North America, Hurricanes are affected by a semi-permanent area of high pressure that scientists call the Bermuda High, which expands and contracts throughout the year.

As the hurricane spins faster and faster, it creates a vacuum of air in the center, which forms the “eye” of the hurricane, where it’s relatively calm. It’s easy to visualize this by picturing what happens in the center of a whirlpool or around a sink drain. However, it should be noted that water draining in a sink or the direction of water flows when a toilet flushes has nothing to do with the Coriolis Effect.

Modifying Weather: What we can and can’t do

Cloud Seeding

We can indeed modify the weather to a certain extent. For example, we can use silver oxide to seed the clouds to increase rainfall. The silver oxide gives the water vapor inside a cloud something else to bind to instead of dust in the atmosphere.

This is done in places like the Sierra Nevada mountain range to increase snowfall by 10 to 15%. Broader studies are inconclusive, showing anywhere from zero to 20% increase in moisture through cloud seeding.

As NOAA pointed out in their article, they conducted cloud-seeding experiments from the 1960s to the early 1980s, during which they seeded multiple hurricanes. What they discovered was that the mechanics of a hurricane are different from that of a thunderstorm, and it had no effect.

One of the plot points in the 2024 movie Twisters was the idea of using silver dioxide, along with polyacrylate, the stuff found in baby diapers, to suck the water out of the supercell thunderstorm. Polyacrylate weighs around 1.0511 grams per cubic centimeter, and water weighs around 1 gram per cubic centimeter.

Because rainwater contains salt, calcium, and other minerals, polyacrylate can only absorb around 300 times its weight, which equals around 315.33 grams. A supercell thunderstorm can hold over 2 billion gallons of water.

That means you would need 9,589,792 pounds of polyacrylate to absorb the moisture of a supercell. Now, imagine how much you would need for a 300-mile-wide hurricane, not even considering the impact of cleaning all of that out of the ocean and from land.

Microwave Energy

There are some conspiracies claiming that NEXRAD Doppler Radar can steer hurricanes. They can’t at all, and to understand why, you have to understand what radar is and how it works.

Yes, it uses the same type of energy as your microwave: electromagnetic. However, while the average Microwave uses around 1000 Watts, the Doppler Radar System uses around 700,000 Watts in a quick burst that lasts just 0.00000157 seconds.

Microwaves travel at the speed of light and hit a storm cloud. Some of that light is reflected back, a small portion is absorbed, and the rest continues off into space.

The waves that return back are analyzed to develop a radar image. The denser the water in a cloud, the more that gets reflected back.

You can see an example of this in lakes and oceans. The closer you are to the surface, the more light, but the deeper you go, the less light.

When we look at something, we only see the light reflected back. We don’t see what gets absorbed.

The same applies to microwave energy. It’s why you can have clouds in the sky but a completely clear radar picture.

Microwave ovens work by reflecting electromagnetic energy back and forth through food. That energy causes molecules to vibrate.

That vibration creates friction. That friction creates heat.

With enough energy, you might be able to disrupt a storm with microwave energy. However, it wouldn’t be able to change its direction.

Using computer models, the late physicist Bernard Eastland demonstrated that it might be possible for a satellite to fire a gigawatt of focused microwaves at the interior of a severe thunderstorm to heat the supercooled downdrafts that produce tornadoes. That’s roughly the same amount of power in a bolt of lighting or to power the DeLorean to send Marty back to 1985.

So, in theory, with enough energy, you could disrupt a storm, but you wouldn’t be able to move it. Also, producing that level of power on Earth takes something on the scale of Hoover Dam.

Solar Geoengineering

Another conspiracy theory is that NOAA or some other agency uses solar geoengineering to create hurricanes. It claims a solar shade is being used to create hurricanes somehow.

Hurricanes need the sun’s heat to warm the water so they can form and grow in size. A solar shade does the exact opposite.

Even if a solar shade did exist, it likely would have zero effect on Earth’s climate. In April, a Wichita State University Professor and a graduate student presented their paper investigating the deployment of a solar shade and determined that it wasn’t feasible.

Why do people fall for conspiracy theories?

First, it’s important to understand that it has nothing to do with a person’s intelligence. The issue is that the human brain is hard-wired to look for patterns. Our ability to notice patterns and cause and effect has allowed humanity to survive from its earliest beginnings.

It includes patterns that may not even be there.

Apophenia is the tendency to see a meaningful pattern in two unrelated things that aren’t actually there. Pareidola is to see something in an image or object that isn’t actually there, like a face or other familiar object.

Both are advantageous abilities when you think about it. Looking up at the stars and the constellations certainly is helpful when you’re trying to navigate.

However, those constellations aren’t real. It’s a pattern we perceive. If you’re in another galaxy, or even just the southern hemisphere, the night sky would look completely different to you.

Pattern recognition happens in a part of the brain called the neocortex, which is also responsible for emotions. It’s what makes us who we are.

Apophenia and Pareidola can easily feed into cognitive bias. Everyone is susceptible to it. In fact, studies show that we are more susceptible to cognitive bias the older we get.

How to avoid falling for conspiracy theories

First, consider the source. Is it reliable? Is it just a social media post or a screengrab? What is the purpose of it? Does it appear to have an agenda? Does it make a plea to your emotions in some way, like to anger you? What evidence do they have to support those claims? Is it actually reliable? Does it have multiple viewpoints and perspectives? Does it provide a balance of opposing viewpoints? Does it contain confirmation bias or logical fallacies? Is it even relevant to you? Is there a tone to it that makes it appear they have already drawn a conclusion? Is the information even accurate or up-to-date? Does the person providing the information have a conflict of interest?

Remember Occam’s Razor: “Plurality should not be posited without necessity.” In other words, of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. In other words, the simplest explanation is the correct one.

Conspiracies overcomplicate things that have simple explanations. Science is reliable because it requires rigorous standards, from verifiable testing to peer reviews and more testing. For something to be accepted by the scientific community, the experiments have to be repeatable by other scientists unconnected to the original author.

Conspiracies require none of that. While they may point to something in the real world, like a scientific project or government test program, the rest of the supporting evidence either doesn’t exist or is completely misinterpreted.

As Carl Sagan used to say, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

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