Unfounded rumors linking an extreme weather event to human efforts to control the weather are again spreading on social media. It’s not plausible that available weather modification techniques caused or influenced the July 4 flash flooding along the Guadalupe River in Texas.
The flooding, which is known to have killed at least 134 people, including at least 37 children, as of July 15, occurred after remnants of a tropical storm moved north and stalled over a region known as “Flash Flood Alley” that is prone to flash flooding due to its terrain. Experts have stated that climate change likely contributed to the worsening of the rain.
“This isn’t just bad weather,” read one post. “It looks a hell of a lot like weather warfare.”
Cloud seeding is a real weather modification method, often used in an attempt to alleviate drought, that can sometimes nudge clouds to produce small amounts of rain or snow. It does not cause rain on the scale seen in the Texas flooding.
Cloud seeding “had no influence on the outcome of the July 4th flooding,” Katja Friedrich of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences told us in an email, basing her comments on her own past research on the subject.
“I love how confident people are in science, but if cloud seeding would work as they often think, we would probably be able to solve the water crisis in the western US or in other arid regions, but we are not able to do so,” she added.
In contrast, climate change caused by heat-trapping pollution, largely due to the burning of fossil fuels, is known to increase extreme rainfall events. “It is pretty clear that climate change increased rainfall” in Texas, Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told us via email. It’s more difficult, he said, to determine the role climate change played in the rise of water levels, as this requires modeling that takes into account complex local factors.
We previously wrote about conspiracy theories — fueled by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia — that someone deliberately caused or steered Hurricane Helene in 2024 via weather modification. It is not possible to cause or steer a hurricane. On July 5, Greene announced new legislation to restrict weather modification. Florida, Tennessee, and Louisiana have enacted or are set to enact laws curtailing weather modification.
In July, Kandiss Taylor, a Republican candidate for Congress from Georgia, posted five times on X and Substack, also promoting the idea of “fake” and “manufactured” extreme weather. Taylor suggested that Hurricane Helene, which she said personally cost her family $57,000 in damages, was the result of weather modification, or “targeted destruction,” as she put it, and other disasters might be as well.
“If storms are being manipulated, and people die because of it, that’s not just a tragedy,” she wrote. “That’s murder.”
Taylor told us via email that her posts were “in response to proposed new legislation in Congress, not about Texas. The media twisted what I posted.” But in her Substack and elsewhere, she suggested the Texas flooding could be due to weather manipulation. “Now, I’m watching in nonstop prayer what’s happening in Texas. And let me tell you, the patterns, the timing, the scale raise serious questions,” she wrote on Substack.
Unfounded Claims About Cloud Seeding
Cloud seeding relies on releasing small particles, most often silver iodide crystals, into clouds, which can help raindrops or ice crystals form from existing moisture and fall from the sky. As of July 2024, there were active cloud seeding projects in nine states, including Texas, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
Many social media posts have suggested that Rainmaker Technology Corporation may be responsible for the flooding. The company performed cloud seeding on July 2 in Karnes County, Texas, several counties southeast of where the flooding took place.
But it’s not plausible that the company’s activities played a role in the Texas flooding, experts told us and other news outlets.
If the cloud seeding happened on July 2, there was “no way that material was still in the atmosphere” by the time of the storm, Friedrich said. Thunderstorms, of course, are also able to produce large amounts of rainfall on their own, she said, adding that there is “no need for cloud seeding.”
Indeed, Rainmaker’s CEO, Augustus Doricko, responded to Flynn on X, writing that the two “clouds that were seeded on July 2nd dissipated over 24 hours before the developing storm complex that would produce the flooding rainfall.”
But even if cloud seeding had happened closer to the relevant storm, experts said, it would not have caused the extreme amount of rain that fell.
Friedrich said that her team’s past work showed that “cloud seeding produces rather small amounts of precipitation” — on the order of fractions of a millimeter of snow. In fact, a challenge in quantifying the results of cloud seeding, she said, has been that the amount of precipitation “is so small and often much smaller than natural precipitation.”
During the Texas flooding, the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes at Hunt, Texas, and 2 to 3 inches of rain fell each hour at times, a National Weather Service spokesperson previously told us.
“The amount of energy involved in making storms like that is astronomical compared to anything you can do with cloud seeding,” Bob Rauber, an atmospheric scientist and emeritus professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, similarly told the Washington Post. “We’re talking about a minimal increase on a natural process at best.”
Furthermore, as we’ve said, the slow movement of the storm helped cause the flooding. “Cloud seeding influences how cloud particles grow but not the movement or stalling of thunderstorms,” Friedrich said.
Climate Change Likely Increased Rainfall
As we’ve said, multiple natural factors conspired to cause the flooding. However, experts said that climate change likely contributed to increased rainfall.
Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, who is also director of the Southern Regional Climate Center and a professor at Texas A&M University, agreed via email that climate change likely increased total rainfall.
He explained that warmer air can carry more water vapor and can “produce larger rainfall rates.” Another factor influencing the severity of the flooding was the short period during which a large amount of rain fell. “There’s evidence that shorter-duration extreme rainfall is intensifying more rapidly than longer-duration extreme rainfall, so maybe storms themselves are becoming more concentrated,” he said.
ClimaMeter, an international project aimed at rapidly interpreting the relationship between extreme weather and climate, compared conditions in the past with those in more recent decades, finding that conditions in parts of central Texas were 7% wetter in the years since 1987 than between 1950 and 1986. However, the scientists stated that they had “low confidence in the robustness of our approach,” given the available data and the exceptional nature of the flooding. The group concluded that the heavy rain was “locally intensified by human-driven climate change.”
Wehner informally estimated that climate change likely increased rainfall by at least 7%, based simply on the increase in water vapor in the air caused by warming in the Gulf. After taking into account factors associated with the “extra available energy in warmer temperatures,” he said, he came up with a possible 20% increase in rainfall. Wehner has conducted formal attribution studies in the past for extreme weather events, which he said his calculations did not replace; however, he told us he wouldn’t be conducting one for this event.
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-- By Andréa Mochida
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