More than 100 people have now been confirmed to have lost their lives in the flash flood, which hit homes and camps along the edge of the Guadalupe River in the early hours of Friday morning. Meteorologists who spoke to Wired have rejected claims that the National Weather Service failed to precisely predict the risk of flooding in Texas. But within hours of the tragedy occurring, conspiring theorists, right -wing influencers and lawmakers have pushed wild claims on social media that the floods are somehow geoengine.
“False weather. False hurricanes. False flood. False. False. False. “That doesn’t even seem natural,” Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director of Women for America First, wrote in X, in a poster, which was seen 9 million times.
As the emergency response to the floods still took place on Saturday, U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican, tweeted that she would introduce a bill to “end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geo -engineering.” Greene, who once blamed California wild fires for laser beams or light beams connected to an electric company with claimed links to an organization affiliated with a powerful Jewish family, said the bill will be similar to the Senate 56 of Florida, which Governor Ron Desntis signed into law in June. This bill makes a weather modification third degree crime, punishable by up to $ 100,000. (Greene’s office did not respond to a request for a comment on whether her announcement was specifically linked to the floods in Texas.)
On Instagram, a right -wing influencer Gabrielle Yoder jumped on one of the greatest conspiracy theories, claiming that cloudy sowing is responsible for causing the floods and summoning Doricko specifically.
The Docicko company was also named by a disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn in X. He wrote that “anyone who calls this as a conspiracy theory can go himself.”
Doricko told Wired that Rainmaker was working on a short cloud seed -operation just days before the storms near the town of Runge, Texas, about 120 miles away from Kerr Government, where the worst flood was concentrated. But Doricko says his staff meteorologists noted some high humidity content in the area. The company, he says, called on its operations, according to state regulations.
Cloudy sowing – the practice of increasing precipitation in a cloud by introducing materials such as silver iodine or dry ice – has been used for decades. The Texas Department of License and Regulation Supports a page On current weather modification efforts of irrigation districts, prefectures and other groups in the state. Doricko’s company, Rainmaker, is wrong Beginning that aims “[synthesize] Advanced technology with environmental management. ”
Numerous meteorologists told Wired that there was no way that cloudy sowing was responsible for the devastating storms that robbed Texas last week.
“It is not physically possible or possible in the laws of atmospheric chemistry to a cloud seed on a scale that would cause an event like [the Texas flooding] To happen, “says Matt Lanza, a digital meteorologist based in Houston. Lanza compares a cloudy sowing to the addition of” ice cream to cake “: it is capable of sucking precipitation of clouds in drier areas, not to create storms wholesale from thin air.
The National Weather Service has already warned as early as Tuesday about possible night streams in some parts of Texas, thanks to humidity coming north from a tropical storm Barry, which made a landing last weekend in Mexico.
“The meteorological ingredients [for the storm] It was already there, and a cloudy sowing could not have played a role, “Lanza says.
Doricko is not strange to anti-weather modification factions. He spent much of the early half of this year testifying against hovering state-level anti-geo-engineering bills, including the one who later passed in Florida.
Doricko’s personal profile – he was once photographed with Bill Clinton and was chosen as Thiel Fellow – seems to have facilitated the attacks on his company for those seeking conspiracy to pinch the devastating storms in Texas.
“I try to be as transparent as possible, as this is an incredibly controversial topic, but is actually not as regulated and discussed transparently as it should be by the federal government,” Doricko says. “Just for the record, I’m not a deep state plant of Bill Gates or Palantir, Peter Thiel or Bill Clinton.”
