The Truth About Hurricane Geoengineering
5 min read
Over the past month, as meteorologists warned millions of Americans to protect themselves from impending major hurricanes, they were forced to contemplate another, unexpected danger. Threatening messages spilled into forecasters’ inboxes. Meteorologists, those messages said, are in cahoots with the government to create hurricanes out of thin air and steer the storms toward specific places and people. They should suffer for it.
These particular conspiracy theories surfaced after Hurricane Helene and crescendoed as Hurricane Milton approached—two monster storms, with little time for Americans in hurricane country to catch their breath between them. The theories moved at maximum speed on X, where Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene pointed out that majority-Republican areas fell in Helene’s destructive path and said, “They can control the weather.” (Later, she clarified that “they” included people affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.) Hurricanes are “weather weapons,” per the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Others claim that the storms are instruments in a wily scheme against conservative voters, and that left-wing politicians have deviously chosen to unleash them just weeks from a dead-heat presidential election.
Claims of a Republican-hating cabal of meteorologists pulling stormy levers to park hurricanes over southern states are, perhaps all too obviously, false. There is no evidence that meteorologists or lawmakers have directed tropical cyclones to do their bidding, or have the capability to harness hurricanes in this way at all.
And yet, much of the most persuasive misinformation contains a kernel of truth, and the hurricane conspiracy is no exception. Government agencies and teams of scientists have indeed attempted for decades to control the weather through geoengineering. They have seeded clouds with silver iodide to try to induce rain over parched areas, and tested a technique to brighten clouds so that they reflect more sunlight back into space. Some scientists want to try even more complex interventions, including mimicking a volcanic eruption that could help cool rising global temperatures. But hurricanes? Hurricanes are one of the most difficult natural phenomena to tamper with—so difficult that, right now, climate scientists don’t take the idea seriously.
Humans are not yet particularly good at any variety of geoengineering. The effectiveness of cloud seeding is still under debate. Dimming the sun is not as easy as flipping a switch, and requires the release of a quadrillion nearly invisible particles that must be tailored to just the right size. Experiments involving fertilizing the ocean with iron have shown promise on small scales, but they may not work at all if they’re deployed more widely. Hurricanes, with their extreme winds and flooding rains, defy any sort of human control. “Hurricane modification is not a thing,” Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, in Massachusetts, told me. “Attempting to alter the strength or track of a hurricane would be like trying to thwart a cruise ship with a rubber ducky.”
Conjuring hurricanes into existence is flat-out impossible. “Even with cloud seeding, we need the clouds to already be there in order to seed them,” Alyssa Stansfield, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah, told me. “We can’t create clouds in any way.” And hurricanes are especially unhackable because of their sheer size and power, she said. Storms like Milton radiate the energy of dozens of atomic bombs every hour. “It would take enormous energy to change a hurricane’s path or strength,” Juan Moreno-Cruz, a climate-policy researcher at the University of Waterloo, told me. “We can’t make or steer them, because they’re much more powerful than any technology we have.”
Hurricanes are also fundamentally different from typical storm clouds, Stansfield said. The water droplets that silver-iodide targets are less abundant within hurricanes, so the substance is less likely to achieve the desired effect. Nipping a hurricane in the bud is unrealistic too; dozens of tropical disturbances arise in the Atlantic basin every year, and scientists can’t predict which ones will balloon into hurricanes. Even as geoengineering is becoming more mainstream, hacking hurricanes isn’t being discussed, says Holly Jean Buck, a professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo and the author of After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. “There’s no moral taboo,” Buck told me. “It’s just not a good idea scientifically.”
That hasn’t stopped the U.S. government from trying before. Starting in the early 1960s, Project STORMFURY carried out experiments on hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, far from land. A team of weather experts and military personnel released silver iodide into the storms’ rainbands, which they believed would reshuffle the storms’ structure and weaken their strongest winds. Researchers observed some diminished intensity, but the results were inconclusive—it was impossible to determine whether the effects were due to human intervention or the cyclones’ natural whims. The effort was canceled in 1983, and the method deemed not viable. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security convened a workshop for experts to brainstorm potential methods for hurricane modification. The ideas included scattering soot into the atmosphere over a hurricane to change air temperatures and reduce its power, spreading special film on the ocean so that cyclones encounter less moisture to use as fuel, and flying jet aircraft in the eye of a rolling storm to reverse its motion.
Nothing became of those ideas, and in some ways, that’s disappointing. Hurricanes claim lives and destroy livelihoods; Helene killed more than 200 people, making it the deadliest storm to hit the mainland United States since Katrina. But officials decided against further pursuing those concepts in part because they carry the same risks as any other geoengineering project: unintended and unknowable consequences. A hurricane purposefully deflected from one U.S. metropolis could, for example, end up ravaging another. If scientists could find a way to safely and reliably steer hurricanes away from populated shores, it would count as one of humanity’s most profound achievements, and completely change the way people live. Why would the government’s first instinct be to use that power to thwart political opposition?
The misinformation will surely continue in the coming weeks. Neither the election nor the hurricane season is over yet. Besides, there’s one more kernel of truth in the swirl of paranoia. Milton and Helene really might have been modified by human influence—just not in the ways that Greene and others claim. “The only way that humans are modifying hurricanes is through long-term warming of the ocean and atmosphere due to accumulation of carbon pollution, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels,” Francis said. Warming skies and seas provide extra energy for storms to consume, giving more and more hurricanes the chance to transform into rainier and windier disasters without historical precedent. Monster storms are not political plots; they are premonitions of our climate future.
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