Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has said that "they" can control the weather, said she plans to introduce a bill to make what she calls "dangerous and deadly" weather modification a felony. "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," the Republican said in a post on X Saturday, per the Hill. Meteorologists and other experts said there must be some misunderstanding.
The legislation would target cloud seeding. The Government Accountability Office defines that practice as adding tiny particles, most often silver iodide crystals, to clouds to spark rain or snow. Greene said her bill is modeled after Florida's new law, but its legislators say cloud seeding is safe but is being undermined by conspiracy theories about efforts to change the weather. One reason is that contrails, which are condensation trails left in the air by planes, are sometimes confused with chemtrails. They're "kind of two different things, and I think people have got them mixed up, because they think that they've heard that this chemtrail conspiracy theory is about geoengineering and weather modification," said Mick West, a fellow for the Committee of Skeptical Inquiry.
"Then, they discover that there's this thing called cloud seeding, which actually is weather modification. And then they kind of put two and two together and make 17," West said. Greene didn't mention the Texas flooding, but her comments still drew criticism for alluding to debunked theories that someone is causing severe weather. She's suggested before that hurricanes are targeted at Republican areas and that space lasers caused wildfires, per WAGA. Travis Herzog is among the meteorologists who pushed back on Greene's logic, saying the most seeding can do is "take an existing cloud and enhance the rainfall by up to 20%."
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
