Future Climate Shocks and Conspiracism

It was still dark outside in the early hours of july fourth, twenty twenty five when the Guadalupe River in Texas transformed from an idyllic backdrop into a supersized beast It rose in some places from under two feet higher than a two story house in less than two hours The raging waters crashed through Texas Hill Country sweeping up cars and RVs ripping buildings off their foundations and killing at least one hundred and thirty seven people, including dozens of children Search and rescue efforts were barely underway when the weather control rumors started churning. This is conspiracy, she wrote I'm Kristen Conger Grab your red string and follow along Now you all, if you have some family in Texas, now would definitely be the time to check on them, family, your friends, especially if they live in the central area. Floodwaters brought down trees, homes, and buildings tearing through camp Mystic, where seven hundred fifty girls were spending the holiday weekend. Some are still reported missing. What we're also seeing is people latching onto a conspiracy that clownd se is what has caused the deadly floods. We didn't have anything to do with the flooding. I feel I'm praying for everybody affected by it. They are cyber conspiracy theith You know, you don't patent a conspiracy and these things have been patented and been proven they do it. I'm big on God and just letting work his magic. not people trying to play God. There's a reason Texas Hill countountry is nicknamed Flash Flood Alley. It is the most flood prone place in America And it was an environmental risk factor that had only grown riskier last summer. due to prolonged drought. You see, its shallow soil sits on limestone And when tropical storm remnants and a thunderstorm cluster converged overhead, dumping one hundred billion gallons of rain in the region Hill countountry took it on like a slab of cement which is to say it didn't take it on at all And instead, it became instant runoff into an overflowing Guadalupe Rriver The flash flood damaged thirteen summer camps dotted along its miles of Typically picturesque river banks I watched phone footage of a camp Lahunta cabin with boys still inside of it Hold down the Guadalupe Wobbly flashlights, cutting through the darkness, tracking the screaming flotilla According to a disclimer text overlay Those kids all survived Otherwise I wouldn't be recounting that horrible image In fact, all but one of the affected camps made it through with no fatalities. Cross the river from Camplo Junta though The All girls Christian camp miss it Us and unfathomable twenty seven The social listening platform Open Measures, tracks online extremism and disinformation and noted that weather conspiracies spiked on fringier platforms like True Social and Rumble in response to those Texas floods Roughly a quarter of all the posts they identified blamed federal authorities like the military and EPA for somehow causing the flash floods And the most shared ones originated from Q andon extremists Notably for our women and conspiracism purposes, the most prolific weather control poster on trrh Social was not Donald Trump But a woman named Cornelia D Nunzio And Cornelia, I will say, I popped onto her account and It's wild I'll just leave it at that But these weather control conspiracies proliferated on the major platforms as well Gabrielle Yoder, a MAGa influencer who goes by at that Patriot mom twweeted the following day. this is in all caps Stop spraying our skies We do not consent Yodor is a Texas hill country transplant And she told her one hundred sixty one thousand Instagram followers, quote I could visibly see them spraying prior to the storm that has now claimed over forty lives The them, Yoder was likely referring to, was Rainmaker a cloud seeding startup that had wrapped an operation days before in an area more than one hundred miles from the Flash flood catastrophe. In addition to the technological impossibility of cloud seeding generating one hundred billion gallons of rain on demand and from so far away Rainmaker insisted it had complied with state regulations on agricultural cloud seeding and suspended the project due to the storm forecast To which Gabrielle Yoder and many others called Bes As a result, Rainmaker's CEO fended off death threats And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOA, went on the offensive. In Oklahoma City, a man had broken into a new station property that housed one of NoA's nextext genen live radar weather satellite systems and unsuccessfully attempted to crash it The agency was coordinating with local law enforcement to protect other satellite sites around the country that could be similarly ambushed by extremists convinced the floods were caused by a government controlled meteorological weapon of mass destruction. They campt miss it, girls Memorialized as Heavens twenty seven were the emotional linchpens conspiratorial thinking that what had just happened was distinctly unnatural. How could it be? that all those other campers along the Guadalupe survived and yet So many mystic girls died Was it a coincidence that it was a Christian operation More than a hundred other people perished in the flood waters, but so many go fearing innocent girls taken at once consonspiraciess saw it as a targeted attack And at this point, I'm not surprised Government weather control is actually one of the most widely believed conspiracy theories in America. In part, because the U.S government and humans across history have attempted to do just that contontrol the weather or scapegoat other people for causing bad weather and allegedly controlling it For instance, in the eighteen nineties, some researchers thought that if they fired cannons at the clouds, that it would shock rain right out of them the old cloud seating, I guess. In nineteen fifty three, amid the Cold War, the US actually formed the President's Advisory Committee on weather control because yes, they were freaked out about the possibility that the Soviets might figure out the technology to control the weather and create massive weather weapons. They'd already figured out nuclear bombs, so why not a weather bomb And finally, in nineteen eighty nine, Taylor Swift's favorite year. One engineer pro sending a massive glass umbrella, essentially, into space with the idea that it could reflect solar radiation Cool the planet. What we're witnessing today isn't just history repeating itself It's weather control as the new climate change denial And also a conspiracy convergence It's what climate hoax looks like when the environmental disasters become impossible you ignore Just think about the past few years. twenty twenty three, we had the Maui Wildfires, twenty twenty four, backack to back Hurricanes Helene and Milton. twenty twenty five, the Texas floods. twenty twenty six El Nino is back and this just in. The super early NGOs of the world have declared An incoming El Nino from hell with a summer of extreme heat droughts, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes predicted Cool, cool, cool And yes, political opportunists, algorithms and widespread institutional mistrust are fueling all of this But as University of Buffalo sociologist Holly Bucks observed In the wake of the coronavirus, people concerned about government control over vaccines and pandemic responses began to organize against geoengineering the intentional use of large scale technology to cool the global climate. In other words weather control And it's now being carried further with help from pandemic bonded allies in the anti vax and Woooo wellness spaces Holly Bucks explained, the conspiracy itself has also evolved Today, it's less about chem trails and more about ideas of weather modification or geoengineering as believers have adopted the language and debates of the scientific community Like if we go to the late nineties Conspiracy theorists snooping on U. S. military research alleged that contrails, those chalk lines of condensation that planes leave behind that are actually caused by ice crystals formed in high altitudes. It's pretty basic science They claimed those were actually Chem Trails. Yes, chem trarail is a fully made up term and concept To their eyes, those streaks were visual evidence of the government crop dusting us with foreign chemicals and ionized metals that keep us sick and crazy Cloud seeding meant to juice rainfall for farmers was further taken as a sign of nefarious actors playing God And we've got the latest conspiracy embattled technology of solar geoengineering, or diverting sunlight off the atmosphere as a way to mitigate climate change and conspiracists twist extreme weather events into Three buckets of disaster conspiracies The first one casts blame on secret technologies and weather weapons And of course, the government agencies like NOAA, the EPA, and FEMA that are all in on their protection and deployment The next bucket is secretly injected, sprayed or crop dusted chemicals in the atmosphere, where you'll find chem trails, cloud seeding, and today's weather conspiracy catch all Geoengineering. Finally third disaster conspiracy bucket are directed energy weapons or ds These are deep state lasers, often blamed for wildfires. and all of this, you know, intersects with conspiracies on Radiation, five G networks, climate lockdowns where the idea is that the elites are actually tricking us into thinking that climate change is actually a thing so that they can force us to stay home and essentially locked into quote unquote climate ghettos in order to lower greenhouse gas emissions And think about it. I mean, conspiracy theories are always about h Who's really pulling the strings to make bad things happen Is there a more powerful and terrifying force than nature? I mean, even the rich couldn't stop the LA wildfires from devouring their palisades mansions And here's the thing. Bad weather Feds conspiracies Like these are predictable conspiracy incubators. They create information vacuums, staggering losses, and seemingly inexplicable institutional and infrastructural failures to protect the victims. But of course, there are kernels of truth to the mistrust. I mean, weather doesn't discriminate, but hello, city planners, building codes, all of these things do. Like with Hurricane Katrina It's not a coincidence that wider, wealthier neighborhoods of New Orleans that are situated on higher ground were okay compared to the predominantly black poor lower Ninth ward that was submerged when the levees broke When it comes to weather modification, obviously that warrants accountability too But these conspiracies blow the power and actual scale of geoengineering way out of proportion So Noah has been researching two methods that are still at the theoretical stage. This is just for an example of what we're talking about One is stratospheric aerosol injection. That's where you release a bunch of microscopic particles like miles high into the atmosphere and all of those microscopic particles reflect small amounts of sunlight back into space The other method they've been looking into involves sprinkling low lying ocean clouds with sea salt to make them more reflective for allowing less sunlight to reach the water And these two methods, like once you're in kind of weather conspiracy land, these two methods come up a lot as like evidence. of some kind of control happening Part of the problem though, lies in our language Like before I started researching, I did not know that natural disaster is such a contested term Bea for decades, folks in the field of disaster studies and risk management have argued, hey, natural disaster is a misleading term, since by definition It takes humans to turn natural hazards like floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires into disaster scenarios A twenty nineteen study, for instance, published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, which I'm sure you all have subscriptions to emphasize that while natural hazards are unpreventable disasters resulting from them aren't. A hazard becomes a disaster because its impact threatens the lives and livelihoods of people who are often vulnerable due to discrimination and marginalization inequitable access to resources, knowledge and support as well as rapid urbanization, environmental degradation, and climate change. Nevertheless, the study authors noted politicized use of natural disaster and its foregone implications has only grown In the U S, whether conspiracism really broke the dam. in twenty twenty four. Obviously it didn't start then, but there had really never been such an intense tidal wave of it The catalysts were those back to back hurricanes, Helene and Milton that made U S landfall about a month or so out from U. S presidential elections The storm chaos was capitalized on by your usual anti climate science commentators, clout chasers and white supremacist gun wavers. And also the Trump campaign When Helene ripped through the Southeast and killed more than two hundred people Georgia rep, Marjorie Taylor Green Heavily implied the Biden administration manufactured the storm to suppress red state Trump voters posted on X to our one point two million followers Yes, they can control the weather It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done. When the deadly Texas flood struck Marjorie Taylor Green announced she'd be introducing federal legislation ban and criminalize quote, Weather modification and geoengineering that wasn't happening. also didn't cause the Texas floods. Soon after, she organized a congressional panel where experts debunked claims that the government was using those tools to cause the recent devastating floods, hurricanes and wildfires But that's not the headline Green ran with Let's be clear. Weather modification is no longer a conspiracy theory, she said in a press statement It's real It's happening And the American people deserve a voice. to which The American people do have a voice Just ask the emergency responders and meteorologists who went to the mat Daring, Helene, and Milton When those hurricanes set off an unprecedented surge of misinformation They were on the receiving end of death threats Meteorologists were presumed to be in on environmental sorcery In october twenty twenty four, Michigan meteorologist Katie Nicolaow told the Guardian I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane There are people assuming meteorologists control the weather FEMA had to whip up a rumor response debunking site to manage the madness, which probably did Nothing Not to mention they had to manage the actual federal disaster response And on the ground, aid workers encountered hostile storm survivors and had to convince them that they weren't scammers, human traffickers, or part of a government land takeover And that weather control threat perception, like turning these scientists, meteorologists into the enemy. Like that It didn't just blow away with those storms In april twenty twenty four, Tennessee became the first state to enact a law banning cloud seeding, geo engineering and weather modification process, it essentially said Crails, yeah Those are real In early twenty twenty five, Kentucky legislators introduced a similar bill in the wake of flooding that killed twenty three people in the state Louisiana has since passed its own ban. And so has Florida. And with its new band Florida is the first state to make geoengineering a felony Like, even state reps who don't believe the conspiracies have voted for these bills on the basis that, well, our constituents worry about it So why not usease their minds Why not? Ban something does not exist in the way your voters think it does. Even though Marjorie Taylor Greene's federal bill that she dubbed the Clean skies Act died ultimately in committee Dozens of state legislatures are debating its own preemptive weather modification restrictions A geoengineering ban almost passed in Wyoming this year until enough lawmakers realized, hey, maybe we shouldn't ban cloud seeding Since the Colorado River is running dry and that is our main water source In February, MAGA consonspiracists on Facebook concocted a nonexistent federal task force they named Operation Skywatch. and claimed President Trump An RFK junior had launched a quote global crackdown on chem trails And we're about to mass arrest and prosecute scores of pilots, scientists and quote elite financiers for environmental terrorism and crimes against humanity You see what that does there? Like this is what I'm talking about in terms of kind of the new climate denial They are hijacking this concept of you environmental terrorism or environmental degradation that climate activists might point to and instead flip it and say, oh, no, the actual environmental terrorism is coming from c trails Now again, Trump and an RFK had done no such thing, there was no such federal task force. But I honestly would not put it past RFK to try In addition to vaccing conspiracies and working out in hard denims RFK has been a Kem Trails conspiracy booster as well. I mean, he's one embodiment of this conspiracy convergence that we're seeing has also leaned into weather control conspiracies when it served him the twenty twenty four presidential election, when climate denialism and weather manipulation, misinformation, like the whole Hllene of it all They part of the strategy, as Politico's Eergy and ennvironment News reported at the time The Associated Foreign press also noted that RFK has promised the health and Han serervices federal agency he leads would back federal efforts to ban geoengineering. Again, the key boogeyman of weather control conspiracies these days Now the big picture is this All of this worsening weather predicted evidence of climate change If global temperatures continue rising as projected The next generation's forecast calls for five times more extreme weather events, as in More wildfires, droughts, floods, heat waves. So why the persistent conspiracism I mean, in part, yes, we have we have the whole ecosystem we've been talking about around politics, algorithms, cloud chasing, like people weaponizing the weather for their own ends. But also it's part of the counterintuitive surprises of our human brains Research suggests The more weather extremes we experience doesn't necessarily change our minds about climate interventions and makes some of us more vulnerable to conspiracy thinking And of course it does I mean, propagandists and grifters aside belieelf. is deeper than the weather. Sociologist Holly Bucks sees it as roots in quote, fear about technology and environmental change loss of agency and lack of trust in elites. And speaking of which helpeling matters is the lack of geo engineering oversight and public research funding instead of its current reliance. on the very elites we are not conspiracists to mistrust. For example, that cloud seeding startup founder who got all those death threats for the Texas floods He has ties to Peter Theal. who's also a rainmaker investor Or how about this betweenetween two thousand eight and twenty eighteen Bill Gates and his foundations funded over ten percent of global solar geoengineering research what transparency watch doogs are saying is not like mistrust the elites, but rather Like it is better for all of us when there is more transparency and less esssentially rich people developing technologies that could have massive implications for all of us. A recent report from the Government accccountability Office on the lack of private sector geoengineering transparency found Most of the companies involved don't even know they're supposed to register with NoA That's the agency that's supposed to keep an eye on all of this Also a major conspiratorial villain And Noah, meanwhile, is not going out of its way to let them know And here is where conspiracy would say, well, that's because the military has already secretly mastered weather weaponry and control, so the less transparency, the better for all involved because they want to keep it a secret because they want to secretly take over and destroy us all with bad weather and' exaggerating, but you get it. Observable facts, though, and context tell us that the private sector is already running so much shit that the government has no interest in regulating Why would it go out of its way to break bureaucratic log jams and get involved in a highly contested side tech space I mean, I don't know the answ That's the thing about conspiracy explanations There's so much more emotionally satisfying and thriller movie plot than the reasons most natural disasters happen. As the twenty twenty five Texas flash floods generated weather modification and cloud seedating conspiracies A different kind of devastating misinformation went viral too two days into search and rescue efforts. A story of two young girls' miraculous rescue from thirty feet up a tree they'd clung to for survival, spread from word of mouth among volunteer cleanup teams. to Facebook. to local news outlets, which then scrambble to publish retractions when public safety officials confirmed it was sadly Untrue Miles away from Camp Mystic, that family owned Christian summer camp that lost twenty seven girls and its executive director parents of the deceased and missing were reeling in another kind of misinformation vortex. When weather turned deadly, the camp Mystic leadership told them There was nothing to worry about This place is often described as a Texas institution Camp Mystic was hallowed ground to generations of moneynied mystic girls And the Eastland family that ran it were and are beloved accross its nearly hundred year history C'amp Mystic has survived its fair share of risky weather And since most of its staff and counselors had spent summer after summer on its riverside grounds presumed to be fully equipped for what to do if and when the waters rise Heavens twenty seven a name adopted for the Mystic Girls Lost to the Food. proved They weren't And the more canamp mystic leadership told the Heavens twenty seven parents that their tragedy was unavoidable and such an unprecedented disaster the less the grieving parents believed them. Emergency weather alerts, for instance, when ignored for over three hours Why han't they evacuated to higher grounds sooner Many of the parents had no idea of Camp Mystick's flood history either Like the one in nineteen thirty two that swept away the original cabins The nineteen seventy eight flood wasn't as destructive But in nineteen eighty seven, another forced a neighboring camp to evacuate to Mystic and ten of those kids died along the way Troublingly in twenty thirteen, twenty nineteen and twenty twenty. Camp Mystic petitioned FEMA to redraw its flood maps to exclude a number of its buildings. and save Mystic a bundle. on flood insurance And FEMA complied The riverside cabins where most of the Heavens twenty seven bunked weren't merely in a floodplain, which is the entire zone of land susceptible to flooding They were situated in the most dangerous part of a floodplain called a floodway Fastest moving currents and highest rising waters occur during epic pourowns and dam breaks When Western Carolina University coastal geologist and flood expert, Rob Young saw where the youngest Campt Mystic girls' cabins were He told New York Magazine He couldn't sleep for two days In the floodway, we expect a velocity, a charging river, Young said Someone should be in jail The Heavens twenty seven parents agreed By the time Camp Mystix family owners announced that God and their community had blessed them to reopen for summer twenty twenty six parents were suing for wrongful death. Public scrutiny and lawsuits mounting Camp Mystic walked back its plans and remained closed. After all One of the girls, an eight year old Ceey Stewart has never been found Meanwhile, in the Alabama State House Lawmakers passed its own version of the Heavens twenty seven Camp saafety Bill The deadly flash floods also revived proposed legislation to ban alleged chem trails and cloud seeding It ultimately didn't pass, but nevertheless predicted more of the same In february twenty twenty six, during congressional debate on the bill A Republican witness in favor of outlawing nonxistent weather control told the body, quote, I have watched the weather, cloud seeding in Texas, and it happened right before Camp Mystic. And yes, it breaks my heart. But yes, That five hundred year flood was the result of cloud seeding in Texas The hottest weather question for twenty twenty six is will it El Nino like it's eighteen seventy seven That was one of the most powerful on record, Inigating droughts across the global South and contributing to widespread famine that killed an estimated fifty million people The World Economic Forum states the obvious that the nineteenth century El Ninho from hell quote highlights how climate shocks can turn lethal when combined with hunger, weak governance, and institutional neglect And today, a hotter planet shaped economy, fragile food systems, and geopolitical instability could create a quote climate shock layered onto a cost of living shock Should the worst case scenario El Nino forecast come to fruition Whether it will is a question that no climate scientists or meteorologists can say for certain because It's the weather But the Elminho projections are also exactly the kind of international warning conspiracists easily read into as globalist doomsday signaling like this from the World Economic Forum, saying, quote, food reserves, water systems, heat health plans, electricity demands, social protection, and emergency logistics should be stress tested before the shock arrives in the conspiracy gaze Whatever disasters El Nino does or doesn't reap becomes proof of a plot. Either the WEF and others are right and we experience a wretched, destabilizing El Nino, that means they predicted it because they were planning it all along with secret geoengineering weather weapons Or It's not as bad as they warned and that means they were psychologically conditioning us for a future shock attack Either way With the U.S. midterm elections happening this fall My conspiracy she wrote forecast calls for more weather control conspiracism And for the record I hope I'm wrong If you want to check out my sources, just go to conspiracyhewrote. com slash episodes I would love to hear from you. Are you concerned about the weather or weather control conspiracism. What have you noticed Are there other conspiracy theory red strrings that you would like me to unravel I love an assignment Links to get in touch are in the episode description And if you would like to support my work, just find consonspiracy. She wrote on Patreon and you can get ad free episodes. How great is that? And how great are you for being here Thank you all so much for listening Until next time. As financial and legal troubles continue to mount for the owners of Camp Mystic following last summer's deadly floods, todayoday we're learning they have filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy. An attorney representing families of six Camp Mystic victims believes this filing is a tactic to delay their cases. Sam Taylor told CBS News every step of the way, they've tried to avoid accountability He said, adding the filing is in his opinion, another effort by them to avoid a trial