For the second time in three weeks, the Biden administration has issued a public notice debunking conspiracy theories and false claims meant to undermine the federal government’s role in preparing for and responding to hurricanes.
On Wednesday, NOAA released a document titled “Fact Check: Debunking weather modification claims” to counter falsehoods across social media about the agency’s capacities, actions and motives around hurricanes.
The falsehoods — which proliferated as Hurricane Milton was approaching Florida’s Gulf Coast on Oct. 8 — included claims that federal agencies were engaged in nefarious activities to apply technologies to strengthen and steer hurricanes across oceans to make landfall at particular locations.
Some of the wilder conspiracies involved accusations that the government was using “cloud seeding” to manipulate the hurricanes’ behavior and NEXRAD Doppler radars not for forecasting purposes, but to steer the storms toward particular areas.
