Conspiracy Theories About the Texas Floods Lead to Death Threats

More than 100 people have now been confirmed for having lost their lives in the sudden floods that hit the houses and camps along the edge of the Guadalupe river in the early hours of Friday morning. Meteorologists who spoke to Wired rejected the allegations that the National Weather Service did not precisely predict the risk of flooding in Texas. But a few hours after the tragedy, conspiracy theorists, right-wing influencers and legislators pushed wild affirmations on social networks that floods were sort of geo-conceived.

“False weather. False hurricanes. False floods. Fake. Fake.” Wrote Kandiss Taylor, who intends to present himself as GOP candidate to represent the 1st district of the Congress of Georgia in the House of Representatives, wrote in a position 2.4 million times. “It does not even seem natural,” wrote Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director of Women for America, wrote on X, in an article that has been seen 9 million times.

While the emergency response to the floods was still held on Saturday, the American representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, tweeted that she would present a bill to “put an end to the dangerous and fatal practice of the modification of bad weather and geo-engineering”. Greene, who once blamed California forest fires with laser beams or light bundles linked to an electric company with alleged links with a powerful Jewish family, said the bill will be similar to the Florida Senate bill, which Governor Ron Desantis signed in June. This bill makes the meteorological change a third degree crime, liable to a doll of up to $ 100,000. (Greene’s office did not respond to a request for comments on the question of whether her announcement was specifically linked to the floods in Texas.)

On Instagram, the influencer on the right, Gabrielle Yoder, jumped on one of the greatest theories of the conspiracy, claiming that the seeding of the clouds was responsible for provoking floods and calling Doricko specifically.

The Docicko company was also appointed by the former national security adviser in disgrace Michael Flynn on X. He wrote that “anyone who calls this as a conspiracy theory can go themselves”.

Doricko told Wired that Rainmaker was working on a brief cloud of clouds a few days before storms near the city of Runge, Texas, about 120 miles from Kerr County, where the worst flood was concentrated. But Doricko says that his personnel meteorologists have noted a strong humidity in the region. The company, he says, canceled its operations, in accordance with state regulations.

The sowing of clouds – The practice of increasing precipitation in a cloud by introducing materials such as silver iodide or dry ice – has been used for decades. The Department of Texas on licenses and regulations maintain a page on the current efforts of meteorological modification of irrigation districts, counties and other groups of the state. Doricko’s company, Rainmaker, is a buzzing startup that aims to “[synthesize] Advanced technology with environmental management. »»

Several meteorologists told Wired that there was no way that the sowing of the clouds was responsible for the devastating storms that raged Texas last week.

“It is not physically possible or possible in the laws of atmospheric chemistry to cloud seeds on a scale that would cause an event like [the Texas flooding] To perform, ”explains Matt Lanza, a digital meteorologist based in Houston. Lanza compares the sowing of the clouds to add “icing to a cake”: he is able to make precipitation from clouds in the drier areas, and not to create storms large from the thin air.

The National Weather Service already warns last Tuesday about potential night showers in certain parts of Texas, thanks to humidity coming to the north of Tropical Storm Barry, which led to the earth last weekend in Mexico.

“Meteorological ingredients [for the storm] were already there, and the seeding of the clouds could not have played a role, ”explains Lanza.

Doricko is no stranger to anti-time modification factions. He spent a large part of half of this year testifying against a band of anti-geo-geo-geo-geo-geo-free invoices, including that which finally succeeded in Florida.

The personal profile of Doricko – He was photographed once with Bill Clinton and was chosen as Thiel scholarship holder – seems to have facilitated attacks on his business for those looking for a plot on which to pin the devastating storms in Texas.

“I try to be as transparent as possible, because it is an incredibly controversial subject, but is not as regulated and discussed transparently as it should be by the federal government,” explains Doricko. “Just for the record, I am not a deep plant of Bill Gates or Palant, Peter Thiel or Bill Clinton.”