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When she’s not wielding space lasers, Marjorie Taylor Greene is busy peddling conspiracies about the government’s ability to control the weather, as proven by her recent commentary on the California wildfires.
The Donald Trump loyalist and general societal nuisance took to her colleague’s social media platform earlier this week to suggest a solution to the blaze currently ravaging large swathes of the Greater Los Angeles region. Was her solution the deployment of urgent aid and resources, you ask? Or perhaps minimizing the political blame-game being played by her boss? Nope, it was suggesting that Democrats use “geoengineering” to “control the weather.” If you read that and thought, huh?, here’s a little translation of all that inanity.
On Jan. 13, Greene asked in an X post why the Democrats haven’t “use[d] geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down” on the LA wildfires, adding that the government “know[s] how to do it.” The foolishness of the suggestion was enough to catch the attention of X’s Community Notes feature, which allows users to fact-check certain posts. Naturally, that function got an absolute workout in response to Greene’s message, with one Community Note providing additional context around how cloud seeding actually works.
Spoiler alert, but cloud seeding — the effectiveness of which has been debated by scientists — is not an all-powerful process wielded by the government like Storm from X-Men. While, as the Community Note explains, cloud seeding does “work… to form a droplet heavy enough to fall to earth” this process only works in certain conditions, and is not nearly as powerful as Greene theorizes — and certainly not the point of extinguishing the extremely destructive LA wildfires.
That much was clarified in a second Community Note under Greene’s post (she must be setting a record), which corrected her suggestion and explained that while cloud seeding “can slightly enhance precipitation,” it “cannot generate major storms or control weather patterns in any significant way.” So, despite her best efforts, Greene cannot steal the role of X-Men’s Storm from Cynthia Erivo, but all of that was lost on her since she took the Community Notes as evidence supporting her theory.
“I just want to thank Community notes for effectively proving me right in that they can control the weather,” Greene wrote, obviously glimpsing over the part where the exact opposite was explained. In any case, this isn’t the only time the far-right politician has suggested Democrats are capable of atmokinesis.
In October, amid the devastating effects of Hurricane Helene, Greene again connected the natural disaster to her theory that “they can control the weather,” in an X post that was likewise fact-checked by a Community Note feature that works overtime on her conspiracy-filled page. Oh, and those space lasers I mentioned earlier? They were, according to Greene, the igniters of the California wildfires in 2018.
That’s right, it’s not climate change that is fuelling and exacerbating natural disasters, but an unseen laser pointed from space by some nebulous entity — made worse by Democrats’ failure to cloud seed storms big enough to extinguish them. If she wasn’t a politician (wouldn’t that be nice?), Greene might’ve had an illustrious career as a science fiction author.