This past July 4 was one that will not be forgotten anytime soon. For a holiday that usually signals celebrations of freedom and pride in American ideals, for many Texans, a series of catastrophic floods have forever cast it into a different light.
As the floods swept away people, with 119 of them losing their lives, our beloved Hill Country region was hit hard, and people from all over the state – from Beaumont to Midland, as well as a few from out-of-state – were victims of the catastrophe.
While reasonable people who were affected from afar by the tragic events did what they could to help – from monetary donations to donation points to going down there to aide in recovery efforts – there seemed to be no shortage of the other side of the coin showing itself on social media.
Posts after regurgitated post on Facebook, Twitter/X, et. al, accused politicians of wanting to “play God” with the weather, and cited cloud seeding as a means by which the catastrophic flooding occurred.
This has sprung up time and time again in recent years, on the heels of tragic weather events, and I’m beyond sick and tired of such nonsense.
It never fails to amuse me how so-called “independent thinkers” usually always arrive at the same groupthink, confirmation bias-tickling conclusions with their shared nonsense, using the same flawed arguments and rhetoric, for their echo chamber bubbles.
For some, conspiracy theories offer comfort in a world that often feels chaotic. I once had a gentleman attempt to explain to me how the Amish were secretly building rocketships to get to the moon in order to mine uranium and sell to the Chinese. Seemed a little antithetical to the Amish system of values to me, but whatever.
Another individual, who was my next-door neighbor many moons ago, tried to tell me that then president Barack Obama was releasing torrents of mind-controlling drugs into the country’s water systems.
The world can be a chaotic place, yes, but as far as cloud seeding goes, it’s a practice that has been taking place since the 1960s.
Texas has an increasingly worse water shortage, and cloud seeding, which is legal under a statewide weather modification act, passed into law in 1967, is one tool that scientists have to help with the problem.
From what information I’ve found, cloud seeding can only enhance rain from existing clouds by up to 20%, and it cannot create massive deluges, like what befell the Hill Country area.
Whenever tragedy strikes, whether it’s a natural disaster or political upheaval, it is in line with human nature to seek out explanations. For some folks, the official or scientific answers might feel unsatisfying or inadequate, or even too random to accept.
Conspiracies offer an alternative – a narrative in which nothing is accidental, where every event is predicated on some reason, and clues are found in the most seemingly mundane of places.
The illusion of control, or knowledge, can be comforting. It’s easy to understand why so many fall prey to such things, largely amplified now by way of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other platforms.
We’re only human, and we’re hard-wired to detect patterns. It’s how our ancestors survived – whether that included spotting tracks in the dirt or changes in the weather. However, being dependent on patterns also primes our brains to see patterns where none exist.
Floods, fires and storms can (and do) occur, and the randomness of nature’s power can be frightening. A conspiratorial-minded brain can reframe that fear, and instead of a random act of nature, a disaster, like the Hill Country floods, become part of a plan. The irony in all of this, or one ironic notion, is that by pointing at a target for blame, disasters can feel less threatening.
One meteorologist, James Spann, wrote on Facebook about how he received “piles of nasty messages and verbal threats” after he reported simple facts about the Texas floods.
Spann reported that the floods were, simply, caused by natural weather dynamics and not human interference or weather modification efforts. He went on to state that the catastrophe was “not caused by Democrats or Republicans.” Good grief!
The internet has accelerated the spread of fringe ideas to where many tenets of such ways of thinking have sprung up into the mainstream.
The July 4 weekend flooding is a prime example of this sort of phenomenon in conspiracy thinking. While meteorologists like Spann can explain the catastrophic happenings through weather patterns, like stalled storm systems and heavier-than-normal rainfall, some folks would rather turn, instead, to theories about “weather manipulation” or “geoengineering”; the idea that man is playing God.
The idea that the government, or powerful elites in high castles somewhere, control the weather by using secret technologies is gold to those who consume conspiracies.
It seems incapable to many to accept that natural acts of a tragic scale can destroy lives without warning or purpose. Accepting randomness means, in part, accepting vulnerability, and that can be deeply unsettling to some.
People who treat confirmation bias-tickling rants on TikTok, Facebook and the like are not “in the know” or possessing any sort of secret information, or “research,” they’re just needing certainty and control and have access to the internet.
Tragedies occur, and the survivors of the floods that affected the Texan Hill Country, and the hearts and mental space of the world around it, don’t need nonsense conspiracies as they try to rebuild their lives. They need empathy and kindness.
