Hurricane Helene, and now the ongoing Milton, have brought the tinfoil-hat crazies out of the woodwork on social media like the mentally deficient cockroaches they are. What’s mentally deficient? Combining a pathetic lack of scientific education (thanks a lot, American public schools) with still worse critical-thinking skills, and a level of gullibility that make con men the world over foam at the mouth. The result? Patently idiotic crap like this, which somehow gets likes, clicks and attention. I’ll not give these attention-starved crackpots the glory of linking to their page nor YouTube channel.
This keeps coming up, over and over for many years, like flies on turds, and no matter how many times truth swats away the flies, more keep returning.
Here is the truth, from an expert radar meteorologist (me) who has reviewed tens of thousands of radar images over my nearly 40 years in meteorology, as a student (the first four under the tutelage of world-renowned NSSL radar expert Don Burgess) then full-time operational meteorologist. I have published several formal and conference papers dealing with radar analysis and interpretation. Furthermore, I quite possibly have published more lead-authored formal peer-reviewed papers total (ten) than any full-time forecaster in U.S. history, with many more as a coauthor. It’s not bragging if it’s the truth. Now, with that out of the way…
These are rings of lower-atmospheric and ground returns around radar sites. You can see the centers of them at places like Springfield, Wichita, Tulsa (Inola), Kansas City (Pleasant Hill), Norman and many others. They are normal and common every night when radar waves are directed downward off temperature inversions to bounce off bugs, bats, birds, and all kinds of objects on the ground, and enough of the bounced signal returns to the antenna to be detected.
That’s it! That’s all! It really is that simple. No sinister agenda, no “geoengineering”. The radiation (10-cm microwaves weakening fast at distances of miles) cannot “change the weather”. They only can bounce off targets dense enough and return a tiny fraction of their original, already weakening power.
Elected officials can be morons about it too.
Who specifically is “they”? Where is your proof? You don’t have any. Busted liar! Margie, as a conservative, I see your behavior here as an embarrassment to conservatism and as desperate, opportunistic attention-seeking clickbait of the worst order. You know nothing of this topic; sit down and shut up. [Damn right I told a woman to sit down and shut up, no apologies. Get over it, wokes. That’s because it has nothing to do with her gender, and everything to do with her acting as dumb as a brick. She’d get the very same treatment if she were a dude, and her name was Marty. Now that’s real “equality”!]
Cloud seeding, despite how often and worldwide it has been tried (and still is), can work on very small, controlled scales in lab freezers. It is not proven to work versus unseeded clouds in the real, vast, chaotic atmosphere. Why? You can’t have a control group. Because of that, there’s no way to prove whether rain did or did not fall as a direct result of seeding. Extensively published research meteorologist Chuck Doswell has written an excellent summary of the seeding issue. Read that. Learn something.
As for Project Stormfury? That was an experimental attempt to seed hurricanes and change their rainfall patterns to reduce flooding. It failed. How? Results were inclusive to nil, for one, and for another (again), there were no “control hurricanes” of identical nature to compare against.
As for lasers, powerful, experimental ones have been shown to produce enough plasma to redirect a lightning flash down a path of lesser resistance, basically acting as a lightning rod. That isn’t “weather control”, anymore than lightning-current redirection through the walls of my house, by my rod-and-cable system, is “weather control”. What a load of crap. You’d need more power than mankind can muster to have even one hour’s chance of matching the energy in a hurricane.
Give these “weather control” sites, posts and videos no attention, and debunk them whenever possible with your gullible friends. They prey on ignorance and a terrible lack of scientific education in this nation.
Notice I am NOT for censorship of them. Instead, the way to react to bad ideas is with better ideas (truth). This is that, at least to the extent I feel like addressing the stupidity.
Yes, it doesn’t help that numerous real, damaging, cruel and/or otherwise evil governmental conspiracies have been done against citizens. That has set the plate for any cockamamie idea to seem legit. But that doesn’t mean they are!
While I realize critical, scientific thinking is in short supply, again, thanks to generally woeful standards to which far too many public-school students have been held, it is needed more than ever. In an age when kooks of all political spectra think “they” can control the weather, that essential oils can resolve cancer or any other disease in particular, that mineral crystals or planetary alignments somehow impart a power in one’s life, that GMO is deadly (when it in fact has helped agricultural productivity and saved millions from starvation), when a genetic and anthropological male with XY chromosomes can ridiculously claim to be female simply via self-declaration (yeah, and when I was a kid, I was Superman too)…we have, as a society, lost our grip on reason, logic, statistical numeracy (outliers don’t disprove the rule!), and rationalism. We need to get them back. We live in a sea of gullible, hapless suckers for any cockamamie idea.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.