\n<\/p>\n
The popularity of these conspiracies may also be on the rise in right-wing spaces. Some MAHA figureheads, including Nicole Shanahan, have shared geoengineering content promoting conspiracy theories, while Marla Maples, Donald Trump\u2019s ex-wife, told Fox News in July that she helped Florida\u2019s anti-weather modification bill pass. (Bill Gates\u2019 track record of funding solar geoengineering research has undoubtedly helped fan some of these flames.)<\/p>\n
Doricko, the Rainmaker CEO, has spent much of the past year testifying in state legislatures that were considering vague anti-geoengineering bills that would have also banned cloud seeding. In May, he told WIRED that he and his team had spoken in front of 31 state legislatures. Education, he says, is key to getting people on board with the technology.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s some cohort of people that believe that, you know, Joe Biden is actually a lizard person,\u201d he says. \u201cI think that a lot of people aren\u2019t quite that far along, but are very concerned about chemtrails, probably. Showing them farms that are greener than they otherwise would have been with testimonies from those farmers\u2014that\u2019s probably the way that we\u2019re gonna win hearts and minds.\u201d (Doricko told WIRED last week that in recent months, his company has had \u201cinterest, curiosity, and excitement\u201d from various state governments, both Democratic and Republican, in using cloud seeding to enhance water supply. \u201cThe education that we had the opportunity to do ultimately I think assuaged a lot of reasonable people\u2019s concerns.\u201d)<\/p>\n
There is one additional type of human-caused shift in the world\u2019s weather that played an outsize role in the hearing: climate change. Greene and other Republican lawmakers repeated many climate denial talking points and bad framing around climate science, including the idea that carbon dioxide is good for the planet because it is plant food. There were multiple mentions of beach houses owned by Barack Obama and Al Gore as a way of illustrating supposed hypocrisy about sea level rise. One of the witnesses called by the House majority works at an organization with a long history of questioning established climate science; he claimed in his testimony that there is \u201cuncertainty as to exactly how much influence humans have exerted\u201d over the global rise in temperature\u2014a take that is out of line with mainstream science.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy view is that this is mainly a way of saying there are secret forces at work that are making your life miserable, and everything bad is due to these secret forces,\u201d says Dessler. \u201cWhen in reality, it\u2019s not secret forces, it\u2019s climate change and it\u2019s these other things that are hurting people.\u201d<\/p>\n
But even a whole hearing dedicated to a conspiracy theory grab bag may not be enough for some. On X, a popular anti-geoengineering community was alight with posts about the hearing\u2014including many critical of the experts and their findings. \u201cThis was a scripted show to protect the government\u2019s weather control agenda,\u201d one moderator\u2019s post reads. \u201cWhy no independent voices?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The popularity of these conspiracies may also be on the rise in right-wing spaces. Some MAHA figureheads, including Nicole Shanahan, have shared geoengineering content promoting conspiracy theories, while Marla Maples, Donald Trump\u2019s ex-wife, told Fox News in July that she helped Florida\u2019s anti-weather modification bill pass. (Bill Gates\u2019 track record of funding solar geoengineering research<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[2588,3922,452,13522,13523,13521,13524,110],"class_list":{"0":"post-22050","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-conspiracy","9":"tag-doge","10":"tag-hearing","11":"tag-modification","12":"tag-nest","13":"tag-subcommittee","14":"tag-theorizing","15":"tag-weather"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}