Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has made it abundantly clear that she didn’t study atmospheric sciences in college, launching an unhinged suggestion that officials could end the Los Angeles wildfires by manipulating the weather.
“Why don’t they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California?” the Republican asked Sunday in a post on X. “They know how to do it.”
Greene has repeatedly used cloud seeding—the practice of releasing silver iodide particles and other aerosols from planes or ground generators into clouds to encourage rain or snowfall—as a silver bullet explanation for weather phenomena while apparently not knowing how it works.
In October, she suggested that the federal government created Hurricane Milton using the technology, days before it battered Florida. Experts noted cloud seeding can create small amounts of localized rain in some cases, but not a hurricane.
President Joe Biden called Greene’s antics “so stupid,” while one of Greene’s GOP colleagues in the House said anyone who shares her views “needs to have their head examined.”
As for the wildfires currently blazing across Los Angeles, officials cannot simply create rain out of thin air.
If there even were an opportunity to attempt cloud seeding at a scale that would impact the wildfires, it would require storms or cloud systems to seed. There are currently no significant storms or cloud systems in the area.
Firefighters battle the Palisades Fire as flames rage across Los Angeles. / California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection/Handout
Southern California is also currently embroiled in a significant drought, meaning fewer seed-able systems; the soil moisture in much of the region, including Los Angeles, is in the bottom 2 percent of historical measurements, according to NASA data published through the National Integrated Drought Information System.
“In a drought there are likely to be fewer seed-able storms,” reads a 2022 article in Yale Environment 360, which is published by the Yale School of the Environment. “And when there are storms, even the estimates from cloud seeding companies themselves show the practice increases precipitation by only around 10 percent in a given area.”
“Please keep politicians away from weather,” said Bryce Jones, a meteorologist with WDRB News in Louisville, Kentucky, in a tweet quoting Greene’s latest weather conspiracy. “And keep politics entirely out of it. This is exhausting.”
It is not the first time Greene has dabbled in wildfire commentary; Shortly after her election to Congress a Facebook post emerged in which she had blamed California wildfires in 2018 on a Jewish-controlled “space laser”.
Her cloud-seeding proposal comes as the latest example of misinformation spread by U.S. right-wingers as firefighters continue to battle two destructive fires that have burned almost 38,000 acres.
A view of flames at the mountain as seen from Topanga Canyon near Pacific Palisades in Topanga, Los Angeles. / Anadolu / Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images
Right-wing media accounts have baselessly pointed to diversity policies in the Los Angeles fire department as a factor in the spread of the devastating blazes.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) falsely claimed that Democrats redirected FEMA funds to migrants.
And President-elect Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., tried to blame a 2022 donation of fire equipment by Los Angeles firefighters to Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, said Sunday that his country has offered to send 150 firefighters to support Los Angeles emergency responders.
