Fake clouds, seeding doubt (Evan Solomon, 2/29/24, GZero)
“Those clouds are not real,” the woman standing next me at the car pickup spot said, pointing to the overcast skies above San Diego.I had just arrived here to speak to a group of business leaders about Eurasia Group’s Top Risk report and the political landscape ahead in a year of polarizing elections.
“Sorry?”
“It’s usually beautiful and sunny here, but now with the cloud seeding, all we get is this,” she explained, adopting that apologetic tone proud locals use when their home isn’t exhibiting its best for a visitor. She interrupted her weather flow to give me some other tips about local restaurants — “check out Roberto’s taco stand” — and hiking in the area, before returning to the weather.
“Yeah, you know all those floods we had this past month?” she asked rhetorically. “They’re from these clouds the climate folks created with their cloud seeding because they want to block out the sun to cool the Earth down.”
And then she added the kicker: “And it’s poison, you know.”
Of all the risks I had come here to talk about, the poison-fake-clouds-causing-floods risk did not make the agenda. But the theory is so pervasive in California that the LA Times just wrote a long story in order to, well, rain on the conspiracy parade. […]
If someone doesn’t believe the clouds are real, why would they believe the facts about the economy are real?