Sometimes it’s easier to believe in space lasers than climate change

Hurricane Helene roared through the Southeast two weeks ago, destroying an uncounted number of buildings, triggering massive flooding and leaving more than 200 people dead. In a statement, President Joe Biden extended his sympathies, saying he was “praying for those who lost loved ones from Hurricane Helene, and for those whose homes, businesses, and communities were impacted by this terrible storm.”

Except that if Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is to be believed: Maybe he caused it??

Greene is perhaps America’s second most-famous conspiracy theorist, having risen to national attention by combining doomsday rhetoric with Republican politicking — mirroring the person who holds the top spot.

One of her best-known and most dubious assertions centered around a natural disaster. When a wildfire erupted in California, Greene speculated that the conflagration had been caused by a laser beam targeted from space at the direction of investment bankers. This was not when she was a kid, mind you; she offered this explanation in 2018. So perhaps it is not surprising that her explanation for Helene’s 2024 arrival is broadly similar.

She got there slowly. First, on Oct. 3, she posted a hard-to-read map showing how Helene’s path overlapped with heavily Republican areas of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. This isn’t incorrect, as The Washington Post also reported, but the idea is hampered by the same inaccuracy that plagues presidential election maps: lots of lightly populated rural areas vote red but occupy a lot of square mileage.

Later that day, she made the subtext explicit.

“Yes they can control the weather,” she wrote on X, the rumor-driven site that replaced Twitter. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

A “community note” — a form of internal fact-checking — was appended to that post noting that control of the weather to the scale of a hurricane was very much not possible.

But Greene dug in. Two days later, she shared a clip from CBS News describing how lasers could be used to control the weather. What was presented was theoretical, though, with the scientist being interviewed indicating that the idea was not demonstrably functional. What’s more, the same issue of scale applied. Making rain fall from a cumulonimbus is very different than ginning up massive regions of rain-filled clouds.

On Monday evening, Greene posted a meme getting at her original point, that evidence of the ability to manipulate weather was extensive. But it relied on a familiar tactic in the world of conspiracy theorizing: scraping together and misrepresenting a number of disparate and unrelated things.

Finally, about an hour later, Greene offered her most revealing assessment of the situation. Sharing a post from another user on X, she sarcastically joked that her theory was no more ludicrous than the idea that such storms were caused by “cow farts.” The question she was posing to readers was obvious: Which seemed more likely, that the government could whip up a hurricane or that Helene and other storms are worsened by methane emissions from the cattle industry?

The answer, of course, is the cow one.

Let’s set aside the ridiculousness of the weather-control argument, an argument that depends on nonexistent technology and on our assuming that the government never used this to, say, ground Russian aircraft preparing to invade Ukraine but instead saved it so they could wipe out western North Carolina.

Let’s instead focus on the abundant and convincing evidence that climate change is real, contributes to strengthening storms like Helene (and Hurricane Milton, now headed toward Florida) — and is driven to a small degree by emissions from livestock.

Climate change is a broad term referring primarily to the increase in global temperatures that has resulted from emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. Those gases rise into the upper atmosphere and remain there, keeping some heat that would otherwise escape into space within the atmosphere. That has raised global air and water temperatures, including in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hurricanes draw energy from ocean water, with warmer water offering the storms more fuel. Warmer air holds more precipitation. In a warmer world, then, we would expect to see hurricanes grow large, quickly. And we do.

Cow flatulence doesn’t contribute a lot of methane to the atmosphere. As NASA explains, cow burps are the bigger problem. It’s emissions from the agriculture industry more broadly that are the bigger contributor to atmospheric methane, though. And while methane is more effective at trapping heat, it makes up much less of the greenhouse gas that blankets the planet than carbon dioxide, produced largely by burning fossil fuels.

We don’t need to post random memes with patent numbers to demonstrate this. We can, instead, point to voluminous, detailed scientific research.

But Republicans such as Greene have invested enormous political capital in the idea that climate change isn’t real or is overstated. The issue has been deeply politicized over the past two decades, in part thanks to the efforts of fossil fuel companies. By now, the partisan damage has been done, with politicians such as Greene tossing out goofy claims about cow farts as a way to trigger conditioned scoffing from her political allies. To her and to many of her allies, climate change is as ridiculous an explanation for a hurricane as “maybe it was a government megalaser” is to objective observers.

This is the world we live in, one where a random person’s motivated poking around on the internet is presented as equivalent to actual controlled research. Where the poking around, when done by the right person, can spur a cadre of allies to step up in defense — regardless of how silly the results of the “research.”

Over on her official X account, Greene summarized her argument, again suggesting that the weather is under government control.

“Climate change is the new Covid,” she claimed. But this is backward. The right spent more than a decade devising ways to undercut climate science and stoke distrust in scientists, efforts that were leveraged to undercut confidence in the pandemic response and vaccines.

At the very least, Greene is (seeming inadvertently) admitting that climate change, like covid, is dangerous.