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By Hatty Willmoth
Food & Nutrition Reporter
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Scientists and social media commenters alike have rejected suggestions by politician Marjorie Taylor Greene on X that Californian wildfires could be put out by cloud seeding.
"Why don't they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California?" wrote Greene, @mtgreenee on X, on Sunday, January 12. "They know how to do it."
Greene is a Georgia congresswoman who describes herself in her X bio as a proud American, pro-life, pro-gun and pro-Trump. Her post has had 1.3 million views.
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Newsweek has reached out to Greene for comment via email and on X.
What Is Cloud Seeding?
"Cloud seeding is a weather modification technique that involves spreading fine particles (usually made of silver iodide, salt or dry ice), or even electric charge, into existing clouds to help the formation of precipitation," Professor Maarten Ambaum, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Reading, U.K., told Newsweek.
"The injected particles or charges interact with the cloud drops and ice crystals, and can help the formation of precipitation from those cloud drops or ice crystals."
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Could Cloud Seeding Help in California?
"Cloud seeding adds small particles to the atmosphere to attempt to promote rainfall, but to form clouds and rain you need enough water in the atmosphere," Professor John Marsham, atmospheric scientist at the University of Leeds, U.K., told Newsweek.
"Cloud seeding is useless if there is not enough water in the air. The fires in California are due to the ongoing drought; there simply isn't enough water in the air. Cloud seeding would be useless."
But even if California had not been experiencing drought, cloud seeding was not generally an appropriate solution to wildfires, said Ambaum.
"Cloud seeding is unlikely to be applicable to help wildfires, even if suitable clouds were present at the right location," he said. "The wildfires themselves already perturb those local clouds to such an extent that any cloud seeding would not leave any observable impact.
"Cloud seeding in clouds over wildfires is likely ineffective and possibly dangerous to the pilots of the seeding aircraft."
Marsham said that Greene's suggestion just distracted from the "real story of the reckless behavior of the fossil fuel industry."
"The severity of these fires has been driven by our use of fossil fuels, and the fossil fuel industry continues to seek to delay the actions urgently required," he said.
What People Are Saying
Responses on X were mixed between those mocking Greene and those sharing conspiracy theories about why they believed an undefined "they" was allowing California to burn.
Such theories included the idea that "weather tech" was being used but "not to improve the situation," blaming the fires on "space lasers," and suggestions that the fires were part of a plan to claim land in Los Angeles to rebuild the city in time to host the 2028 Olympics.
Another commenter called Greene "an embarrassing human being"—with 2,900 likes—while memes were shared that called Greene "an idiot sandwich," a "psycho" and an "a**hole."
Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about the wildfires? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.
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