Over 100 people have now been confirmed to have lost their lives in the flash flooding that hit homes and camps along the edge of the Guadalupe River in the early hours of Friday morning. Meteorologists who spoke to WIRED dismissed claims that the National Weather Service failed to accurately predict the risk of flooding in Texas. But within hours of the tragedy happening, conspiracy theorists, right-wing influencers, and lawmakers were pushing wild claims on social media that the floods were somehow geoengineered.
“Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake,” Kandiss Taylor, who intends to run as a GOP candidate to represent Georgia’s 1st congressional district in the House of Representatives, wrote in a post viewed 2.4 million times. “That doesn’t even seem natural,” Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director of Women for America First, wrote on X, in a post that has been viewed 9 million times.
As the emergency response to the floods was still taking place on Saturday, US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, tweeted that she would be introducing a bill to “end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering.” Greene, who once blamed California wildfires on laser beams or light beams connected to an electric company with purported ties to an organization affiliated with a powerful Jewish family, said that the bill will be similar to Florida’s Senate Bill 56, which Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law in June. That bill makes weather modification a third-degree felony, punishable by up to $100,000. (Greene’s office did not respond to a request for comment on whether her announcement was specifically tied to the floods in Texas.)
On Instagram, right-wing influencer Gabrielle Yoder jumped on one of the biggest conspiracy theories, claiming that cloud seeding was responsible for causing the floods and calling out Doricko specifically.
Docicko’s company was also named by disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn on X. He wrote that “anyone who calls this out as a conspiracy theory can go F themselves.”
Doricko told WIRED that Rainmaker was working on a brief cloud seeding operation just days before the storms near the town of Runge, Texas, about 120 miles away from Kerr County, where the worst of the flooding was concentrated. But Doricko says his staff meteorologists noted some high moisture content in the region. The company, he says, called off its operations, per state regulations.
Cloud seeding—the practice of increasing precipitation in a cloud by introducing materials like silver iodide or dry ice—has been in use for decades. The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation maintains a page on current weather modification efforts from irrigation districts, counties, and other groups in the state. Doricko’s company, Rainmaker, is a buzzy startup that aims to “[synthesize] advanced technology with environmental stewardship.”
Multiple meteorologists told WIRED that there is no way that cloud seeding was responsible for the devastating storms that racked Texas last week.
“It is not physically possible or possible within the laws of atmospheric chemistry to cloud seed at a scale that would cause an event like [the Texas flooding] to occur,” says Matt Lanza, a digital meteorologist based in Houston. Lanza compares cloud seeding to adding “icing to a cake”: It’s able to juice up precipitation from clouds in drier areas, not create storms wholesale out of thin air.
The National Weather Service was already warning as early as last Tuesday about potential nighttime downpours in parts of Texas, thanks to moisture coming northward from Tropical Storm Barry, which made landfall last weekend in Mexico.
“The meteorological ingredients [for the storm] were already there, and cloud seeding could not have played a role,” Lanza says.
Doricko is no stranger to anti-weather modification factions. He spent much of the early half of this year testifying against a swath of state-level anti-geoengineering bills, including the one that eventually passed in Florida.
Doricko’s personal profile—he was once photographed with Bill Clinton and was chosen as a Thiel fellow—seems to have made the attacks on his company easier for those looking for a conspiracy on which to pin the devastating storms in Texas.
“I am trying to be as transparent as possible, because this is an incredibly controversial subject but isn’t actually as regulated and discussed transparently as it ought to be by the federal government,” Doricko says. “Just for the record, I’m not a deep state plant from either Bill Gates or Palantir, Peter Thiel or Bill Clinton.”
