Fact check: Are artificial hurricanes targeting Republicans?

Hurricane Milton is the second powerful storm to have made landfall in Florida just two weeks, after Hurricane Helene devastated communities in six US states. Numerous social media users have claimed that both storms were caused by humans and specifically targeted pro-Republican counties ahead of the presidential election on November 5.

Claim: "Hurricane Milton just made another near-impossible shift" claims this user on X calling on his over 2 million followers to share his video "before they take it down." He's shared the same post a handful of times. "What are the chances of 2 freak storms right before an election?" he asks. "This is not even close to a normal-looking storm," he said in a video on the platform Rumble, insinuating cloud seeding had influenced the storm. "Yes, they can control the weather," claimed Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ardent supporter of Republican nominee  Donald Trump, just days earlier. Her tweet has since been viewed over 43 million times.

DW fact check: False.

The shift is called eyewall replacement cycle, and is a normal occurrence in hurricanes of this magnitude. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 had also formed a double eyewall before hitting the coast and was about to undergo an eyewall replacement cycle, scientists found. As the inner wall weakened, the outer one gained strength, picking up intensity.

"In addition to large and rapid intensity swings, eyewall replacement cycles usually cause hurricanes to grow larger," hurricane experts explained.

Aircraft from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) repeatedly fly into the storms to collect atmospheric data. NOAA already said back in May that it was predicting above-normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin this year.

"We have had unlucky stretches before with back-to-back storms," meteorologist Matthew Cappucci told DW. In 2004, four hurricanes hit Florida within a six-week period. "We had Hurricane Charley which hit us as a Category 4 in Fort Myers, Florida back on August 13 of that year, then we had Jeanne and Frances, all those storms," he added.

Scientists with World Weather Attribution, who use established climate models to quickly determine whether human-caused climate change has played a part in extreme weather events, explained that "climate change is enhancing conditions conducive to the most powerful hurricanes like Helene, with more intense rainfall totals and wind speeds."

Climate change supercharges storms

"We know that sea surface temperatures, the heat that is in the ocean, is what fuels things like Helene as well as Milton," Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at the nonprofit Climate Central in the US, told DW.

"Where we saw that extreme rapid intensification, the ocean temperatures that were above average in the western side of the Gulf of Mexico were made 400 to 800 times more likely because of human-caused climate change," he said.

While there has been some success in changing the weather on a small scale, such as making it rain with cloud seeding when there are heavy clouds already in the air, "this kind of weather manipulation is simply not physically possible," Ryan Truchelut, a hurricane forecaster and researcher at WeatherTiger's Hurricane Watch, told DW in writing.

"We as humans cannot make a storm of that magnitude that we're seeing," said Winkley.

"If people, including elected public officials, are telling you that we can control the weather, they are wrong. Rhetoric like that is unhelpful at best and dangerous at worst," hurricane hunter and NOAA engineer Nick Underwood posted on X. "From someone who routinely flies into hurricanes, I assure you that we cannot control the weather."

Even US President Joe Biden came out to address the slew of disinformation and directly called out Republican Congresswoman Taylor Greene. "The claims are getting even more bizarre," he said. "Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman of Georgia, is now saying the federal government is literally controlling the weather! We're controlling the weather... it's beyond ridiculous."

Do screenshots of patents show a hurricane control device?

Several posts on social media have circulated a screenshot showing a patent application of a "hurricane and tornado control device" as proof of successful weather manipulation.

Patent registration itself doesn't guarantee a working device. Anyone can register a patent, so no one else jumps onto the idea and does it first.

Between 1962 and 1983, the US government experimented with hurricane modification. In Project Stormfury, silver iodide was used on tropical cyclones in an attempt to weaken their impact. But initially promising results came into question later, in part because scientists were unable to account for variables, especially whether hurricanes were weakening as part of their natural life cycle or because of the experimental intervention. The researchers also noted that cloud seeding had little prospect of success since hurricanes contained too little supercooled water for it to work.

Were Republican voters targeted?

There have also been claims that traditionally pro-Republican areas were targeted so they wouldn't be able to vote in the upcoming presidential election.

"They are manufacturing another killer hurricane to go over the same areas as Helene on October 9th, 2024 to make it even worse for red Republican voters," claimed this X user in a tweet.

"The Dem leaders know in-person voter turnout leans heavily Republican in Florida and North Carolina. If the roads and homes are ravaged then republican voters won't (sic) go to the polls but mail-in voters will still vote," reads another post. There are several such posts claiming that the storms were specifically aimed at hurting Republican voters.

However, it's not possible to steer the path of a hurricane. "A hurricane's speed and path depend on complex ocean and atmospheric interactions, including the presence or absence of other weather patterns," the National Weather Service writes on its website. "This complexity of the flow makes it very difficult to predict the speed and direction of a hurricane."

There have also been claims Democrats were "going to use our own push for voter ID against us," said this X user in a post. "So many Republican voters have lost everything, including their ID, from Hurricane Helene. Untold numbers with Milton to come. They're not going to let the victims vote," he added. Republicans have long pushed for stricter voter ID laws.

In North Carolina, the bipartisan State Board of Elections unanimously approved a list of emergency measures to help Helene survivors vote. There are also exceptions to needing voter ID if the "voter was a victim of a natural disaster within 100 days before Election Day that resulted in a disaster declaration by the President of the United States or the Governor of North Carolina."

Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, issued an executive order after Hurricane Helene to allow the counties hit hardest greater flexibility in distributing mail-in ballots and changing polling sites. However, DeSantis declined to extend the voting registration deadline as requested by civil and voting rights organizations. A Florida district judge also denied reopening voter registration, the League of Women Voters of Florida said in a statement. "Historically, voter registration in the final five days before the deadline has nearly matched the totals of several preceding months in Florida," the organization said.

Disinformation attacks after disasters to sow distrust

There were already a surge of disinformation posts after Hurricane Helene hit — DW debunked those claims here. Disinformation is "specifically being circulated to make people less hopeful and more distrustful of the government," disinformation expert Brooke Binkowski told DW. She also mentioned fake evacuation maps she's seen and how those were harming people while they were fleeing a natural disaster.

"It confuses people when they need to find help and they don't know who to call," she said. Ultimately, "they don't trust anyone."