His voice shaking, veteran South Florida meteorologist John Morales paused to be sure the Hurricane Milton data was correct. “It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours.”
Those of us who work at the intersection of weather and media instantly understood. The dramatic drop in pressure reflected phenomenal strengthening. But equally important, Morales knew he now had to translate that data for his audience, who would not understand what a millibar was, or why Milton’s dropping pressure was such an alarming sign.
Weather professionals are trying hard to convey the impact of storms such as Milton and Helene in the midst of increasing misinformation and viral skepticism on social media.
In this vulnerable space, simple messages with easy explanations can provide emotional comfort and feel empowering — even when they are wrong.
The effortless availability of information, coupled with heightened anxiety, can send people scrambling to look for anything to help emotionally process the approach and traumatic aftermath of hurricanes such as Milton and Helene.
In this vulnerable space, simple messages with easy explanations can provide emotional comfort and feel empowering — even when they are wrong. And meteorologists are very aware of this dynamic.
In our modern era in which a firehose of information is available at our fingertips, it is difficult to sort out the useful information from the overwhelming background noise. We can latch on to a nugget that provides comfort, allows us to cope and provides a simple explanation for a complex event.
Or worse, it will assign blame.
Those of us in weather communications have been dealing with conspiracy theories since the dawn of social media. One of the earlier, very popular social media conspiracies repeatedly mischaracterized the benign mixing clouds from jet aircraft exhaust — known as condensation trails. The false “chemtrials” narrative persists to this day, despite numerous debunking articles, research papers and PSA campaigns.
Indeed, despite the efforts of public officials and the media, it feels like conspiracy theories are only getting worse.
Trivial things about how the atmosphere works and how we observe it can be misinterpreted by the public. Working to understand the ionosphere (HAARP), detecting precipitation and wind currents (Doppler radar) and vertically measuring humidity (weather balloons) are all things beyond the everyday experience of people who do not work in weather or atmospheric science.
Legitimate questions about how things work are always welcome. But good-faith questions seem to be fading away, replaced by bad-faith postulating and anti-science rhetoric.
Remember, the goal of disinformation is to develop a distrust of legitimate information, leading to discord and division. It takes minimal effort to falsify a photo and spread a lie that turns misunderstanding into fear. History has shown us that fear can be used as a cruel weapon to gain power and control, and we have already seen it bubble up into the halls of Congress.
No matter what Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tells her millions of social media followers, humans cannot control the weather. Sometimes we try to modify it, using techniques like cloud seeding. Those results have been minuscule.
But there is an especially important distinction between modification and control.
And it feels important to say that humans are responsible for an inadvertent weather modification that is increasingly apparent, in the form of climate change. Several decades of human activities have modified the long-term weather averages that make up the climate. And as climate change continues to accelerate, we will see further impact on the regular weather.
The water in the Gulf of Mexico is now warmer than in the past, leading to the rapid intensification of Milton. Storms that intensify like Milton may not become a new normal, but they will become more common than a century ago. So it is not weather control in the way Greene and other bad-faith actors spreading disinformation mean it, but it is climate change — a long-term human-caused weather modification. And communicating the difference may be an ongoing challenge for weather and climate professionals for the rest of our careers.
