AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
After deadly floods struck Texas 10 days ago, conspiracy theories soon followed. Rumors are circulating online, claiming that a weather modification technology used to combat droughts may have led to the tragedy. Experts say this is part of a growing trend of misinformation springing up after natural disasters. Joining me with more is Mose Buchele from member station KUT in Austin. Good morning.
MOSE BUCHELE, BYLINE: Hi, Ayesha.
RASCOE: So walk us through this. What are these rumors?
BUCHELE: The main one this time around has to do with cloud seeding, OK? This is a practice of releasing tiny particles into clouds to try to encourage rain. It doesn't create clouds, but the point is to increase the rain that falls from them. And this has been around for decades. There's some mixed evidence about its effectiveness. But after this disaster, some online accounts pointed to a cloud seeding operation that happened in a different part of Texas a couple days prior to the floods, and the theories just kind of took off from there.
RASCOE: But experts say this isn't true, right? Cloud seeding had nothing to do with the floods.
BUCHELE: Correct. Absolutely correct. Victor Murphy is a recently retired National Weather Service meteorologist. Here's how he put it to me.
VICTOR MURPHY: There is zero science whatsoever out there, Mose - zero - that correlates these two.
BUCHELE: Nevertheless, we heard some public figures amplify these theories. Right after the floods, Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that she was introducing a bill to ban cloud seeding and other weather modification.
RASCOE: Is this the first time we've seen conspiracy theories pop up about weather manipulation?
BUCHELE: No. No. No. They've been around for a while, but they've recently really taken off. Amber Silver is a professor at State University of New York at Albany who studies misinformation in natural disasters. She says trust in public institutions is low. The internet has put more people into online echo chambers. So when catastrophes happen and people are looking for answers, these false narratives get amplified really quickly. She says it's hard to counter those narratives.
AMBER SILVER: Unfortunately, we know from the research that saying, that's wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, isn't the way to do it because people tend to just entrench themselves in their own beliefs. And no one likes to feel like, oh, I was wrong, or, you know, this person is calling me stupid, or whatever else.
BUCHELE: She says fighting misleading info is really better done by trusted community voices outside the context of a disaster, when emotions just aren't so high.
RASCOE: Have we been hearing from those trusted community voices in Texas?
BUCHELE: Yeah. I - we've heard a lot just from, like, local TV and weather radio people pushing back against this. On Monday, Texas Senator Ted Cruz visited the hardest-hit part of the state and warned people against trusting online rumors. The CEO of this cloud company, Rainmaker, has also been speaking out publicly. The EPA, without mentioning these floods specifically, also posted online information explaining the science of some of this stuff. But despite all that, a lot of people at the local level think these conspiracy theories are distraction from the really important questions that have to be asked about how this natural disaster could have been handled better. Troy Kimmel is an emergency management response meteorologist in Austin.
TROY KIMMEL: There's no good news coming out of this, but we're trying to offer people closure. And I think we got other problems on our plate right now, and I don't think this needs to distract us.
BUCHELE: He worries that these more outlandish theories will get in the way of looking at what really happened so that emergency officials can improve their communication and response next time.
RASCOE: That's Mose Buchele with KUT in Austin. Thanks, Mose.
BUCHELE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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