Clouds form when water vapor—an invisible gas in the atmosphere—sticks to tiny floating particles, such as dust, and turns into liquid water droplets or ice crystals. In a newly published study, we show that microplastic particles can have the same effects, producing ice crystals at temperatures 5° to 10° Celsius (9° to 18° Fahrenheit) warmer than droplets without microplastics.

This suggests that microplastics in the air may affect weather and climate by producing clouds in conditions where they would not form otherwise.

We are atmospheric chemists who study how different types of particles form ice when they come into contact with liquid water. This process, which occurs constantly in the atmosphere, is called nucleation.

Clouds in the atmosphere can be made up of liquid water droplets, ice particles, or a mixture of the two. In clouds in the mid- to upper atmosphere where temperatures are between 32° and minus 36° F (0° to minus 38° C), ice crystals normally form around mineral dust particles from dry soils or biological particles, such as pollen or bacteria.

Microplastics are less than 5 millimeters wide—about the size of a pencil eraser. Some are microscopic. Scientists have found them in Antarctic deep seas, the summit of Mount Everest, and fresh Antarctic snow. Because these fragments are so small, they can be easily transported in the air.

Why it matters

Ice in clouds has important effects on weather and climate because most precipitation typically starts as ice particles.

Many cloud tops in nontropical zones around the world extend high enough into the atmosphere that cold air causes some of their moisture to freeze. Then, once ice forms, it draws water vapor from the liquid droplets around it, and the crystals grow heavy enough to fall. If ice doesn’t develop, clouds tend to evaporate rather than causing rain or snowfall.

While children learn in grade school that water freezes at 32° F (0° C), that’s not always true. Without something to nucleate onto, such as dust particles, water can be supercooled to temperatures as low as minus 36° F (minus 38° C) before it freezes.

For freezing to occur at warmer temperatures, some kind of material that won’t dissolve in water needs to be present in the droplet. This particle provides a surface where the first ice crystal can form. If microplastics are present, they could cause ice crystals to form, potentially increasing rain or snowfall.

Clouds also affect weather and climate in several ways. They reflect incoming sunlight away from Earth’s surface, which has a cooling effect, and absorb some radiation that is emitted from Earth’s surface, which has a warming effect.

The amount of sunlight reflected depends on how much liquid water vs. ice a cloud contains. If microplastics increase the presence of ice particles in clouds compared with liquid water droplets, this shifting ratio could change clouds’ effect on Earth’s energy balance.

The Earth constantly receives energy from the Sun and reflects it back into space. Clouds have both warming and cooling effects in this process.

Credit: NOAA

How we did our work

To see whether microplastic fragments could serve as nuclei for water droplets, we used four of the most prevalent types of plastics in the atmosphere: low-density polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, and polyethylene terephthalate. Each was tested both in a pristine state and after exposure to ultraviolet light, ozone, and acids. All of these are present in the atmosphere and could affect the composition of the microplastics.

We suspended the microplastics in small water droplets and slowly cooled the droplets to observe when they froze. We also analyzed the plastic fragments’ surfaces to determine their molecular structure, since ice nucleation could depend on the microplastics’ surface chemistry.

For most of the plastics we studied, 50 percent of the droplets were frozen by the time they cooled to minus 8° F (minus 22° C). These results parallel those from another recent study by Canadian scientists, who also found that some types of microplastics nucleate ice at warmer temperatures than droplets without microplastics.

Exposure to ultraviolet radiation, ozone, and acids tended to decrease ice nucleation activity on the particles. This suggests that ice nucleation is sensitive to small chemical changes on the surface of microplastic particles. However, these plastics still nucleated ice, so they could still affect the amount of ice in clouds.

What still isn’t known

To understand how microplastics affect weather and climate, we need to know their concentrations at the altitudes where clouds form. We also need to understand the concentration of microplastics compared with other particles that could nucleate ice, such as mineral dust and biological particles, to see whether microplastics are present at comparable levels. These measurements would allow us to model the impact of microplastics on cloud formation.

Plastic fragments come in many sizes and compositions. In future research, we plan to work with plastics that contain additives, such as plasticizers and colorants, as well as with smaller plastic particles.

Miriam Freedman is professor of chemistry, Penn State and Heidi Busse is a PhD student in chemistry, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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As the Popo Agie River wends its way down from the glaciers atop Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains toward the city of Lander, it flows into a limestone cave and disappears. The formation, known as the Sinks, spits the river back out at another feature called the Rise a quarter of a mile east, a little more voluminous and a little warmer, with brown and rainbow trout weighing as much as 10 pounds mingling in its now smooth pools. The quarter-mile journey from the Sinks to the Rise takes the river two hours.

Scientists first discovered this quirk of the middle fork of the Popo Agie (pronounced puh-po zuh) in 1983 by pouring red dye into the river upstream and waiting for it to resurface. Geologists attribute the river’s mysterious delay to the water passing through exceedingly small crevasses in the rock that slow its flow.

Like many rivers in the arid West, the Popo Agie is an important aquifer. Ranchers, farmers, businesses, and recreationists rely on detailed data about it—especially day-to-day streamflow measurements. That’s exactly the type of empirical information collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the power of misinformation in the United States better than what happened Monday morning when retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn hit the send button on a social media post. He shared a video that claimed “weather modification operations” that are “clearly connected” with the Department of Defense were responsible for Hurricane Helene’s “assault” on the Carolinas.

“You have to listen to this clip,” Flynn told his 1.7 million followers on X. “Another ‘conspiracy theory’ about to be exposed for the truth behind weather manipulation?”

Within 15 hours, the post by former President Donald Trump’s onetime national security adviser had more than half a million views. Add that to the 43 million views of alt-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claims late last week that “Yes they can control the weather.”

Now compare that to the post by the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact immediately debunking the weather modification theory with its most untruthful “Pants on Fire!” rating a day after Helene made landfall: After 10 days, that post had all of 11,400 views—less than 2 percent of Flynn’s audience.

With the storm-battered Southeast bracing for another massive hurricane and the hyperpartisan election just four weeks away, government officials and rescue workers aren’t just battling the elements, they’re fighting against a spiraling misinformation war.

“The combination of the two just makes the misinformation even more drastic,” says Josephine Lukito, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media who studies misinformation. “There’s more misinformation, and people seem to be falling for it more.”

Many of the false narratives involve the military, which is so often at the heart of conspiracy theories—hiding evidence of UFOs at Area 51 or working with Trump to take down a cabal of Satan-worshipping global elites. But the claims circulating in the wake of Helene and the buildup to Hurricane Milton have been more immediate, more personal: The military doesn’t want to help you.

In fact, it may want to harm you.

Almost as soon as Helene made landfall September 26, a narrative started spinning up on social media: The government had botched the response to the storm—on purpose.

While much of the false information focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response, dark narratives about the military also circulated, spread by far-right influencers and military veterans alike.

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, more than 6,000 National Guard members were activated for search and rescue and to help clean up the wreckage. But online, people posted that they hadn’t seen guard members in their neighborhood. In a disaster the size of Helene, rescuers can’t be everywhere at once. But online, posters began to circulate the false idea that maybe the guard wasn’t deployed at all.

And Fort Liberty, the US Army’s largest military base, home to the famed 82nd Airborne Division, is in North Carolina, mere hours from some of the state’s hardest-hit areas. Some conspiratorial posts asked why soldiers from the base weren’t immediately mobilized. Active-duty troops typically do not deploy as first responders to natural disasters.

In the social media ecosphere—on alt-tech platforms like Rumble, Gab, and GETTR, as well as more mainstream sites like X—these questions quickly coalesced into a grab bag of conspiracy theories. The military wasn’t deploying soldiers for hurricane response because the Pentagon decided they would be put to better use in the Middle East or Ukraine instead. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris wanted to prevent red-state voters from casting their ballots—or even wanted them dead. The federal government was planning to seize land in western North Carolina for lucrative lithium mining contracts.

None of that was true.

“If troops are being deployed and [people] don’t necessarily see it in their geographic area, this is a ‘Is this really happening?’-type question,” Lukito says.

“There’s a lot of political actors that can take advantage of that.”

On Saturday, Trump amplified the idea that the military had not responded to the hurricane, claiming at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that there had been “no helicopters, no rescue” in North Carolina. That is untrue: The North Carolina National Guard says it has rescued hundreds of people and delivered more than a million pounds of supplies, some of it by helicopter.

But even as top FEMA officials and local sheriffs begged residents to sign up for federal emergency aid while beating back misinformation, a new false narrative was gaining traction online: The military had perfected the science of weather control and was now weaponizing it against conservatives.

“We have an inherent distrust of our government,” says Pablo Breuer, board chair of the counter-disinformation nonprofit Disarm Foundation and a career Navy veteran.

“It’s very easy to stir up fear, uncertainty, doubt, and angst by stoking fear that the military is not really there to protect you. They’re there to oppress you.”

An analysis by The War Horse and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, of 40 different social media platforms found that two days before Greene’s viral “they can control the weather” post, comments connecting the military to weather manipulation spiked on Gab, a social media platform favored by the far right.

“I’d bet my life it was the US Military using their HAARP Technology manipulating the weather to destroy a large portion of Red States and people before the election,” one user wrote, before moving on to antisemitic tropes. The user’s profile featured pro-Russia, white nationalist content.

It’s not a new idea. HAARP—a research program studying the upper atmosphere based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and initially funded by the military—has long been fodder for conspiracy theorists. Back in January, right-wing agitator and white nationalist Laura Loomer asked on X whether the “deep state” was using HAARP to control the weather when a blizzard threatened turnout for the Iowa caucus. It was not.

“We all know @NikkiHaley has a lot of friends in the defense industry and Military-industrial complex,” she tweeted.

Posts about geoengineering the weather also spiked on other social media sites after Helene. Some of those posts, particularly on more mainstream platforms, pushed back on misinformation, and social media users quickly added context in X’s Community Notes debunking Greene’s viral post.

But views of Flynn’s and Greene’s “weather manipulation” posts dwarfed the number of views on X, for example, of carefully crafted posts from some notable climate scientists about the deadly confluence of extreme weather.

“The fingerprints of #ClimateChange are all over what has transpired in recent weeks and may yet occur in coming days,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist, posted in a thread Monday.

“There are still thousands of folks in dire need…Helping them is and should remain the primary short-term priority. Yet if we can’t also manage to have the harder conversations regarding natural hazard risk & disasters & climate change in the moments when people are actually paying attention, we’re never going to solve any of the underlying problems.”

Just days before Helene slammed into the state, the Georgia National Guard’s ​​Headquarters Company of the 110th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion prepared for a long-planned nine-month deployment to Poland to support US forces and allies stationed in Europe.

Online, that and other deployments were held up—inaccurately—as proof that the military didn’t want to save American lives.

Images of text messages, ostensibly from National Guard members and active-duty soldiers, began circulating, claiming that troops were ready and willing to deploy to the disaster zone but that “higher ups” weren’t allowing it.

But that’s not how disaster response works, Breuer says.

“We have more than enough troops and equipment to be able to do the things that the military is being asked to do overseas and do the things that we want and need to do at home,” Breuer says. “We’re ready and willing to help anyone at any time.”

But he points out that the military cannot just deploy itself into a disaster zone.

Responding to a natural disaster the scale of Helene is a sprawling effort among local, state, and federal resources, as well as private and nonprofit organizations. Any military response is first provided by the National Guard, which is typically mobilized under state—not federal—control. Governors of affected states can request the support of guard units from other states.

As claims about missing guard troops proliferated online, National Guard units already were mobilizing. Before Helene made landfall, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, already had authorized 500 guard members to respond to the storm, quickly adding another thousand troops as the storm battered Georgia. That number has since increased to 2,500.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, initially activated more than 350 National Guard members as the storm moved into the Carolinas and steadily increased that number as the scale of devastation became clear.

In total, more than 6,000 guard members from 18 states have mobilized to provide search and rescue and begin the cleanup effort.

In a news conference Friday, Cooper expressed his frustration with the growing tide of misinformation.

“It can hurt our relief efforts,” he said. “It…demoralizes National Guard soldiers who are out here for days and days and people who are working in emergency management who are working around the clock to help people.”

Federal troops can also help with disaster recovery, but it’s not their primary mission—and the military typically doesn’t deploy federal troops without a request from a state governor, says DeeDee Bennett Gayle, chair of the emergency management and homeland security department at SUNY Albany. Often, that comes only after an initial assessment of the damage.

Last Wednesday, Biden announced that 1,000 soldiers from Fort Liberty and Fort Campbell in Kentucky were deploying to help with hurricane recovery efforts in North Carolina. On Sunday, the White House mobilized an additional 500 active-duty troops after approving a request from the North Carolina governor.

“We want to make sure that we’re being complementary, not out there doing something on our own,” Maj. General Robert Davis, director of operations for US Northern Command, told WRAL News, stressing that the National Guard and FEMA take the lead in disaster response.

“Even going back as far as Hurricane Andrew in Florida, you see the signs, ‘Where’s the calvary?’” Bennett Gayle told The War Horse. “There’s very few things that you can have the federal government just impose within a state.”

A deluge of misinformation often follows natural disasters, but the timing of this fall’s powerful twin hurricanes is particularly inauspicious.

“Unfortunately, this one is happening just one month out from the election,” says Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit organization researching and countering extremism. 

In such a hyperpoliticized environment, people look for sources of information they can rely on. Despite overall declining faith in institutions, the military still commands high levels of trust, experts say, and people claiming connections to the military are seen as more credible messengers about the government.

Keneally cautions that it can be difficult to suss out whether somebody actually served—just because their social media profile says they’re a veteran doesn’t mean they are. But getting veterans, or people who claim to be, to amplify messages is a long-standing disinformation tactic.

“They are trying to say, you’re a good patriot, you went to save your country,” Keneally says. “Now look at what’s happening to your country that you swore your life to protect.”

As false narratives about the hurricane response gained traction, people claiming connections to the military were more than happy to offer their “insider take”—from Flynn, who served in the Army for more than 30 years and still draws a military pension, to veterans online claiming they personally knew troops who were prevented from responding to the storm.

But Breuer, who served in the Navy for 22 years, says trusting individual veterans on social media over active-duty military leadership doesn’t make sense.

“The admirals and the generals that are in charge of the military…take an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Breuer says.

“That includes things like storms.”

This War Horse investigation was reported by Sonner Kehrt, with additional reporting from Anastasia Zolotova Franklin, Catherine Tong, Andrea Richardson, and Alexa Koenig of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center. The story was fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

On Tuesday evening during a measurement flight, the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center dropped the ashes of Peter Dodge, a longtime radar scientist and hurricane hunter, in the eye of Hurricane Milton. The drop honored Dodge's 44-year career and his contributions to radar meteorology and tropical cyclone research.

As the powerful and dangerous storm bears down on Florida, the release of Dodge's ashes was an unusually peaceful moment during a type of flight that is typically quite turbulent. Michael Lowry, a Hurricane Specialist and Storm Surge Expert at WPLG-TV in Florida, celebrated the moment on X, calling it a "beautiful tribute."

Lowry's post included a screenshot of a Vortex Data Message, which is a log of in-flight observations made by hurricane reconnaissance aircraft, detailing the storm's center location, pressure, wind speed, temperature, and other key meteorological data used to assess the intensity and structure of the cyclone. At the end, a tribute line reads, "PETER DODGE HX SCI (1950–2023) 387TH PENNY."

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This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the power of misinformation in the United States better than what happened Monday morning when retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn hit the send button on a social media post. He shared a video that claimed “weather modification operations” that are “clearly connected” with the Department of Defense were responsible for Hurricane Helene’s “assault” on the Carolinas.

“You have to listen to this clip,” Flynn told his 1.7 million followers on X. “Another ‘conspiracy theory’ about to be exposed for the truth behind weather manipulation?”

Within 15 hours, the post by former President Donald Trump’s onetime national security adviser had more than half a million views. Add that to the 43 million views of alt-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claims late last week that “Yes they can control the weather.”

Now compare that to the post by the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact immediately debunking the weather modification theory with its most untruthful “Pants on Fire!” rating a day after Helene made landfall: After 10 days, that post had all of 11,400 views—less than 2 percent of Flynn’s audience.

With the storm-battered Southeast bracing for another massive hurricane and the hyperpartisan election just four weeks away, government officials and rescue workers aren’t just battling the elements, they’re fighting against a spiraling misinformation war.

“The combination of the two just makes the misinformation even more drastic,” says Josephine Lukito, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media who studies misinformation. “There’s more misinformation, and people seem to be falling for it more.”

Many of the false narratives involve the military, which is so often at the heart of conspiracy theories—hiding evidence of UFOs at Area 51 or working with Trump to take down a cabal of Satan-worshipping global elites. But the claims circulating in the wake of Helene and the buildup to Hurricane Milton have been more immediate, more personal: The military doesn’t want to help you.

In fact, it may want to harm you.

Almost as soon as Helene made landfall September 26, a narrative started spinning up on social media: The government had botched the response to the storm—on purpose.

While much of the false information focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response, dark narratives about the military also circulated, spread by far-right influencers and military veterans alike.

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, more than 6,000 National Guard members were activated for search and rescue and to help clean up the wreckage. But online, people posted that they hadn’t seen guard members in their neighborhood. In a disaster the size of Helene, rescuers can’t be everywhere at once. But online, posters began to circulate the false idea that maybe the guard wasn’t deployed at all.

And Fort Liberty, the US Army’s largest military base, home to the famed 82nd Airborne Division, is in North Carolina, mere hours from some of the state’s hardest-hit areas. Some conspiratorial posts asked why soldiers from the base weren’t immediately mobilized. Active-duty troops typically do not deploy as first responders to natural disasters.

In the social media ecosphere—on alt-tech platforms like Rumble, Gab, and GETTR, as well as more mainstream sites like X—these questions quickly coalesced into a grab bag of conspiracy theories. The military wasn’t deploying soldiers for hurricane response because the Pentagon decided they would be put to better use in the Middle East or Ukraine instead. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris wanted to prevent red-state voters from casting their ballots—or even wanted them dead. The federal government was planning to seize land in western North Carolina for lucrative lithium mining contracts.

None of that was true.

“If troops are being deployed and [people] don’t necessarily see it in their geographic area, this is a ‘Is this really happening?’-type question,” Lukito says.

“There’s a lot of political actors that can take advantage of that.”

On Saturday, Trump amplified the idea that the military had not responded to the hurricane, claiming at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that there had been “no helicopters, no rescue” in North Carolina. That is untrue: The North Carolina National Guard says it has rescued hundreds of people and delivered more than a million pounds of supplies, some of it by helicopter.

But even as top FEMA officials and local sheriffs begged residents to sign up for federal emergency aid while beating back misinformation, a new false narrative was gaining traction online: The military had perfected the science of weather control and was now weaponizing it against conservatives.

“We have an inherent distrust of our government,” says Pablo Breuer, board chair of the counter-disinformation nonprofit Disarm Foundation and a career Navy veteran.

“It’s very easy to stir up fear, uncertainty, doubt, and angst by stoking fear that the military is not really there to protect you. They’re there to oppress you.”

An analysis by The War Horse and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, of 40 different social media platforms found that two days before Greene’s viral “they can control the weather” post, comments connecting the military to weather manipulation spiked on Gab, a social media platform favored by the far right.

“I’d bet my life it was the US Military using their HAARP Technology manipulating the weather to destroy a large portion of Red States and people before the election,” one user wrote, before moving on to antisemitic tropes. The user’s profile featured pro-Russia, white nationalist content.

It’s not a new idea. HAARP—a research program studying the upper atmosphere based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and initially funded by the military—has long been fodder for conspiracy theorists. Back in January, right-wing agitator and white nationalist Laura Loomer asked on X whether the “deep state” was using HAARP to control the weather when a blizzard threatened turnout for the Iowa caucus. It was not.

“We all know @NikkiHaley has a lot of friends in the defense industry and Military-industrial complex,” she tweeted.

Posts about geoengineering the weather also spiked on other social media sites after Helene. Some of those posts, particularly on more mainstream platforms, pushed back on misinformation, and social media users quickly added context in X’s Community Notes debunking Greene’s viral post.

But views of Flynn’s and Greene’s “weather manipulation” posts dwarfed the number of views on X, for example, of carefully crafted posts from some notable climate scientists about the deadly confluence of extreme weather.

“The fingerprints of #ClimateChange are all over what has transpired in recent weeks and may yet occur in coming days,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist, posted in a thread Monday.

“There are still thousands of folks in dire need…Helping them is and should remain the primary short-term priority. Yet if we can’t also manage to have the harder conversations regarding natural hazard risk & disasters & climate change in the moments when people are actually paying attention, we’re never going to solve any of the underlying problems.”

Just days before Helene slammed into the state, the Georgia National Guard’s ​​Headquarters Company of the 110th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion prepared for a long-planned nine-month deployment to Poland to support US forces and allies stationed in Europe.

Online, that and other deployments were held up—inaccurately—as proof that the military didn’t want to save American lives.

Images of text messages, ostensibly from National Guard members and active-duty soldiers, began circulating, claiming that troops were ready and willing to deploy to the disaster zone but that “higher ups” weren’t allowing it.

But that’s not how disaster response works, Breuer says.

“We have more than enough troops and equipment to be able to do the things that the military is being asked to do overseas and do the things that we want and need to do at home,” Breuer says. “We’re ready and willing to help anyone at any time.”

But he points out that the military cannot just deploy itself into a disaster zone.

Responding to a natural disaster the scale of Helene is a sprawling effort among local, state, and federal resources, as well as private and nonprofit organizations. Any military response is first provided by the National Guard, which is typically mobilized under state—not federal—control. Governors of affected states can request the support of guard units from other states.

As claims about missing guard troops proliferated online, National Guard units already were mobilizing. Before Helene made landfall, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, already had authorized 500 guard members to respond to the storm, quickly adding another thousand troops as the storm battered Georgia. That number has since increased to 2,500.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, initially activated more than 350 National Guard members as the storm moved into the Carolinas and steadily increased that number as the scale of devastation became clear.

In total, more than 6,000 guard members from 18 states have mobilized to provide search and rescue and begin the cleanup effort.

In a news conference Friday, Cooper expressed his frustration with the growing tide of misinformation.

“It can hurt our relief efforts,” he said. “It…demoralizes National Guard soldiers who are out here for days and days and people who are working in emergency management who are working around the clock to help people.”

Federal troops can also help with disaster recovery, but it’s not their primary mission—and the military typically doesn’t deploy federal troops without a request from a state governor, says DeeDee Bennett Gayle, chair of the emergency management and homeland security department at SUNY Albany. Often, that comes only after an initial assessment of the damage.

Last Wednesday, Biden announced that 1,000 soldiers from Fort Liberty and Fort Campbell in Kentucky were deploying to help with hurricane recovery efforts in North Carolina. On Sunday, the White House mobilized an additional 500 active-duty troops after approving a request from the North Carolina governor.

“We want to make sure that we’re being complementary, not out there doing something on our own,” Maj. General Robert Davis, director of operations for US Northern Command, told WRAL News, stressing that the National Guard and FEMA take the lead in disaster response.

“Even going back as far as Hurricane Andrew in Florida, you see the signs, ‘Where’s the calvary?’” Bennett Gayle told The War Horse. “There’s very few things that you can have the federal government just impose within a state.”

A deluge of misinformation often follows natural disasters, but the timing of this fall’s powerful twin hurricanes is particularly inauspicious.

“Unfortunately, this one is happening just one month out from the election,” says Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit organization researching and countering extremism. 

In such a hyperpoliticized environment, people look for sources of information they can rely on. Despite overall declining faith in institutions, the military still commands high levels of trust, experts say, and people claiming connections to the military are seen as more credible messengers about the government.

Keneally cautions that it can be difficult to suss out whether somebody actually served—just because their social media profile says they’re a veteran doesn’t mean they are. But getting veterans, or people who claim to be, to amplify messages is a long-standing disinformation tactic.

“They are trying to say, you’re a good patriot, you went to save your country,” Keneally says. “Now look at what’s happening to your country that you swore your life to protect.”

As false narratives about the hurricane response gained traction, people claiming connections to the military were more than happy to offer their “insider take”—from Flynn, who served in the Army for more than 30 years and still draws a military pension, to veterans online claiming they personally knew troops who were prevented from responding to the storm.

But Breuer, who served in the Navy for 22 years, says trusting individual veterans on social media over active-duty military leadership doesn’t make sense.

“The admirals and the generals that are in charge of the military…take an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Breuer says.

“That includes things like storms.”

This War Horse investigation was reported by Sonner Kehrt, with additional reporting from Anastasia Zolotova Franklin, Catherine Tong, Andrea Richardson, and Alexa Koenig of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center. The story was fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

Another hurricane is barreling toward the Florida coastline.

Forecasters predict Hurricane Milton—now a Category 5 storm—will “remain an extremely dangerous hurricane through landfall in Florida,” according to the National Hurricane Center, a division of the federally-funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. As of Monday afternoon, Hurricane Milton was about 700 miles southwest of Tampa, with maximum sustained winds of 175 miles per hour. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has since directed millions of residents to evacuate. All of this comes as the state is still recovering from the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene.

It’s against this increasingly alarming situation that there’s growing awareness of the right’s long-held desires to gut NOAA, the very agency that has been so critical to helping residents and authorities brace for storms like hurricanes Helene and Milton, as well as understand the realities of climate change. But with a second Trump term a very real possibility, threats to NOAA carry new significance. That’s because Project 2025, the right-wing extremist guidebook to a second Trump term, explicitly calls for NOAA’s break-up. That plan can be found on page 674, which describes NOAA as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

“It should be broken up and downsized,” Project 2025 says of the agency, adding that its functions “could be provided commercially, likely at lower
cost and higher quality.” The document then acknowledges the important work of the National Hurricane Center but asserts that it should nonetheless be reviewed.

As The Atlantic pointed out in a piece this summer, privatizing the work of NOAA could make weather forecasts less accessible and undermine American scientists’ ability to collaborate with international colleagues. But even if NOAA was not fully eliminated, experts say Project 2025’s other proposals could significantly harm the agency. “There are lots of ways they go after an agency without calling for its immediate elimination, and I think they are hiding behind the fact that they haven’t explicitly called for elimination,” Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the nonpartisan FactCheck.org. “These different offices are working together very closely to provide…both short-term as well as long-range information to help inform weather and climate predictions,” Cleetus added. “So the idea that you would dismantle it and it would still continue to be able to provide the service, that’s just not accurate.”

This makes investing in NOAA—not dismantling it—crucial. Last week, the Biden administration announced $22.78 million to support research on water-driven climate impacts.

But confronting the realities of climate change—and supporting officials who do—does not seem like a priority for those in Trump’s orbit. Consider my colleague Jackie Flynn Mogensen’s recent dispatch from a New York Times climate event at which Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, dismissed the realities of climate science. “I enjoy my high-carbon lifestyle,” Roberts told the audience.

In the meantime, continue following NOAA’s updates to ensure you stay safe if you are in Hurricane Milton’s path. While agency officials track the storm, Trump is, again, ranting on Truth Social.

Another hurricane is barreling toward the Florida coastline.

Forecasters predict Hurricane Milton—now a Category 5 storm—will “remain an extremely dangerous hurricane through landfall in Florida,” according to the National Hurricane Center, a division of the federally-funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. As of Monday afternoon, Hurricane Milton was about 700 miles southwest of Tampa, with maximum sustained winds of 175 miles per hour. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has since directed millions of residents to evacuate. All of this comes as the state is still recovering from the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene.

It’s against this increasingly alarming situation that there’s growing awareness of the right’s long-held desires to gut NOAA, the very agency that has been so critical to helping residents and authorities brace for storms like hurricanes Helene and Milton, as well as understand the realities of climate change. But with a second Trump term a very real possibility, threats to NOAA carry new significance. That’s because Project 2025, the right-wing extremist guidebook to a second Trump term, explicitly calls for NOAA’s break-up. That plan can be found on page 674, which describes NOAA as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

“It should be broken up and downsized,” Project 2025 says of the agency, adding that its functions “could be provided commercially, likely at lower
cost and higher quality.” The document then acknowledges the important work of the National Hurricane Center but asserts that it should nonetheless be reviewed.

As The Atlantic pointed out in a piece this summer, privatizing the work of NOAA could make weather forecasts less accessible and undermine American scientists’ ability to collaborate with international colleagues. But even if NOAA was not fully eliminated, experts say Project 2025’s other proposals could significantly harm the agency. “There are lots of ways they go after an agency without calling for its immediate elimination, and I think they are hiding behind the fact that they haven’t explicitly called for elimination,” Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the nonpartisan FactCheck.org. “These different offices are working together very closely to provide…both short-term as well as long-range information to help inform weather and climate predictions,” Cleetus added. “So the idea that you would dismantle it and it would still continue to be able to provide the service, that’s just not accurate.”

This makes investing in NOAA—not dismantling it—crucial. Last week, the Biden administration announced $22.78 million to support research on water-driven climate impacts.

But confronting the realities of climate change—and supporting officials who do—does not seem like a priority for those in Trump’s orbit. Consider my colleague Jackie Flynn Mogensen’s recent dispatch from a New York Times climate event at which Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, dismissed the realities of climate science. “I enjoy my high-carbon lifestyle,” Roberts told the audience.

In the meantime, continue following NOAA’s updates to ensure you stay safe if you are in Hurricane Milton’s path. While agency officials track the storm, Trump is, again, ranting on Truth Social.

Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc across the Southeast over the past several days, leaving more than 60 people dead and providing a chilling example of how climate change is worsening storms.

Since the hurricane made landfall in northern Florida on Thursday, it killed at least 64 people, including 1-month-old twins and their 27-year-old mother in Georgia, and a couple in their 70s and a 6-year-old relative who drowned in North Carolina, the Associated Press reported Sunday. North Carolina was particularly hard hit, with western parts of the state receiving more than two feet of rainfall, leading to the closure of about 300 roads, according to federal authorities.

The storm also brought more than a foot of rain to parts of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, as well as massive power outages, including, at one point, in 40 percent of South Carolina, the AP reports. As of Sunday afternoon, there were more than 2.2 million power outages across the Southeast, with more than 870,000 in South Carolina and more than 600,000 in Georgia, according to PowerOutage.us.

In a statement Saturday, President Joe Biden said he was “deeply saddened by the loss of life and devastation” that Helene wrought, adding, “As we turn toward recovery efforts, we will make certain that no resource is spared to ensure that families, businesses, schools, hospitals, and entire communities can quickly begin their road to rebuilding.”

Before the storm made landfall, Biden approved emergency aid requests from the governors of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and sent 1,500 federal personnel to the region, according to information the White House released Friday. On Sunday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that Biden had approved major disaster declarations for North Carolina and Florida, unlocking more aid for both states.

“Doug and I are thinking of those who tragically lost their lives and we are keeping all those who loved them in our prayers during the difficult days ahead,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement Saturday, adding that she had been briefed on the situation by FEMA officials and would continue receiving regular updates.

On CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell blamed climate change for the storm’s rapid intensification—and warned that the devastation was a harbinger of what’s to come in our increasingly warming planet. “In the past, when we would look at damage from hurricanes, it was primarily wind damage, with some water damage, but now we’re seeing so much more water damage, and I think that is a result of the warm waters, which is a result of climate change,” Criswell said.

Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc across the Southeast over the past several days, leaving more than 60 people dead and providing a chilling example of how climate change is worsening storms.

Since the hurricane made landfall in northern Florida on Thursday, it killed at least 64 people, including 1-month-old twins and their 27-year-old mother in Georgia, and a couple in their 70s and a 6-year-old relative who drowned in North Carolina, the Associated Press reported Sunday. North Carolina was particularly hard hit, with western parts of the state receiving more than two feet of rainfall, leading to the closure of about 300 roads, according to federal authorities.

The storm also brought more than a foot of rain to parts of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, as well as massive power outages, including, at one point, in 40 percent of South Carolina, the AP reports. As of Sunday afternoon, there were more than 2.2 million power outages across the Southeast, with more than 870,000 in South Carolina and more than 600,000 in Georgia, according to PowerOutage.us.

In a statement Saturday, President Joe Biden said he was “deeply saddened by the loss of life and devastation” that Helene wrought, adding, “As we turn toward recovery efforts, we will make certain that no resource is spared to ensure that families, businesses, schools, hospitals, and entire communities can quickly begin their road to rebuilding.”

Before the storm made landfall, Biden approved emergency aid requests from the governors of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and sent 1,500 federal personnel to the region, according to information the White House released Friday. On Sunday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that Biden had approved major disaster declarations for North Carolina and Florida, unlocking more aid for both states.

“Doug and I are thinking of those who tragically lost their lives and we are keeping all those who loved them in our prayers during the difficult days ahead,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement Saturday, adding that she had been briefed on the situation by FEMA officials and would continue receiving regular updates.

On CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell blamed climate change for the storm’s rapid intensification—and warned that the devastation was a harbinger of what’s to come in our increasingly warming planet. “In the past, when we would look at damage from hurricanes, it was primarily wind damage, with some water damage, but now we’re seeing so much more water damage, and I think that is a result of the warm waters, which is a result of climate change,” Criswell said.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

After unleashing widespread flooding and knocking out electricity for half of Puerto Rico, this season’s third hurricane, Ernesto, has turned north and is approaching Bermuda. In an average Atlantic season, the third hurricane doesn’t spin up until September 7, so Ernesto has arrived way, way early. As of August 9, this summer had already produced a third of the activity in a typical season— with nearly 90 percent of it remaining.

All that makes Ernesto, now a Category 2 hurricane, an ominous sign of what’s still to come in the next few months—and what to expect as the planet rapidly warms. “Being a little more than three weeks ahead of schedule for the third hurricane is pretty impressive,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

This spring, scientists predicted that the Atlantic Ocean would play host to an exceptionally active hurricane season, with five major hurricanes and 21 named storms, for one particularly good reason—the ocean is exceptionally warm, and is expected to stay that way. In July, the nursery for Atlantic hurricanes was running 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the long-term average. “Hurricanes are a lot like engines—they need some sort of fuel,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “They need something to be able to accelerate and pick up wind speed, and the thing they use to do that largely is the ocean surface.”

As water evaporates off the ocean, buoyant clouds form, releasing heat and lowering atmospheric pressure. That sucks in air, creating winds and a vortex. Hurricanes also love high humidity because dry air can slow the speed of the updrafts that the storms need to grow big and strong. Hurricanes hate wind shear—winds moving at different speeds and directions at different altitudes. El Niño tends to encourage the proliferation of wind shear over the Atlantic, while La Niña tends to discourage it. Right now the conditions are “neutral,” as El Niño has faded and La Niña has yet to officially form.

So warm ocean temperatures aren’t the only ingredient to make a hurricane, but they’re certainly the fuel. As Ernesto was chugging across the Atlantic between West Africa and the Caribbean, it was encountering abnormally high ocean temperatures made at least 50 to 100 times more likely because of climate change, according to Climate Central’s analysis. (To be clear, this isn’t saying that Ernesto itself was more likely because of climate change—that will require further analysis.) More remarkable still, the group found that Hurricane Beryl, a Category 5 that slammed into Texas in early July, fed on ocean temperatures made 100 to 400 times more likely by climate change. “We also know that storms are moving slower, they are lasting longer, and these things we expect to be influenced by climate as well,” Gilford said.

High ocean temperatures also feed the “rapid intensification” of hurricanes, defined as a jump in sustained wind speeds of at least 35 mph in 24 hours. Hurricane Beryl did that on its way to Texas, shattering records for how quickly it developed into a monster storm. Rapid intensification makes hurricanes extra dangerous because a coastal city might be preparing for a Category 2 to make landfall, only for a Category 5 to suddenly appear. And the problem is only getting worse, as research has found a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore.

Luckily for Bermuda, Ernesto hasn’t rapidly intensified—though it’s come close this week—but it’s still a very dangerous Category 2. “The shear is potentially a little bit stronger than originally thought,” said Samantha Nebylitsa, who studies hurricanes at the University of Miami, and “dry air just has been really impeding the intensification. It’s just not letting up.” That could well weaken the storm into a Category 1 by the time it hits Bermuda.

The Atlantic is likely to continue providing more fuel as summer winds down. Because the ocean takes longer to heat up than the land, the peak of hurricane season isn’t until September. And the season doesn’t officially close until the end of November. “The best predictions suggest that we are maybe only about 15 or 20 percent the way through of the total activity we expect this year,” Gilford said. “There’s a lot more to come down the pipeline in 2024.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

After unleashing widespread flooding and knocking out electricity for half of Puerto Rico, this season’s third hurricane, Ernesto, has turned north and is approaching Bermuda. In an average Atlantic season, the third hurricane doesn’t spin up until September 7, so Ernesto has arrived way, way early. As of August 9, this summer had already produced a third of the activity in a typical season— with nearly 90 percent of it remaining.

All that makes Ernesto, now a Category 2 hurricane, an ominous sign of what’s still to come in the next few months—and what to expect as the planet rapidly warms. “Being a little more than three weeks ahead of schedule for the third hurricane is pretty impressive,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

This spring, scientists predicted that the Atlantic Ocean would play host to an exceptionally active hurricane season, with five major hurricanes and 21 named storms, for one particularly good reason—the ocean is exceptionally warm, and is expected to stay that way. In July, the nursery for Atlantic hurricanes was running 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the long-term average. “Hurricanes are a lot like engines—they need some sort of fuel,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “They need something to be able to accelerate and pick up wind speed, and the thing they use to do that largely is the ocean surface.”

As water evaporates off the ocean, buoyant clouds form, releasing heat and lowering atmospheric pressure. That sucks in air, creating winds and a vortex. Hurricanes also love high humidity because dry air can slow the speed of the updrafts that the storms need to grow big and strong. Hurricanes hate wind shear—winds moving at different speeds and directions at different altitudes. El Niño tends to encourage the proliferation of wind shear over the Atlantic, while La Niña tends to discourage it. Right now the conditions are “neutral,” as El Niño has faded and La Niña has yet to officially form.

So warm ocean temperatures aren’t the only ingredient to make a hurricane, but they’re certainly the fuel. As Ernesto was chugging across the Atlantic between West Africa and the Caribbean, it was encountering abnormally high ocean temperatures made at least 50 to 100 times more likely because of climate change, according to Climate Central’s analysis. (To be clear, this isn’t saying that Ernesto itself was more likely because of climate change—that will require further analysis.) More remarkable still, the group found that Hurricane Beryl, a Category 5 that slammed into Texas in early July, fed on ocean temperatures made 100 to 400 times more likely by climate change. “We also know that storms are moving slower, they are lasting longer, and these things we expect to be influenced by climate as well,” Gilford said.

High ocean temperatures also feed the “rapid intensification” of hurricanes, defined as a jump in sustained wind speeds of at least 35 mph in 24 hours. Hurricane Beryl did that on its way to Texas, shattering records for how quickly it developed into a monster storm. Rapid intensification makes hurricanes extra dangerous because a coastal city might be preparing for a Category 2 to make landfall, only for a Category 5 to suddenly appear. And the problem is only getting worse, as research has found a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore.

Luckily for Bermuda, Ernesto hasn’t rapidly intensified—though it’s come close this week—but it’s still a very dangerous Category 2. “The shear is potentially a little bit stronger than originally thought,” said Samantha Nebylitsa, who studies hurricanes at the University of Miami, and “dry air just has been really impeding the intensification. It’s just not letting up.” That could well weaken the storm into a Category 1 by the time it hits Bermuda.

The Atlantic is likely to continue providing more fuel as summer winds down. Because the ocean takes longer to heat up than the land, the peak of hurricane season isn’t until September. And the season doesn’t officially close until the end of November. “The best predictions suggest that we are maybe only about 15 or 20 percent the way through of the total activity we expect this year,” Gilford said. “There’s a lot more to come down the pipeline in 2024.”

Enlarge (credit: Peter Zelei Images via Getty Images)

Extreme weather is, by definition, rare on our planet. Ferocious storms, searing heatwaves, and biting cold snaps illustrate what the climate is capable of at its worst. However, since Earth’s climate is rapidly warming, predominantly due to fossil fuel burning, the range of possible weather conditions, including extremes, is changing.

Scientists define “climate” as the distribution of possible weather events observed over a length of time, such as the range of temperatures, rainfall totals, or hours of sunshine. From this, they construct statistical measures, such as the average (or normal) temperature. Weather varies on several timescales—from seconds to decades—so the longer the period over which the climate is analyzed, the more accurately these analyses capture the infinite range of possible configurations of the atmosphere.

Typically, meteorologists and climate scientists use a 30-year period to represent the climate, which is updated every 10 years. The most recent climate period is 1991–2020. The difference between each successive 30-year climate period serves as a very literal record of climate change.

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Enlarge / Image of some of the atmospheric circulation seen during NeuralGCM runs. (credit: Google)

Right now, the world's best weather forecast model is a General Circulation Model, or GCM, put together by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. A GCM is in part based on code that calculates the physics of various atmospheric processes that we understand well. For a lot of the rest, GCMs rely on what's termed "parameterization," which attempts to use empirically determined relationships to approximate what's going on with processes where we don't fully understand the physics.

Lately, GCMs have faced some competition from machine-learning techniques, which train AI systems to recognize patterns in meteorological data and use those to predict the conditions that will result over the next few days. Their forecasts, however, tend to get a bit vague after more than a few days and can't deal with the sort of long-term factors that need to be considered when GCMs are used to study climate change.

On Monday, a team from Google's AI group and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts are announcing NeuralGCM, a system that mixes physics-based atmospheric circulation with AI parameterization of other meteorological influences. Neural GCM is computationally efficient and performs very well in weather forecast benchmarks. Strikingly, it can also produce reasonable-looking output for runs that cover decades, potentially allowing it to address some climate-relevant questions. While it can't handle a lot of what we use climate models for, there are some obvious routes for potential improvements.

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments