This story was published in partnership with Capital B. Willie Calhoun knows how to live with water. His home, cradled between the Mississippi River and a patchwork of canals, is split by the surging, ever-present current. But it wasn’t always that way in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. Before the city’s largest aqueduct, known as the Industrial Canal, was built, the stretch of land between the river and Lake Pontchartrain was a place meant for water, fish, and wading birds rather than for people. The ground was soft and unstable, mostly swamp, dense cypress trees, and tangled undergrowth laced with meandering bayous. But in 1918, dredges cut through the wetlands, carving a straight channel that drained and filled the low ground, creating the Lower Ninth Ward and the impression that the land was ready for houses—and factories and ship traffic. It then became home to Black families, who affectionally nicknamed the neighborhood the “Lower Ninth” or, simply, “the Nine.” They were drawn by promises of stability, only to inherit the vulnerabilities engineered into the landscape. He still remembers a day, sitting at the dinner table when he was about 10. His longshoreman father, tired after a day on the barge, declared a warning almost as fact: “If a storm ever come up, it is gonna drown the Ninth Ward.” Willie Calhoun at Fairview Mission Baptist Church in the Lower Ninth WardTrenity Thomas The storms did come. “He was right,” Calhoun said.  “Lower Nine was flooded. It drowned.”  Along Lake Pontchartrain, the river, and the navigation canals, levees and concrete floodwalls trace the edges like banks shaping the current. When storms press in, surge barriers and gates swing shut to calm the incoming rush, while pumps gather the rainfall and send it flowing back out. It isn’t a single wall, but a braided system to protect the city below sea level. Roughly 350 miles of clay and concrete along the lake and river must all work in concert to keep the neighborhoods dry. In 1965, when Calhoun was 15, the levees along the Industrial Canal failed when Hurricane Betsy struck New Orleans. Dozens of his neighbors trapped in their attics drowned as floodwaters rose to their rooftops. Four decades later in 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck even harder. The Industrial Canal’s levees crumbled again. Water roared through the streets with enough force to rip houses from their foundations. Cars flipped, tricycles vanished beneath sludge, and bodies remained unrecovered for weeks. Of the 1,300 people who died in Katrina, Calhoun lost two neighbors and one of his oldest friends. Today, the sense of loss is palpable. On his block, just four homes remain.  Fairview Mission Baptist ChurchTrenity Thomas Calhoun, who is now the pastor of Fairview Mission Baptist Church, retired early from the federal government to rebuild a home for his mother in 2008, plunging into debt for the first time in his life. At 75, he is still paying for the honor to return. Each flood and manmade catastrophe has demanded more than just rebuilding homes, Calhoun said. On some evenings, he stands in the neighborhood at the edge of the canal, sunlight gleaming off the concrete floodwalls rebuilt after Katrina. The shadows stretch across deserted fields and the shuttered Martin Luther King Jr. High School. The stillness feels uneasy: After all the storms he’s outlasted since his father first warned him of these waters, another threat is rising. It is here where the US government is moving to restart a $4.7 billion canal reconstruction effort. This winter, on the heels of the 20th anniversary of Katrina and 68 years after the project was first approved by Congress in 1956, the US Army Corps of Engineers is expected to decide whether to seek funding for a plan to relocate the canal’s lock system, which transfers boats from the canal to the river and vice versa, and subsequently rebuild a portion of the canal’s flood protection system.  It would leave the city’s weakest flood defenses exposed for more than a decade and allow the Mississippi River—and its storm surges—to flow about a quarter of a mile deeper into the neighborhood. Supporters see it as a long‑delayed fix to a chokepoint vital to Gulf commerce; residents like Calhoun see years of disruption with uncertain protection and a fresh test of what “progress” means for Black families. For decades, the construction had not moved forward due to sustained community opposition, environmental lawsuits, and shifting economic justification. (Over the last decade, the estimated cost has ballooned by $3.5 billion.) But today, the Corps now finds itself in a more advantageous position. Lax environmental regulations, a steadily declining population, and the shifting priorities of federal policy have created fewer obstacles than ever before. The decision will determine the neighborhood’s fate and signal the nation’s position on climate adaptation, equity, safety, and willingness to work with water instead of against it. If construction proceeds, the anticipated timeline would bring years of disruption, with uncertain guarantees. Benefits like job creation may come, but so might increased displacement and ecological harm. Since Katrina, the rebuilding of his community has “been about how they can make a nickel or a dime off us,” Calhoun said. “And when you go back and you start looking at the history, you start looking at what’s really happening right now in all these 20 years, how is it that they have not produced more for the people here?”   “You can come back from water if you respect it.” Lower Ninth Ward in February 2006, six months after Hurricane Katrina.Mark Murrmann THE CHOICE AT WATER’S EDGE Across the Nine, weeds push through cracked sidewalks, power poles lean, and the hum of life is absent. The nearest full-service grocery store is miles away; small corner shops offer mostly canned goods and soda. Work is scarce. The neighborhood has less than half the number of working people as it did pre-Katrina, the starkest decline in the city. Unemployment is more than double the city’s rate, and most households earn less than half the national average.  Many blocks feel paused in time, as though the rush to rebuild never reached here. Yet even as blocks stayed empty and storefronts went dark, the region poured roughly $14.5 billion into a fortified rim of levees, gates, and pumps meant to keep surge from ever reaching the Industrial Canal and the Lower Nine again. The Army Corps has been in charge of projects that have strengthened levees, floodwalls, and seagates and built the world’s largest pump station and storm surge barriers. But that system now faces a cut in federal funding and will no longer receive regular monitoring, leaving the city more vulnerable to unnoticed weaknesses and potential disaster.  Already, parts of the new flood system are sinking by as much as 2 inches per year. Standing on the floodwall system in August, Calhoun could fit his finger through cracks in the slowly separating wall. The new project could worsen that decline. When levees settle unevenly, they crack, which weakens the city’s barrier against the fastest-rising sea levels in the United States. The Corps knows this. “In New Orleans, you’re kind of building on pudding,” Ricky Boyett, a spokesperson for the Corps, said earlier this year. “If you build anything on that ground, it’s going to sink.” Reconstruction of the levee in the Lower Ninth Ward in 2006Mark Murrmann The Environmental Protection Agency knows it too.  Emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that under the Biden administration, the regional office of the EPA privately voiced concerns about the project’s impact. Officials’ worries focused on the project’s potential to worsen flooding and pollution in a community already facing substantial environmental and health burdens. The emails also showed, at times, a hostile relationship with Corps staffers.  But the Port of New Orleans and the Industrial Canal form a vital gateway between America’s heartland and the world, channeling over $100 billion in economic impact and generating 1 in 5 jobs in Louisiana. In 2023, 81 million tons of grain, fossil fuels, and manufactured goods moved through the waterway, the fifth-largest amount for an American seaport.  To supporters of the project, the canal’s upgrade represents a lifeline for commerce: Every day, massive barges must wait hours—sometimes all day—to squeeze through the century-old lock that connects the canal to the river. The Corps and shipping companies argue that modernizing the waterway will finally break this bottleneck. They point to the stakes in simple terms: Without these improvements, a single stalled barge or shipment can delay millions of dollars in exports, slow deliveries to factories across the Midwest, and threaten the efficiency that keeps New Orleans at the heart of America’s trade with the world.  The port, having lost 15 percent of its volume to other Gulf ports in Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi since Katrina, has spent nearly a million dollars lobbying the Army Corps since 2020 for canal and harbor upgrades in hopes of maintaining its viability. However, existentially, the project signals something even bigger, explained Rollin Black, a researcher and advocate focused on coastal restoration around New Orleans. In his view, the threats extend beyond the levees themselves. For a century, the Gulf Coast has, on average, lost 1 yard of wetlands every single minute. And instead of bolstering coastal restoration or adapting to rising climate pressures, he warned, authorities are intensifying the city’s vulnerability by disrupting the very flows of water and sediment that sustain Louisiana’s wetlands against storms. A historical marker near the floodwall bordering the Lower Ninth WardTrenity Thomas Recent environmental policy changes have weakened the safeguards that put this project on the Biden administration’s radar last year. Updates to the National Environmental Policy Act have cut public input and environmental justice reviews. The new EPA regional head who covers Louisiana, Scott Mason, was the main author of Project 2025’s EPA plan, which called for speeding up federal funding for water infrastructure by pushing for faster permitting and less environmental review for public works projects. In response to several questions, Mason’s EPA office said it is working “closely with [the Army Corps] to ensure nearby residents of this project have their concerns addressed.” But to Black, there is no addressing or mitigating the impact of this project.  “You can come back from water, if you respect it,” he said, but “I think if the canal project were to happen, it’d be a worse hit than Katrina. “I don’t think they could come back from this project.” This is in no small part due to the fact that every federal promise since Katrina—from reopened schools to genuine economic revival—has faded, he said.  It is the childhood fear of a forever-underwater Lower Ninth Ward that has kept Calhoun and his family against the project. When the project was first announced and floated throughout the 1960s, his parents were vehemently opposed. “We understood then that the ground was sinking, that more and more of the waters were coming inland,” he said.  Calhoun argues the process is sidestepping Black elders. At a July public comment meeting, every local resident who spoke opposed the project, but only 15 percent were Black. Despite the community still being majority Black, the number of Black residents in the area is 67 percent less than it was in 2000.  The number of white residents has grown by 920 percent. “They don’t understand the stakes,” Calhoun said. While white transplants, drawn by cheap property and the neighborhood’s cultural cachet,  now lead much of the opposition to the canal project, those voices, longtime residents said, can overshadow their own. The Corps’ justification for the project relies partly on the neighborhood’s population change since the last flood, claiming the construction will have a lower human impact. Today, the area’s population is 7,500, down from 19,500 in 2000. It’s a circular logic, residents say: Destroy a community through incompetence, then use that destruction to justify further damage. In response to questions, the Army Corps said it had developed two programs to mitigate risk, but that the lock expansion was “the least environmentally damaging practicable alternative under federal law.” The federal government maintains that, though economic gains from the project may be debated, action is inescapable because the century-old lock is so deteriorated that it could fail unexpectedly. If it did, it could unleash floodwaters with catastrophic consequences for the community, regardless of whether the canal is upgraded or not. From their vantage along the river, officials argue that waiting is itself a gamble. For residents like Calhoun, the compounding situation—the neglect, displacement, and erasure—raises questions about if the pre-Katrina community will ever have a say in its own destiny again.  “It’s about more than water,” he said. “We’re still Hurricane Betsy survivors. Still Katrina survivors. But who’s going to survive the next storm?”   “Twenty years after Katrina We just want the Corps to focus on us for once.” Lower Ninth Ward, February 2006Mark Murrmann CROSSCURRENTS IN THE NINTH WARD As more muggy summer days surrender to dusk in the Lower Ninth Ward, the line between past and future blurs along the battered canal. Everyone in the neighborhood—old timers and newcomers—now stand at a crossroads shaped by water, memory, and power. Across the neighborhood, there has been murmurs about what benefits the project could bring. Congress mandates allocating roughly 10 percent of the project’s cost, nearly $480 million in this case, for community-based projects. Proposed ideas from the Corps of Engineers include new green spaces, job training, support for youth and seniors, and historical markers recognizing Black community heritage. Some arguments in support of the project rest on how federal infrastructure actually gets made. The Corps develops alternatives and mitigation packages through congressionally authorized studies and feasibility reviews, with public meetings and comment periods giving residents a way in. But the options are ultimately winnowed by cost‑benefit math, engineering risk, environmental review, and the politics of local sponsors and Congress. History here is instructive: pre‑Katrina canal decisions showed how neighborhood preferences could be sidelined when cheaper, faster designs won the day. Opponents can delay a federal project through organizing, lawsuits, and relentless scrutiny, yet the decisive votes sit in Washington. And though neighborhood pushback has managed to postpone the canal project about six times since the 1960s, there’s a persistent fear that their objections will eventually be swept aside. It is why many longtime residents, especially older Black homeowners directly affected by these decisions, have grown apathetic after decades of being ignored. Robert Green, a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, sits in his home in the Lower Ninth Ward.Trenity Thomas “Either you’re going to allow the project to happen and make it work for you, or you’re going to stand on the side and be frustrated, and it still happens,” said Robert Green, one of the few remaining homeowners on his street just two blocks from the canal. Katrina killed his mother and his 3-year-old granddaughter Shanai “Nai Nai” Green.  It is hard to get activated around the project, Green said, because he doesn’t have relationships with the people he sees leading the movement. Before Katrina, he knew all of his neighbors. Today, he does not.  Corps officials admit the greatest benefits of the canal expansion will go to navigation and shipping, not Lower Ninth residents, who will face years of upheaval. For many, it’s a familiar story: Black neighborhoods absorbing the health and environmental costs of Louisiana’s industrial corridor, reinforcing the region’s “sacrifice zone” status, even as calls rise to move away from fossil fuels. “Twenty years after Katrina, we just want the Corps to focus on us for once,” said Chris Williams, a 46-year-old resident who attended the last public hearing. Currently, half the canal’s cargo supports fossil fuel production, while an additional 38 percent serves other pollution-heavy industries. The powerful Gulf Intracoastal Canal Association, which backs the project, did not respond to requests for comment. The Port of New Orleans deferred all comments to the Army Corps.  No matter the outcome, grain, oil, gas, and coal will still flow through New Orleans tomorrow. The project, advocates argue, highlights the tension between economic promises and environmental reality. As global markets shift toward cleaner energy, in theory, these materials will go extinct soon.  A sign in the Lower Ninth Ward protests the canal project.Trenity Thomas Manufacturing and energy jobs anchor Louisiana’s economy, but since 2020, their stagnation has contributed to the state and New Orleans experiencing the steepest population loss in the country, said Allison Plyer, a demographer in New Orleans. Compared to 2004, the Lower Nine has 60 percent fewer industrial workers living in the neighborhood today. She urged greater scrutiny of whether new industrial projects truly reach locals. (The canal expansion would generate several hundred temporary positions.) Andre Perry, director of the Center for Community Uplift at the Brookings Institution, noted that cities must pursue industries that provide income and protect local environments—a bar the Lower Ninth’s canal project may not clear. A joint report from Brookings and the Data Center warns that this fight plays out amid a deeper, decadeslong crisis. Despite post-Katrina investment, most Black neighborhoods remain close to toxic sites, air pollution, and soil laced with lead and arsenic. These are lasting scars that canal expansion could deepen. The community closest to the canal is exposed to more pollution than 90 percent of the country. State records show that several major oil spills and fires have taken place in the canal since 2020, and at times, companies have been hesitant to follow state cleanup processes.  Federal documents received through FOIA also showed that soil at the bottom of the canal contains hazardous chemicals like DDT, a long‑lasting pesticide that can build up in fish and people, where it disrupts hormones, can harm the brain, and increases cancer risk. Plans to excavate and transport this contaminated soil have heightened neighbors’ fears about what further disruption the future may bring. After Katrina washed the city with toxins, cleanup was slowest in these most polluted areas, prolonging health hazards and depressing property values. Now, with state regulators weakening enforcement and making it harder for communities to challenge polluters, these “sacrifice zones” remain locked in a cycle in which poverty magnifies pollution’s harm, and pollution in turn stifles recovery. The Brookings report calls for a new approach: Make polluters pay into a resilience fund, clean up the neighborhoods most burdened by industry, and channel investment into “green zones” that give residents a healthier, more secure future against the guarantee of more storms. Deborah Campbell at her home in the Seventh WardTrenity Thomas As it stands today, said Deborah Campbell, a 72-year-old lifelong resident who was thrust into activism after Katrina, “the only thing we’re looking forward to—what they’re trying to push in our backyard—is poor health and stress.” Campbell’s group, A Community Voice, believes the project has greater legs under a Trump administration because President Donald Trump’s strongest Louisiana ally, Boysie Bollinger, is a major shipyard owner who operates extensively along the Gulf. In 2017, the Trump administration listed the canal project among its 50 most important infrastructure priorities. (Bollinger Shipyards did not respond to requests for comment.) Since Trump’s return, the rules of the fight have shifted. The Supreme Court has tipped leverage away from regulators and toward industry in the most technical corners of environmental law. At the water’s edge, the Supreme Court’s 2023 guidance in Sackett v. EPA narrowed which wetlands the Clean Water Act still protects. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has stepped back from environmental justice enforcement. Even the Corps’ civil works purse has become a battleground, with Democrats alleging that the Corps’ projects are being funded only in Republican districts, leaving coastal neighborhoods guessing who gets protected next.  In that opening, the canal’s backers see a clearer lane, and the people most exposed are again left to do what the government has not: Defend their health and their homes as they brace for the water to rise. At Sankofa’s wetland park, rainwater seeps slowly into native grasses and cypress roots instead of rushing toward flooded streets, while families often stroll shaded trails where egrets rise from the reeds. Just down the road, neighbors gather at the Sankofa Market, trading recipes over baskets of locally grown and cost-friendly mustard greens, okra, and sweet potatoes.  Down the way, Freedom to Grow NOLA has turned a vacant lot into orderly rows of vegetables and herbs, where residents pull berries from bushes and learn how food connects to care for the land and each other. And along the edge of the city’s disappearing marsh, volunteers with Common Ground Relief, founded by a former Black Panther member days after Katrina hit, are planting mangrove seedlings, their roots anchoring the coast against the slow bite of the Gulf, before heading back to distribute bags of fresh produce and pantry staples to residents.  Common Ground Relief in New OrleansTrenity Thomas Together, these spaces are replacing scarcity with abundance and abandonment with stewardship, protecting both the landscape and the health of the community it sustains, residents have explained. They understand that regardless of what decision the Corps makes, the canal’s waters will still divide New Orleans. The canal serves as a living line between what nature once claimed and what was claimed from it. It reminds Calhoun that here, the cost of development has mostly fallen on those Black families, and ultimately the question left hanging is existential: Whose safety, prosperity, and history does America choose to defend, not if, but when the water threatens to return again? “New Orleans is surrounded by water, and it can either sustain us or kill us,” he said. “It seems like some people would rather continue to work against it, which only leaves one of those two options for us.”  Additional data analysis by Melissa Lewis.

One longstanding fight that has divided the political right has been over whether or not humans should be allowed to modify the weather, with religious conservatives saying absolutely not, while the tech visionaries are all for it. These debates were often theoretical, but then the catastrophic floods in Texas took place. On July 2, two days before floods devastated communities in West Texas, a California-based company called Rainmaker was conducting operations in the area. Rainmaker was working on behalf of the South Texas Weather Modification Association, a coalition of water conservation districts and county commissions; the project is overseen by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. Through a geoengineering technology called cloud-seeding, the company uses drones to disperse silver iodide into clouds to encourage rainfall. The company is relatively new—it was launched in 2023—but the technology has been around since 1947, when the first cloud-seeding experiment took place. After news of the floods broke, it didn’t take long for internet observers to make a connection and point to Rainmaker’s cloud-seeding efforts as the cause of the catastrophe. “This isn’t just ‘climate change,’” posted Georgia Republican congressional candidate Kandiss Taylor to her 65,000 followers on X. “It’s cloud seeding, geoengineering, & manipulation. If fake weather causes real tragedy, that’s murder.” Gabrielle Yoder, a right-wing influencer, posted on Instagram to her 151,000 followers, “I could visibly see them spraying prior to the storm that has now claimed over 40 lives.” Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser and election denier, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about Russia, told his 2.1 million followers on X that he’d “love to see the response” from the company to the accusations that it was responsible for the inundation. Augustus Doricko, Rainmaker’s 25-year-old CEO, took Flynn up on his request. “Rainmaker did not operate in the affected area on the 3rd or 4th,” he posted on X, “or contribute to the floods that occurred over the region.” Meteorologists resoundingly agree with Doricko, saying that the technology simply isn’t capable of causing that volume of precipitation, in which parts of Kerr County experienced an estimated 100 billion gallons of rain in just a few hours. But the scientific evidence didn’t dissuade those who had already made up their minds that geoengineering was to blame. On July 5, the day after the floods, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced that she planned to introduce a bill that would make it a felony offense for humans to deliberately alter the weather. “We must end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering,” she tweeted. Lawmakers in both Florida and Tennessee appear to feel similarly; they have recently passed laws that outlaw weather modification. But other states have embraced the technology: Rainmaker currently has contracts in several states that struggle with drought: Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado, California, and Texas, as well as with municipalities in Utah and Idaho. The debate over cloud-seeding is yet another flashpoint in a simmering standoff between two powerful MAGA forces: on one side are the techno-optimists—think Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk (who has fallen from grace, of course), or even Vice President JD Vance—who believe that technological advancement is an expression of patriotism. This is the move-fast-and-break-things crowd that generally supports projects they consider to be cutting edge—for example, building deregulated zones to encourage innovation, extending the human lifespan with experimental medical procedures, and using genetic engineering to enhance crops. And to ensure those crops are sufficiently watered, cloud-seeding. The opposing side, team “natural,” is broadly opposed to anything they consider artificial, be it tampering with the weather, adding chemicals to food, or administering vaccines, which many of them see as disruptive to a perfectly self-sufficient human immune system. The “Make America Healthy Again” movement started by US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., lies firmly in this camp. Indeed, Kennedy himself has spoken out against weather modification. “Geoengineering schemes could make floods & heatwaves worse,” he tweeted last June. “We must subject big, untested policy ideas to intense scrutiny.” In March, he tweeted that he considered states’ efforts to ban geoengineering “a movement every MAHA needs to support” and vowed that “HHS will do its part.” In April, Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s crusading surgeon general who emerged as a critic of Covid vaccines, cheered Florida’s geoengineering ban. “Big thanks to Senator Garcia for leading efforts to reduce geoengineering and weather modification activities in our Florida skies,” he posted, referring to Republican state senator Ileana Garcia, who had introduced the bill. “We have to keep fighting to clean up the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.” Unsurprisingly, both camps believe that God is on their side. “This is not normal,” Rep. Greene tweeted on July 5, a day after the Texas floods, when the extent of the damage was still not fully known. “I want clean air, clean skies, clean rainwater, clean ground water, and sunshine just like God created it!!” The following day, Rainmaker’s Doricko tweeted, “I’m trying to help preserve the world God made for us by bringing water to the farms and ecosystems that are dying without it.” Last year, he told Business Insider, “I view in no small part what we’re doing at Rainmaker as, cautiously and with scrutiny from others and advice from others, helping to establish the kingdom of God.” > “I view in no small part what we’re doing at Rainmaker as, cautiously and with > scrutiny from others and advice from others, helping to establish the kingdom > of God.” Indeed, for Doricko, the reference to the divine was not merely rhetorical. He reportedly attends Christ Church Santa Clarita, a church affiliated with the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial and Gen Z, ultraconservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of this branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.   His political formation was also ultraconservative. As an undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley, he launched the school’s chapter of America First Students, the university arm of the political organization founded by white nationalist “Groyper” and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. (Doricko didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.) More recently, he has aligned himself with a different corner of the right: the ascendant Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are increasingly influencing Republican politics. Last year, PayPal founder and deep-pocketed right-wing donor Peter Thiel’s foundation granted Doricko a Thiel Fellowship, a grant awarded annually to a select group of entrepreneurs who have foregone a college degree in order to pursue a tech-focused business venture. Rainmaker has received seed funding from other right-leaning investors, including entrepreneurs and venture capitalists Garry Tan and Balaji Srinivasan. (This world isn’t as distant from Doricko’s religious community as it might seem; the cross-pollination between the Silicon Valley elite and TheoBro-style Christian nationalism is well underway.) Yet for all his right-wing bonafides, Doricko also refers to himself as an “environmentalist”—a label that has historically been associated with the political left. And indeed, Rainmaker also has ties to left-leaning firms and politicians. Last March on X, Doricko posted a photo of himself with Lauren Sanchez, wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and head of the environmentally-focused philanthropy Bezos Earth Fund. “Grateful that Lauren and the @BezosEarthFund realize we don’t have to choose between a healthier environment and greater human prosperity,” Doricko wrote. A month later, he posted a photo of himself with former president Bill Clinton, adding, “It was a pleasure discussing how cloud seeding can enhance water supplies with #42 @BillClinton!” Predictably, Doricko drew backlash from the right for those tweets, but he didn’t seem to mind, likely because he’s been too busy fighting weather modification bans IRL. Earlier this year, he testified before both the Florida House Appropriations Committee and the Tennessee Agriculture & Natural Resources Committee, imploring the skeptics to quit worrying and embrace technology. “If you’re in favor of depriving farmers in Tennessee from having the best technology available in other states, I would ask you to vote for the bill as it is,” he said in his testimony in the Tennessee statehouse. “In all things, I aspire to be a faithful Christian, and part of that means stewarding creation. On Monday, Doricko appeared on a live X space, where he attempted to address the allegations that Rainmaker had caused the floods. “The flooding, unequivocally, had nothing to do with Rainmaker’s activities or any weather modification activities that I know of,” he said. Yet Doricko’s appearance seemed only to intensify the rift in the MAGA-verse. “We have a right to KNOW if cloud seeding had a role in #TexasFlooding,” Fox &Friends host Rachel Campos Duffy tweeted to her 279,000 followers on July 9. “Also need to know why companies are allowed to manipulate weather without public consent??!!” The following day, Mike Solana, the CEO of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, posted to his 373,000 followers, “The hurricane laser people are threatening Augustus’s life for making it rain. They are idiots. But he *can* make it rain—and he should (we thank you for your service).”

The devastating floods that hit central Texas last Friday have now killed at least 120 people, including dozens of children, according to authorities, and left at least 150 missing. But the leaders at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tasked with supporting communities in the wake of similar disasters have been missing in action, according to a slate of recent damning reports. For one, FEMA Acting Administrator David Richardson is nowhere to be found, according to multiple reports. A former Marine, Richardson appears to have no experience leading disaster management. Yet in his current role, Richardson—who made headlines after he reportedly told FEMA staff that he was unaware the US has a hurricane season (White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed that as a “joke”) and threatened to “run right over” anyone who got in his way—is federally mandated to be responsible for providing national leadership in preparation for, and in response to, natural disasters. In the past, FEMA administrators have typically been among the first responders at disaster sites to help manage the response. Former FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told E&E News that the head of FEMA should be on the ground “to talk to local officials, talk to the people that have been impacted, see firsthand what the damages are—and make sure FEMA was directing the appropriate resources as fast as possible into the appropriate area.” But FEMA staffers say that whatever Richardson is doing, it’s not that. Not only has he reportedly made no public appearances since assuming his role—which did not require Senate confirmation—he has also yet to arrive in Texas since the July 4 tragedy struck. “I have no idea what’s going on with David Richardson’s absence,” one FEMA employee told E&E News. “If this is how they are going to do a major hurricane response, people are fucked,” one FEMA source told independent journalist Marisa Kabas, author of the newsletter The Handbasket. Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees FEMA and several other agencies, seems to have effectively taken over Richardson’s role. She arrived in Texas within days of the floods, conducting a press conference with Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) and touring the hardest-hit sites, including Camp Mystic, the Christian girls’ camp where at least 27 children, counselors, and staff died. But Noem has also sought to downplay the federal government’s role in responding to the disaster: “We, as a federal government, don’t manage these disasters—the state does. We come in and support them, and that’s exactly what we did here in this situation,” Noem said at a Cabinet meeting earlier this week. > “We as a federal government don’t manage these disasters—the state does. We > come in and support them, and that’s exactly what we did here in this > situation.” But new reporting suggests that Noem is obstructing federal action in fulfilling even the more limited role she envisions. According to a memo obtained by CNN last month, Noem has demanded to personally approve all DHS contracts and grants worth more than $100,000, a process she has reportedly warned would take at least five days per request. “This will hurt nonprofits, states, and small towns. Massive delays feel inevitable,” one FEMA official told CNN last month. It appears that’s already happening in Texas. Four FEMA officials told CNN in a story published on Wednesday that Noem’s new rule has slowed the Texas response. Multiple sources told that outlet that Noem did not authorize the agency’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams—which are normally stationed close to disaster zones as the importance of their role becomes clear—until Monday, more than three days after the flooding began. (As the Daily Beast points out, Noem managed to find some time on Sunday to ask her Instagram followers which portrait of her they would prefer to hang in the Capitol of South Dakota, where she was previously governor.) Aerial imagery from FEMA that Texas officials requested to support search and rescue was also delayed due to Noem’s insistence on personally approving those requests; she has also yet to okay a contract to bolster support staff at a disaster call center, where FMEA staff have been fielding phones, and callers have faced longer wait times, the staff told CNN. CNN and The Handbasket reported that by Monday, only 86 FEMA staffers had been deployed to Texas, a smaller team than would typically be on the ground to respond to such a disaster. By Tuesday night, 311 staffers in total had been deployed, according to CNN. Over the weekend, President Donald Trump signed a major disaster declaration for Kerr County—the epicenter of the floods—which unlocks federal funding and resources to support the emergency response and longer-term recovery. But only 25 households out of more than 20,000 in Kerr County have thus far received funding from that pot of money, according to FEMA’s website. A former FEMA official told E&E News that they “would be asking the regional [FEMA] administrator why that number is so low and what can we do to improve registrations.” (Texas lacks a regional FEMA administrator.) On Wednesday, congressional Democrats serving on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure wrote to FEMA and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) questioning whether Richardson will visit Texas, how many FEMA personnel have been deployed there, and whether Noem and Trump plan to move forward with trying to abolish FEMA, among other questions related to recent reporting about the agency’s failures. “It would be unconscionable to face the next extreme weather event with a FEMA and NWS [National Weather Service] that are anything less than fully resourced to respond from the earliest forecast through the last delivery of relief,” the lawmakers write, asking for a response by July 22. But Noem has already managed to answer one of the Democrats’ questions: She does, indeed, want to abolish FEMA. At a public meeting on Wednesday, Noem blasted FEMA for being too slow to respond without acknowledging her own role in perpetuating the delays. “It has been slow to respond at the federal level,” Noem said of FEMA. “It’s even been slower to get the resources to Americans in crisis, and that is why this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today, and remade into a responsive agency.” When Mother Jones reached out to FEMA for comment, there was no reply. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the agency has taken “an all-hands-on-desk approach to respond to recovery efforts” in Texas, but she did not answer a series of detailed questions about Noem’s and Richardson’s alleged actions based on the reports cited here.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Ted Cruz has had quite a week. On Tuesday, the Texas senator ensured the Republican spending bill slashed funding for weather forecasting, only to then go on vacation to Greece while his state was hit by deadly flooding, a disaster critics say was worsened by cuts to forecasting. Cruz, who infamously fled Texas for Cancun when a crippling winter storm ravaged his state in 2021, was seen visiting the Parthenon in Athens with his wife, Heidi, on Saturday, a day after a flash flood along the Guadalupe River in central Texas killed more than 100 people, including dozens of children and counselors at a camp. > “Texans are dead and grieving, and Cruz is protecting Big Oil instead of the > people he’s supposed to represent. It’s disgraceful.” The Greece trip, first reported by the Daily Beast, ended in time for Cruz to appear at the site of the disaster on Monday morning to decry the tragedy and promise a response from lawmakers. “There’s no doubt afterwards we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say, ‘Okay, what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’” Cruz told Fox News. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.” The National Weather Service (NWS) has faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas, triggering floods that caused the deaths and around $20 billion in estimated economic damages. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response, and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials. But before his Grecian holiday, Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis. Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation bill, prior to its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150 million fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around weather forecasting. A further $50 million in NOAA grants to study climate-related impacts on oceans, weather systems, and coastal ecosystems was also removed. Cruz was contacted by the Guardian with questions about these cuts and his trip to Greece. Environmental groups said the slashed funding is just the latest blow to federal agencies tasked with predicting and responding to disasters such as the Texas flood. More than 600 employees have exited the NWS amid a Trump administration push to shrink the government workforce, leaving many offices short-staffed of meteorologists and other support workers. Around a fifth of all full-time workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), meanwhile, are also set to depart. “Ted Cruz has spent years doing Big Oil’s bidding, gutting climate research, defunding NOAA, and weakening the very systems meant to warn and protect the public,’ said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of Fossil Free Media. “That’s made disasters like this weekend’s flood in Texas even more deadly. Now he’s doubling down, pushing through even more cuts in the so-called big beautiful bill. Texans are dead and grieving, and Cruz is protecting Big Oil instead of the people he’s supposed to represent. It’s disgraceful.” > “That was an act of God; it’s not the administration’s fault the floods hit > when it did.” Cruz, who has previously cast doubt over the scientific reality of the climate crisis, said that complaints about cuts to the National Weather Service are “partisan finger pointing,” although he conceded that people should’ve been evacuated earlier. “Some are eager to point at the National Weather Service and saying that cuts there led to to a lack of warning,” the Republican senator told reporters on Monday. “I think that’s contradicting by the facts and if you look in the facts in particular number one and these warnings went out hours before the flood became a true emergency.” The Trump administration, too, has rejected claims that the service was short-staffed, pointing out that extra forecasters were assigned to the San Antonio and San Angelo field offices. The service’s employees union has said the offices were staffed adequately but were missing some key positions, such as a meteorologist role designed to coordinate with local emergency managers. “People were sleeping in the middle of the night when the flood came,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. “That was an act of God; it’s not the administration’s fault the floods hit when it did.” Leavitt said any blame placed upon Trump for flood forecasting is a “depraved lie.” Resources for weather forecasting, as well as broader work to understand the unfolding climate crisis, could be set for further cutbacks, however. The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal seeks to dismantle all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs, along with its entire research division. This would halt research and development of new weather forecasting technologies and methods. This planned budget, which would need to be passed by the Republican-held Congress to become law, comes as the threats from extreme weather events continue to mount due to rising global temperatures. “We have added a lot of carbon to the atmosphere, and that extra carbon traps energy in the climate system,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “Because of this extra energy, every weather event we see now carries some influence from climate change. The only question is how big that influence is. “Measuring the exact size takes careful attribution studies, but basic physics already tells us the direction,” Dessler added. “Climate change very likely made this event stronger.”

On July 4, tragedy struck Texas. A flash flood cresting at more than 20-feet, killed at least 70 people across six counties in central Texas, according to reports. Most of the damage was concentrated in Kerr County, a region about 125 miles west of Austin. There, the dead include 21 children and 11 who reportedly remain missing from Camp Mystic, a Christian children’s summer camp in the unincorporated community of Hunt. Videos and images show homes destroyed, trees downed, and muddy waters flooding streets. On Sunday morning, Trump announced he had signed a major disaster declaration for Kerr County, which unlocks federal funding and resources to support the emergency response and longer-term recovery. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) has said that more than 800 people have been saved so far, but dozens reportedly remain missing. People at Camp Mystic, a Christian camp for girls in Hunt, Texas, which was hard hit by the flash floods.Julio Cortez/AP But according to a new report in the New York Times, there were serious inadequacies in both preparation for and the emergency response to the natural disaster. In part, apparently because of staffing shortages at the National Weather Service (NWS) prompted by Trump’s and Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal government. Housed within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the Department of Commerce, the NWS provides forecasts, weather warnings, and climate data that are used to help local and state officials protect communities in the face of weather disasters. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) invaded NOAA earlier this year, and hundreds of forecasters were reportedly fired; another 1,000 reportedly took buyout offers. According to the Times, the San Angelo office of the NWS was lacking a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster, and top meteorologist. The nearby San Antonio office also had vacancies for a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, roles that are designed to work with local officials to plan for floods. The Times reports that the warning coordination meteorologist left after taking the early retirement offer that the Trump administration has used across agencies to try to shed staff, citing a person with knowledge of that worker’s departure. The Times also reports that while some of the open roles may predate the current administration, the current vacancy rates at both the San Antonio and San Angelo NWS offices are roughly double what they were in January, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents NWS employees. John Sokich, former director of congressional affairs for NWS, told the Times the reduced staffing made it harder for the NWS to successfully coordinate with local officials. On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) said the vacancies should be investigated, adding, “I don’t think it’s helpful to have missing key personnel from the [NWS] not in place to help prevent these tragedies.” > Rep. @JoaquinCastrotx responds to reports that two key Texas National Weather > Service offices were understaffed: “I do think that it should be investigated. > And I don't think it's helpful to have missing key personnel from the National > Weather Service not in place to help prevent… pic.twitter.com/6wyckCJmZG > > — State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) July 6, 2025 Several factors, however, contributed to the scale of devastation in Texas, including some that may not have been able to have been anticipated, much less controlled. Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said at a news conference on Friday that the NWS underestimated the amount of rain expected to fall in its forecasts, but several meteorologists told Wired in a report published on Saturday that the meteorologists could not have predicted the severity of this storm, and that their forecasts were accurate at the time they issued them. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly also told reporters, “We deal with floods on a regular basis…we had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here.” And as my colleague Henry Carnell points out on Bluesky, other factors that were at play included national reductions in FEMA funding and, in some cases, lags in communication by local agencies to the public advising evacuation. A spokesperson for NWS said in a statement provided to Mother Jones on Sunday that the agency is “heartbroken by the tragic loss of life in Kerr County,” adding that the agency’s local offices in Austin and San Antonio had conducted forecast briefings for emergency management personnel on Thursday, and issued flash floods warnings both Thursday night and Friday morning. People searched through debris along the Guadalupe River on Sunday in Hunt.Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle/AP Still, the vacancies in the local Texas offices, coupled with the devastation of the floods, point to what experts have said is an urgent need for the Trump administration to bolster resources for emergency responses to natural disasters. Just this week, emergency officials from across the country told CNN that FEMA was ghosting them despite the arrival of hurricane season. Also this week, the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA), a nonpartisan group of emergency management directors, sent Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem a letter demanding she make congressionally-mandated emergency management grants available immediately, given that they should have been available in May. Spokespeople for DHS and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday afternoon. Acting FEMA Director David Richardson reportedly told staff last month he was not aware that hurricane season had started, which the White House dismissed as a joke, and a May internal review of FEMA concluded that the agency was not ready for hurricane season despite the June 1 deadline. NOAA is also seeking to cut another 2,000 employees in its proposed budget for the next fiscal year. Appearing alongside Noem, who insisted that the Trump administration would upgrade what she described as an “ancient” NWS notification system, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pledged at a Saturday press conference that officials “will be relentless in going after and ensuring that we locate every single person who’s been a victim of this flooding event.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, right, signed a disaster declaration proclamation on Saturday as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, left, looked on.Rodolfo Gonzalez/AP The tragedy is particularly chilling in light of a May open letter issued by five former NWS directors, who wrote that agency staff “will have an impossible task to continue its current level of services” in light of the Trump cuts, adding, “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the high glare of a summer evening in Fairbanks, Alaska, Ciara Santiago watched the mercury climb. A meteorologist at the National Weather Service office, she had the dubious honor of issuing the state’s first-ever official heat advisory as temperatures were expected to hit the mid-80s. It’s the kind of bureaucratic alert that rarely makes national headlines. But in a city where permafrost thaw buckles roads, homes lack air conditioning, and the high at this time of year is generally in the low 70s, the warning comes as a sign of rapidly shifting climate. Alaska is warming more than twice as fast as the global average.  > “People in [the] Lower 48 might think that’s nothing, but here those temps > could feel like 110.” In Alaska, where hazardous cold is historically more of a concern, weather offices in Fairbanks—just 120 miles south of the Arctic circle as the raven flies—didn’t have the option of issuing heat advisories until the beginning of this month, when it was added to a list of possible public alerts. “It gives us a more direct way of communicating these kinds of hazards when they occur,” Santiago said. The heat bearing down on Alaska isn’t entirely unprecedented, at least in meteorological terms. On the heels of a cold spring, a dome of high pressure, known as an upper-level ridge, has settled over the Interior, a fairly common pattern that traps warm air. In the state’s central valleys, that can spell high temperatures and dry conditions. Temperatures on Friday reached a high of 82 degrees Fahrenheit. An updated advisory on Sunday warned the hot conditions would last until Tuesday, with “temperatures up to 87F to 89F… Isolated areas up to 90F are possible, especially in the Yukon Flats.” “People in [the] Lower 48 might think that’s nothing, but here those temps could feel like 110,” Santiago said. With nearly 22 hours of sunlight approaching the solstice, daytime heat accumulates and lingers—not just outside, but indoors. Unlike the Lower 48, most homes in Alaska weren’t built to keep heat out but to keep it in during months of subzero cold. The thick insulation this requires turns houses into ovens during extended periods of hot temperatures. In Europe, where infrastructure is similarly designed for cold climates, a brutal 2003 heat wave exposed the potential risks: It killed 35,000 people. That’s part of why the state’s new heat advisory matters. It’s not just a weather bulletin. It’s a warning for a state where most people don’t have the coping mechanisms taken for granted elsewhere—shaded porches, central air, even knowing the signs of heatstroke. The sudden temperature jump also poses its own challenges. “I’m originally from Texas,” Santiago said. “I’m so used to hot summers that in the 50s, I start putting on a jacket. Now living in Alaska, I’m wearing dresses at that temperature.” But it’s not just a matter of clothing: When your body adapts to higher temperatures, the volume of blood expands, allowing your heart to pump more efficiently and reducing heat stress. You begin sweating earlier and produce more sweat per gland. But it generally takes one to two weeks of exposure to adapt, making sudden swings in temperature riskier.  The office Santiago works for, like many National Weather Service offices, has recently lost staff under Trump administration cuts. More than 560 members were laid off across the country, reducing its capacity by about a third, and leaving many stations critically understaffed. As a result, the Fairbanks office that made the state’s first heat warning must now suspend operations overnight. “We’re working to the best of our ability with what we have,” Santiago said. The early start to summer heat comes after a winter with low snow levels and early melt, raising concerns about fire season. Layoffs have also affected firefighting staff, where both technical expertise and basic manpower are in question. Concerned about federal capacity, California Gov. Newsom launched a firefighter recruitment effort this week, but in Alaska, much of the wildland firefighting force is federal, raising the question of whether those like Santiago who must prepare for threats ahead will have the resources they need.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The climate crisis caused an additional six weeks of dangerously hot days in 2024 for the average person, supercharging the fatal impact of heat waves around the world. The effects of human-caused global heating were far worse for some people, an analysis by World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central has shown. Those in the Caribbean and Pacific island states were the hardest hit. Many endured about 150 more days of dangerous heat than they would have done without global heating, almost half the year. Nearly half the world’s countries endured at least two months of high-risk temperatures. Even in the least affected places, such as the UK, US, and Australia, the carbon pollution from fossil fuel burning has led to an extra three weeks of elevated temperatures. Worsened heatwaves are the deadliest consequence of the climate emergency. An end to coal, oil, and gas burning was vital to stopping the effects from getting even worse, the scientists said, with 2024 forecast to be the hottest year on record with record-high carbon emissions. The researchers called for deaths from heatwaves to be reported in real time, with current data being a “very gross underestimate” because of the lack of monitoring. It is possible that uncounted millions of people have died as a result of human-caused global heating in recent decades. > “In most countries there is no reporting on heatwaves at all, which means the > numbers we have are always a very gross underestimate.” “The impacts of fossil fuel warming have never been clearer or more devastating than in 2024 and caused unrelenting suffering,” said Dr Friederike Otto, of Imperial College London and the co-lead of WWA. “The floods in Spain, hurricanes in the US, drought in the Amazon, and floods across Africa are just a few examples. We know exactly what we need to do to stop things from getting worse: stop burning fossil fuels.” Joseph Giguere, a research technician at Climate Central, said, “Almost everywhere on Earth, daily temperatures hot enough to threaten human health have become more common because of climate change.” The Guardian revealed in November that the climate crisis had caused dozens of previously impossible heatwaves, as well as making hundreds of other extreme weather events more severe or more likely to happen. The new analysis identified local “dangerous heat days” by calculating the threshold temperature for the hottest 10 percent of days from 1991-2020. These days are associated with increased health risks. The researchers then compared the number of days exceeding this threshold in 2024 to those in a scenario without global heating to calculate how many extra hot days were caused by the climate crisis. They found the average person was exposed to a further 41 days of dangerous heat, highlighting how the climate crisis was exposing millions more people to dangerous temperatures for longer periods of the year. Indonesia, home to 280 million people, experienced 122 days of additional dangerous heat, as did Singapore and many Central American states. In the Middle East, people in Saudi Arabia endured 70 additional hot days, in a year when at least 1,300 hajj pilgrims died during extreme heat. Brazil and Bangladesh endured about 50 extra hot days, while Spain, Norway, and the Balkan countries had an additional month of high temperatures. Five billion people, almost two-thirds of the global population, experienced raised temperatures made at least twice as likely by global heating on 21 July, one of the hottest days of the year. Hurricanes were also supercharged by the climate crisis in 2024. Kristina Dahl, the vice president for science at Climate Central, said: “Our analyses have shown that every Atlantic hurricane this year was made stronger by climate change, and that hurricanes Beryl and Milton, which were both category five storms, would not have reached that level were it not for climate change.” Recent WWA analysis showed that an extraordinary sequence of six typhoons in the Philippines in 30 days, which affected 13 million people, was made more likely and more severe by global heating. Julie Arrighi, the programs director at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said, “Another devastating year of extreme weather has shown that we are not well prepared for life at [the current level] of warming. In 2025, it’s crucial that every country accelerates efforts to adapt to climate change and that funds are provided by rich nations to help developing countries become more resilient.” Measures should include better early warning systems, which saved lives, and the reporting of heat deaths, the researchers said. “In most countries, there is no reporting on heatwaves at all, which means the numbers we have are always a very gross underestimate,” Otto said. “If we can’t communicate convincingly that actually lots of people are dying, it’s much harder to raise awareness that heatwaves are by far the deadliest extreme events, and they are the extreme events where climate change is a real game changer.”

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.” > “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.” “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.” > “It can hurt our relief efforts. 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.

The banks of the Swannanoa River overflowed in Asheville, North Carolina.Erik Verduzco/AP Floridians talk in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on Friday.Gerald Herbert/AP