White streaks cleaved the Gainesville sky as planes passed overhead. It was a common sight, and the city carried on — except for those who believed those linear trails were the mark of conspiracy.
Fears of “chemtrails,” a long-disproven idea that condensation trails — or contrails — from planes contain weather-controlling chemicals and sicken people on the ground, have been at the forefront of misinformation, and it’s caught the attention of Florida lawmakers.
Florida Sen. Ileana Garcia, R-Miami, filed Senate Bill 56 in November to clamp down on “weather modification activities” during the upcoming 2025 legislative session. The bill was drafted following the Fall 2024 hurricane season, which was punctuated by rumors the government, or an unknown agency, was using chemicals or technology to manipulate extreme weather.
The bill seeks to outlaw “acts intended to affect the temperature, the weather, or the intensity of sunlight within the atmosphere of this state” through the “injection, release, or dispersion” of “a chemical, a chemical compound, a substance, or an apparatus.” If passed, it would repeal over a dozen regulations related to common weather manipulation like cloud seeding, which involves spraying chemical compounds into clouds to promote rainfall.
Cloud seeding hasn’t been practiced in Florida for nearly half a century, but violations would come with a $10,000 fee, according to the bill.
Though not explicitly mentioned in the bill, Garcia took to social media and encouraged the “chemtrail” conspiracy theory.
“Imagine still thinking it’s just a conspiracy at this point in time now — look up & you can see it for yourself,” an X user under the name “Concerned Citizen” wrote in response to SB 56, which Garcia reposted on her own account Dec. 1.
She also shared pictures of pale contrails a different constituent sent her through email.
Garcia later denied promoting ideas that hurricanes were spurred by weather modification.
“I find it remarkable how some media outlets are shaping the narrative around the weather modification activities bill,” she wrote in a separate X post. “Unfortunately, my statements have been selectively edited to fit a specific narrative.”
Garcia did not respond to The Alligator’s multiple requests for comment via email and phone.
The extremes
Whispers of weather manipulation aren’t new, but they have been multiplying in the near-constant whirlwind of extreme weather since mid-2024. It began with two gargantuan storms that churned through the Gulf of Mexico.
Hurricane Helene was first, catapulting into Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4 in a northward swing through Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Virginia. Unsuspecting communities like Asheville, North Carolina, were left in ruins. It became one of the deadliest storms to hit the U.S. in the 21st century with a death toll over 200 by the time it dissolved in late September.
Hurricane Milton was born two weeks later and broiled to wind speeds of 180 mph, briefly testing maximum Category 5 intensity before weakening to Category 3 on impact near Tampa Bay.
Rumors swirled that the government, or some other unknown agency, had purposefully engineered the storms and steered their path for maximum strength and destruction. While Asheville faced the fallout of Helene, some of the most extreme social media theories alleged the storm’s surprise arrival was a plot to help U.S. officials seize mountains for lithium mining and that FEMA detained people.
It proliferated so quickly the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), along with other federal agencies, released a fact sheet debunking the disinformation.
“No technology exists that can create, destroy, modify, strengthen or steer hurricanes in any way, shape or form,” NOAA wrote.
Stanford University civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Jacobson researched the possibility of dissipating hurricanes using offshore wind turbines in the Gulf of Mexico and off the East Coast in 2014. He also develops clean energy plans for U.S. states and other countries.
Jacobson built an advanced virtual weather model to replay the progression of Hurricanes Sandy, Katrina and Isaac — the largest, most damaging and most recent storms at the time, respectively — if they had been exposed to offshore wind turbines. The study found turbines could successfully weaken a hurricane, but it would take tens of thousands to even make a dent, he said, a reflection of how difficult it is to influence weather on a large scale.
The circulating theories that weather modification technology like cloud seeding and “chemtrails” are used in Florida to stir hurricanes is a “non-issue,” Jacobson said. It’s unclear whether SB 56 is intended to address concerns about extreme weather, but he emphasized legislation to reduce emissions and prevent climate change would leave Florida in a better spot.
“I would say for sure that global warming is intensifying and strengthening and lengthening hurricanes and also bringing them further north,” he said.
As local recovery efforts after Helene and Milton continued, the Sunshine State was hit with another, more unexpected threat: severe cold.
An outbreak of extreme winter conditions recently inundated much of the country, with three storms stampeding through since the new year. Some northern states’ temperatures plummeted to a deadly -40 degrees with wind chill.
Much of the panhandle, including Tallahassee, was blanketed in multiple inches of snow during Winter Storm Enzo last week. Gainesville found itself with an onslaught of freezing rain, or snow that falls through a warm layer of air close to the ground and can’t refreeze back into flurries. Though it was an invigorating experience for season-starved Floridians — and a slight disappointment for hopeful UF students — UF geography assistant professor Esther Mullens pointed out the event’s abnormality.
“It’s extremely rare for us to get snow, and even in this particular case,” she said.
A temporarily weakened polar vortex was the culprit.
The vortex is a “bowl of cold air” tightly bound by the jet stream above the Arctic, Mullens said. However, a disturbance in the atmosphere, like higher temperatures from climate change, can loosen the jet stream’s hold, allowing Arctic air to stretch like a rubber band over the U.S. before snapping back.
Unusual winter weather can impact unprepared Southern states the most, Mullens said. An example is the 2021 Texas snow storm that caused statewide power outages and dangerous conditions, and like recent hurricanes, it also garnered social media rumors of weather modification. One theorized former President Joe Biden controlled the storm, as reported by Reuters.
“None of these weather events have been influenced by government or any other agency. They are naturally occurring phenomena,” Mullens said about this year’s winter storms.
Though government agencies fact-checked similar theories, they’ve explored influencing extreme weather in the past — but not for the reasons alleged by swirling conspiracies.
The experiments
A U.S. Air Force plane barreled toward the eye of a hurricane nicknamed “King” in 1947. The B-17 was originally designed to be a long-range bomber, but that was no longer its purpose. Instead, finely crushed dry ice would be released from its underbelly into the roiling clouds below. The pilots’ mission was clear: stop King.
This experiment, deemed Project Cirrus, was the first of its kind and sought to destabilize developing hurricanes through cloud seeding. Supercooled water droplets remain liquid even in sub-freezing temperatures and form part of a hurricane’s structure. Scientists had begun to wonder whether “seeding” the clouds with dry ice would freeze the droplets and therefore weaken the cyclone, according to NOAA.
The project held promise, and it took place during a time of enthusiasm toward using weather modification to unravel hurricanes. But it was also a blind experiment, and, according to NOAA, researchers lacked the technology to predict King would rapidly reverse course and hurtle into Savannah, Georgia.
Though hurricanes are proven capable of swerving naturally, public outrage claimed King’s course was altered by Project Cirrus, which was ushered to an end.
Project STORMFURY dawned about a decade later. It was another hunt to take down hurricanes through cloud seeding, but the rules were different this time: Experiments could only be done on hurricanes with less than a 10% chance of making landfall within a day to safeguard coastal areas, according to a 1977 NOAA report.
Researchers seeded four storms by 1971 using silver iodide, which is more effective than dry ice and the most common agent in modern cloud seeding. However, the project saw little success, and it was soon discovered hurricanes don’t have enough supercooled water to make a difference and that changes were likely caused by natural variability. STORMFURY came to a close by 1983.
“NOAA has not attempted to modify hurricane intensity and participate in cloud seeding since,” the organization wrote in its fact-check following Helene and Milton.
At least nine states clustered in the west actively use cloud seeding, and Florida is not one of them. Instead, it’s similar to about 10 other states that have mulled over banning it along with all other weather modification activities. Monitored by NOAA, cloud seeding is often handled by private companies with the goal of promoting rainfill, preventing fog or shrinking hailstones, among others.
The reality
Ideas about “chemtrails” have persisted since before the turn of the century. Believers in the conspiracy claim the white streaks left behind by airplanes contain chemicals that can manipulate weather, cause widespread sickness and more.
However, these “chemtrails” are actually just a collection of condensation, or contrails, from hot aircraft engines, said UF aerospace engineering associate professor Richard Lind.
“When you breathe in the cold air, you can see your breath,” he said. “It really is the same idea.”
The first official observation of contrails was recorded in the early 20th century on the tail end of World War I. Planes had just gained the ability to fly above 25,000 feet into the frigid upper atmosphere, the perfect conditions for the icy streaks to form.
Though it can appear these clouds stick to the sky for lengthy periods before storms, Lind said they are not the cause of storms. Instead, they linger because of the humidity that arrives just before.
Though contrails are not used to influence weather, the Federal Aviation Administration found that aircraft condensation can trap heat in the atmosphere, leading to a warming effect comparable to that of carbon emissions from planes. Increasing engine efficiency is a difficult task but also a focus in aerospace engineering, Lind said, and improvements would in turn reduce fossil fuel usage and the creation of contrails.
Contrails do have adverse environmental impacts, but they don’t “release chemical or biological agents into the atmosphere,” according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
SB 56 doesn’t expressly refer to “chemtrails,” and a ban on cloud seeding and other weather modification activities won’t be considered until the state legislative session in March. Regardless of the result, Lind said there is plenty of research proving “chemtrails” are nonexistent.
“There’s such a distrust, it seems now, of science,” Lind said.
Contact Rylan DiGiacomo-Rapp at rdigiacomo-rapp@alligator.org. Follow her on X @rylan_digirapp.
Rylan DiGiacomo-Rapp is a third year journalism and environmental science major and the Fall 2024 Enterprise Environmental Reporter. Outside of the newsroom, you can usually find her haunting local music venues.
