AMERIKA
Lorena O'Neil
Wed, October 9, 2024
People at an Orlando, Florida, bar watch the local news as the community prepares for Hurricane Milton on Oct. 8, 2024. - Credit: Saul Martinez/Getty Images
As Hurricane Milton approaches Florida, meteorologists are staying awake for days at a time trying to get vital, life-saving information out to the folks who will be affected. That’s their job. But this year, several of them tell Rolling Stone, they’re increasingly having to take time out to quell the nonstop flow of misinformation during a particularly traumatic hurricane season. And some of them are doing it while being personally threatened.
“People are just so far gone, it’s honestly making me lose all faith in humanity,” says Washington, D.C.-based meteorologist Matthew Cappucci, in a phone interview conducted while he was traveling down to Florida for the storm. “There’s so much bad information floating around out there that the good information has become obscured.”
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Cappucci says that he’s noticed an enormous change on social media in the past three months: “Seemingly overnight, ideas that once would have been ridiculed as very fringe, outlandish viewpoints are suddenly becoming mainstream, and it’s making my job much more difficult.”
He says meteorologists and disaster relief experts have to strike a balance between putting out helpful, high-quality information while also squashing misinformation. “Nowadays, there’s so much bad information out there that if we spent our time getting rid of it, we’d have no more time.”
This hurricane season, Cappucci and the other meteorologists I spoke with say, conspiracy theories have been flooding their inboxes. The main one that people have seemed to latch onto is the accusation that the government can control the weather. This theory seems to be amplified with climate change creating worsening storms combined with a tense election year, and the vitriol is being directed at meteorologists. “I’ve been doing this for 46 years, and it’s never been like this,” says Alabama meteorologist James Spann. He says he’s been “inundated” with misinformation and threatening messages like “Stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else.”
“For me to post a hurricane forecast and for people to accuse me of creating the hurricane by working for some secret Illuminati entity is disappointing and distressing, and it’s resulting in a decrease in public trust,” says Cappucci. He says he hasn’t slept in multiple days and is exhausted. This past week he received hundreds of messages from people accusing him of modifying the weather and creating hurricanes from space lasers.
“Ignorance is becoming socially acceptable. Forty or 50 years ago, if I told you I thought the moon was pretend, people would have laughed at me. Now, people are bonding over these incredibly fringe viewpoints.”
“An average hurricane’s life cycle burns through the energy of roughly 10,000 nuclear bombs,” says Cappucci. “The idea that we can even influence something like that, never mind direct it, is just so outlandish that it’s almost, sadly, funny.”
‘Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes’
Meteorologist Katie Nickolaou went viral after correcting a male commenter who tried to claim a Category 5 hurricane can turn into a Category 6, at which point it becomes a tornado.
“Those are different storms with different processes,” clarified Nickolaou. “Though hurricanes can produce tornadoes, it doesn’t affect the overall categorical rating.”
Undeterred, he pushed back, insisting that “anything above a Category 5 would be a tornado,” which is untrue. “I’m going to go scream into an abyss now,” Nickolaou tweeted in response. She tells me her tweet “struck a chord” with meteorologists and people tired of the misinformation.
There is no Category 6 designation for hurricanes, she explains. Designations are based on wind speed, so there has been conversation among scientists that now that hurricanes are getting stronger, we need an additional category. But there are meteorologists that say adding a designation is unnecessary because a Category 5 already means nearly total destruction. They worry that adding a Category 6 would decrease the significance of a four of five and impact people’s decision to evacuate.
“I put on armor every day to try to go online and make sure people aren’t saying things that could harm responses,” says Nickolau. She’s had to fend off rumors that meteorologists should just use giant fans to blow the hurricane away or try nuking it. “You get a person arguing that a hurricane turns into a tornado at a Category 6 and your brain short circuits.”
“Stopping misinformation is becoming an exhausting part of the job which is taking away from spending time forecasting or sending out other information that could be helpful,” says Nickolau. She says her heart sinks when she sees a false post get millions of views because it’s virtually impossible to go back and fact-check it for everyone that’s seen it.
After our phone call, Nickolau received an even more troubling message on her page: “Stop the breathing of those that made them and their affiliates.” She responded that she would not allow people to advocate for murder. “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes,” she tweeted. “I can’t believe I just had to type that.”
‘It beats you down’
Spann, the meteorologist in Alabama, has been doing this work for decades and says he can’t believe what he’s seeing unfold.
“Something has clearly changed within the last year,” says Spann. “We know some of it is bots, but I do believe that some of it is coming from people that honestly believe the moon disappeared because the government nuked it to control the hurricanes, or that the government used chemtrails to spray our skies with chemicals to steer [Hurricane] Helene into the mountains of North Carolina.”
He says the misinformation has gotten so out of control it’s distracting meteorologists from doing their jobs, which involves keeping people safe ahead of, during, and after a devastating hurricane. Spann posted a public service announcement on Facebook that went viral, asking people to stop flooding his page with conspiracy theories.
“We’re trying to push critical information to people that need it and people who are looking for a credible source,” says Spann. He sounds weary as he tells me that if people are going to push conspiracy theories, he wishes they would wait until after the danger has passed. As we’re talking he receives an email from a colleague telling him about an angry caller who demanded to be connected to the folks responsible for stopping the hurricane.
“It affects our mental health,” he adds, saying he’s spoken to the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore and other meteorologists about it a lot this week. After Spann posted a FEMA website about rumor control, he got multiple private messages telling him to retire or personally threatening him. “You’re working with two to three hours of sleep for multiple weeks under a high stress situation, and then you deal with these threats that come in, it’ll beat you down.”
‘It costs lives’
South Florida meteorologist John Morales made headlines this week when he cried on air while warning Floridians about how strong Hurricane Milton will be. For his part, he’s been getting overwhelmingly supportive messages on social media from people who share his angst and anxiety about the climate crisis. He’s been using the increased attention to spread awareness about global warming, climate action, as well as the dangers of misinformation.
“I’ve seen the reactions of climate dismissives for many, many years, and it’s become particularly vitriolic in the last year or two, especially on X,” says Morales, referring to the former Twitter. He’s Puerto Rican, and said that in Latin countries he’s heard the conspiracy theory that Americans control the weather, but now the belief has exploded.
“This is the post-truth era, and these types of crazy beliefs aren’t just confined to your crazy Uncle Joe,” says Morales. “It seems to spread with greater ease, and I am particularly alarmed that after Hurricane Helene, it’s really spread and truly impacted the work of the emergency management agencies that are trying to help people recover and have to dedicate resources to dispel rumors and trample down on the type of stuff that, sadly, even some politicians are spreading. It costs lives and dishonors first responders and civil servants.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene has doubled down on claims Democrats control the weather, prompting fellow GOP congressperson Carlos Gimenez to tweet she should “have her head examined.” Meanwhile, the White House is launching a Reddit account to keep the public informed on Helene/Milton response and recovery.
“Science is one of the few things that doesn’t care about politics,” says Cappucci. “If a tornado is coming down the road at you, it doesn’t check your voter registration.”
He says every October the bird migration causes fuzzy images on weather radars, but this year conspiracy theorists are convinced that these fuzzy images are actually caused by lasers heating up the atmosphere to create hurricanes. Some experts I spoke with think that misinformation is exceptionally bad this year because we are leading up to a presidential election. Some of the conspiracy theories accuse Democrats of intentionally steering hurricanes to red-leaning swing states, in order to hurt Donald Trump’s chances of winning.
“The 2024 misinformation is being fueled to a certain extent by political polarization,” says Sarah DeYoung, a professor at the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. “I think that’s corresponding with there being a presidential election this year.”
DeYoung says there are certain myths that pop up for every disaster. Some of them are well-intentioned, like telling people that hotels have to accept pets in an emergency event, which is not true. Others are misconceptions, like saying looting goes up after natural disasters when in fact the crime rate often goes down, and people are just trying to locate basic essentials like food and water to survive. But in 2024, they are often politically motivated.
“It becomes particularly dangerous because it starts to rile up additional feelings of division and then the false information about FEMA funneling money towards immigrants, that makes people who are immigrants more vulnerable to potential acts of violence and backlash from those kinds of rumors.”
DeYoung says this harms both the people that need help and the people trying to help, by adding confusion, slowing down the recovery process and fomenting mistrust.
‘Platforms are not prepared’
Misinformation and climate change researcher Abbie Richards says she likes to look at the core emotions that drive conspiracy theories.
“When people feel really anxious, really powerless, really uncertain, those are the times where we expect misinformation to thrive,” says Richards, who is also a senior video producer for Media Matters. She says this is exacerbated with a big moment in the news cycle, and then even further inflamed by something as emotionally overwhelming as climate change.
“It’s a problem that by its very nature, makes people feel a wide range of pretty negative emotions — scared, anxious, uncertain — maybe guilty or conflicted if it’s something they’ve been denying,” says Richards. “We are mixing these giant events that are catastrophic and devastating with these big emotions, and it’s really easy for people to fall into scapegoating and blaming conspiracy theories that provide really simple explanations for these super complicated problems.”
Richards explains that in order to regain a sense of control, people drink in whatever information they can get their hands on, even when it’s false. “Sometimes it’s the moon was nuked, but sometimes it’s also just people wanting to help and that can get us into bad situations, too — I’ve seen a lot of hoaxes spread in the name of awareness.”
She says she doesn’t criticize consuming news on TikTok because it is an excellent source for firsthand accounts of events that can fill a different emotional need for people. For example, Richards says TikTok has helped people understand the nuanced challenges of evacuating.
But, she says, social media change is needed.
“The platforms are just not prepared,” says Richards. “They are seemingly very unequipped to handle widespread misinformation that arises in the wake of these events. And if we’re going to learn anything from this experience, it’s that the platforms need to seriously invest in climate-related content moderation, because this is causing harm and it’s impeding relief efforts, and it could hurt people.”
Rolling Stone
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