The recent wave of hurricanes that devastated the East Coast has sparked several conspiracy theories about their origins.
TikToker TJ Ware (@tj_ware) posted a video to help dispel these claims, explaining that humankind would be violating the first law of thermodynamics by creating a hurricane.
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"You can't get more energy out of a system than you put into it," he said. "A hurricane releases 600 trillion watts of energy — 13,000 megatons. That's 250 times more powerful than the most powerful device ever used in the world, which is the Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton nuclear warhead."
Ware likely pulled the first stat from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which calculated the total energy released from cloud and rain formation using the average radius of a hurricane and the rainfall it produces in a day. According to the organization, 600 trillion watts is 200 times greater than the global electrical generating capacity.
"It detracts from the victims and from the real things that are going on," Ware continued before warning viewers of disseminating disinformation and misinformation. "... We shouldn't be doing this to each other or to ourselves. It's ridiculous, and it's junk science. It doesn't even make sense."
The comment section was littered with skeptics, many of whom echoed the sentiments of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and contested that the government perhaps didn't create the hurricane but instead manipulated it to make it stronger.
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Some referenced cloud seeding, a geoengineering practice that facilitates the formation of ice crystals to encourage precipitation. Many have speculated that this weather modification technique was used to induce intense rainfall in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and is what fueled the destruction caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton.
However, FactCheck.org noted that there is no evidence that cloud seeding can provide the immense energy necessary to influence a hurricane in any meaningful manner.
The nonprofit also had to dismiss assertions that the U.S. government has used the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Alaska to control the weather — another talking point raised by several commenters of Ware's video.
As NOAA put it, HAARP is "basically a large radio transmitter" that "is not capable of influencing local weather at Earth's surface, let alone tropical cyclones thousands of miles away."
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Other users expressed their frustration with the spread of conspiracy theories.
"How sad that you even need to explain this," one person said.
"If we could control weather like this … I don't think we would be concerned about climate change," another surmised.
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