WHEN STORMS RECENTLY ravaged Spain, some Irish commentators blamed it on “weather manipulation”.

When dramatic images of the northern lights over Ireland last month appeared online, some claimed it was caused by secretive experiments in Alaska.

Even a cold spell across the country earlier this week was attributed, by one Irish Facebook user at least, to chemicals that were supposedly being released by the trails of commercial aeroplanes.

Increasingly, weather phenomena are being attributed to the actions of humanity — usually in the form of climate change caused by widespread pollution that can be seen, named and measured.

(The evidence for man-made climate change is extensive, and its impacts are already causing severe and widespread disruption to people’s lives across the world.)

However, there are also an increasing number of conspiracy theorists who insist that storms, lights, and snow in Ireland are part of a shadowy plan by nefarious elites.

“They’re looking to try and blame somebody or something, other than climate change,” Alan O’Reilly of Carlow Weather, a popular tracker of Ireland’s meteorological events, told The Journal.

“There’s no real, credible evidence at all for Ireland.”

O’Reilly told us that he is regularly inundated with claims of weather manipulation, but that all the sources for these claims were weak or irrelevant.

Many of these claims involve a process known as cloud seeding, the only credible attempt at weather modification that is currently underway (though its efficacy is questionable).

The practice involves planes releasing silver iodide (Agl), a harmless and naturally occurring substance, from planes in the hope of producing raindrops.

Clouds themselves can have significant effects on surface temperature, with one NASA study estimating that they generally cool the earth’s surface by about 5 degrees Celsius.

However, while cloud seeding is often claimed by conspiracy theorists to be the cause of giant storms or permanent changes in the weather, there is no evidence for this. Nor is there evidence that it has occurred in Ireland.

Last year, the then-Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, Jack Chambers told the Seanad: “Met Éireann confirms that it has not conducted any climate or weather modification programmes, and it is not aware of any such activities in Irish airspace.”

Chambers was responding to a question on a particular type of weather modification, Solar Radiation Modification (SRM), raised by Senator Sharon Keogan, who said of her fellow senators, “each and every one of us get emails daily on this particular issue”.

SRM is regularly mentioned in communities where weather modification theories are spread.

Sometimes these groups cite the fact that scientific advisors for the European Commission had researched the topic, though they usually neglect to mention those researchers’ published findings saying that SRM was not a solution to climate change due to potential risks to the environment and human health.

“It’s a little bit of research mixed with a whole lot of conspiracy,” O’Reilly of Carlow Weather said of the weather modification conspiracy theories.

“They feed off any tiny bit of really information that’s not really relevant, but they’ll try and make it relevant.”

Other conspiracies often make reference to HAARP, The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program.

HAARP was set up to study the topmost layer of the Earth’s atmosphere by the US Air Force; Navy; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which still runs it.

HAARP is frequently the subject of conspiracy theories that claim the project discovered how to control the weather and has used it as a secret weapon system responsible for numerous disasters around the world.

“HAARP is not capable of influencing local weather at Earth’s surface, let alone tropical cyclones thousands of miles away,” the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) writes.

The agency describes HAARP as “basically a large radio transmitter” used to research part of the upper atmosphere, more than 48 kilometres above the Earth’s surface.

The amount of energy unleashed in storms also illustrates the implausibility of claims that humans are purposely generating weather events such as hurricanes.

Calculations from NASA estimate that a hurricane can “expend as much energy as 10,000 nuclear bombs”.

Unfortunately, NASA also predicts that storms are getting stronger as the Earth warms up.

“Weather events that would have always happened — though not often — they’re made more extreme by climate change,” O’Reilly told The Journal.

“Spain would have had big rainfall events in the past, and it will again in the future, but the problem is that they’re becoming more severe because of the warming and the fact that a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture.”

O’Reilly said he believes that people latched onto weather conspiracies because they give an easy sense of superiority — that they know something that other people don’t.

But, ultimately, there were better explanations for the weather events these theories try to explain.

“At this stage, anybody who has their eyes open in terms of what’s happening around the world will see climate change,” O’Reilly said. 

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