Facts Matter: Cloud seed not responsible for Texas floods

More than 160 people are still missing following flash floods in Texas over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, officials said. At least 129 people have died.

Some social media users have already found someone to blame for the tragedy.

“Well … this is weird … A company called Rainmaker, conducted a cloud seeding mission on July 2 over Texas Hill Country,” read an X post. “2 days later, the worst flood in their history occurred … in the exact same area that the Rainmaker flights were.”

But this is not accurate, according to the Associated Press. The work by Rainmaker isn’t connected to the disaster.

“The claim that cloud seeding played a role in this tragic event is complete nonsense,” Andrew Dessler, director of Texas A&M University’s Texas Center for Extreme Weather, told the AP.

Cloud seeding uses an artificial material to induce precipitation, although the results can vary. Rainmaker’s last cloud seeding operation in south-central Texas, before the flood, was July 2.

Rainmaker CEO Augustus Doricko took to X to defend his organization.

“The natural disaster in the Texan Hill Country is a tragedy. My prayers are with Texas. Rainmaker did not operate in the affected area on the 3rd or 4th or contribute to the floods that occurred over the region,” he wrote.

“Cloud seeding works by adding aerosols to existing clouds,” University of Louisiana Monroe associate professor Ken Leppert told the AP. “It doesn’t work by helping to create a cloud/storm that doesn’t already exist. The storms that produced the rainfall and flooding in Texas were not in existence two days before the event.”

Crowds not protesting strike

The U.S. military, on June 21, launched airstrikes against nuclear sites in Iran.

Some social media posts appeared to show video of large groups of protesters demonstrating against those attacks.

"Mass protests errupt (sic) across America as citizens take to the streets in outrage after the US launches attack on Iran," an X user claimed in a June 22 post that was viewed by nearly 5 million users.

But that wasn’t the purpose of the protests shown in the post, according to PolitiFact. Those clips showed demonstrations from a week earlier. The videos were from the “No Kings” rallies held in San Diego, Calif.

“(The) footage was from the No Kings rally on 6/14. I’m not aware of any protests related to Iran over the weekend,” Rachel Laing, spokesperson for the San Diego mayor’s office, told PolitiFact.

Some images from the video matched a June 15 Instagram post and a post from California broadcasting company KSDY 50, slugged “#NoKingsDay,” PolitiFact said.

Video created by AI

A video posted June 23 on X appears to show a woman, wearing a rainbow hijab and a bomb vest, filming a trip to Iran.

The woman is shown arriving as a man throws a dark liquid at her, while asking, “Where is your husband?” She is later shown in a car, wearing a bomb vest, saying, “They told me we are now on our way to the first-ever LGBT rally in Iran.”

But this is all fake, according to PolitiFact. The video is artificial-intelligence, or AI, generated.

Signs that it was created using AI: In one frame, the woman has six fingers. In another, she only has three. When she attaches the bomb vest, it appears to travel through her neck.

As for the “first-ever LGBT rally,” Iran has criminalized same-sex activity with a penalty of death.

Colors weren’t changed

The British Royal Air Force’s Red Arrows aerobatic flight team recently did a flyover at the Glastonbury music festival in England, while trailing white smoke from the aircraft.

Some social media users thought this was unusual.

“Wow. At Glastonbury they even made the Red Arrows use colourless smoke instead of their customary Red, White and Blue to avoid risking offending the anti-British crowd,” read a June 29 X post.

The Red Arrows often display smoke featuring the three colors of the UK’s flag. But there was only white smoke trailing the planes during the June 28 flyover at Glastonbury, above a performance by the rock back Pulp.

It wasn’t about offending anyone, according to Reuters. It was about running out of supplies.

The colors were “completely normal,” a Red Arrows spokesperson told Reuters.

“The team had completed two aerobatic displays at events earlier in the day using coloured dye and the aircraft, which only have very limited capacity for the red and blue smoke, were repositioning to Bournemouth airport, where RAF technicians replenished the jets with the coloured dye, ahead of two more displays at shows on Sunday,” the spokesperson said.

• Bob Oswald is a veteran Chicago-area journalist and former news editor of the Elgin Courier-News. Contact him at boboswald33@gmail.com.