Video doesn’t prove Hurricane Milton was geoengineered. It’s from 2021

As Hurricane Milton spun ever closer to Florida’s west coast, some people on social media shared pictures of clouds on a beach they said showed the coming storm was human-made.

"Hurricane Milton coming in hot, right across our entire state. Here is video of the geo-engineering happening in Clearwater Beach today. 10.5.24," an Oct. 6 Instagram post read. 

Another Oct. 6 Instagram post read, "What in the geo-engineered hellscape is coming at you, Florida? Stay vigilant." One Instagram user shared the video Oct. 6 and claimed the clouds are "not natural" and that the hurricanes are manmade.

(Screenshot from Instagram)

These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

But the video does not show pre-Hurricane Milton clouds over Florida. It was uploaded in 2021. 

Experts told PolitiFact that geoengineering cannot form hurricanes. The Oxford Geoengineering Programme defines geoengineering as "the deliberate, large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to address climate change." The Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program said these emerging technologies could "manipulate the environment and partially offset some of the impacts of climate change."

These technologies generally fall into two types: those seeking to release more solar radiation and reflect sunlight back into space, and those seeking to remove more carbon from the atmosphere.

"There is no known way to geoengineer a hurricane," Mark Bourassa, meteorology professor at the Florida State University Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies, told PolitiFact. "Hurricanes are huge and would require enormous rates of energy input (e.g., atomic bombs won't bother them much) to form. If we could geoengineer a hurricane then there would be a lot of other weather that would be dealt with — which isn't happening."

Andrew Dessler, Texas A&M University professor and director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies, said, "There is no theoretical way (for) humans to generate a hurricane nor is there any evidence that anyone is attempting to do so."

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The clouds in the video don’t show a hurricane.

Michael Diamond, Florida State University assistant professor of meteorology, and Erik Nielsen, instructional assistant professor at Texas A&M University’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, identified these clouds as asperitas — rare clouds that "resemble rippling ocean waves in the sky." 

There is no established explanation why these clouds form, according to the U.K. Met Office, but "atmospheric conditions must be unstable." They don’t produce rainfall but typically appear after thunderstorms, the office said.

"(Asperitas) clouds are associated with thunderstorms but don't produce storms themselves," Diamond said. "These clouds cannot be formed through geoengineering or cloud seeding, to our present knowledge."

Diamond also pointed out that Hurricane Milton was still far from the coast when these claims were made.

This video doesn’t show geoengineering occurring as Hurricane Milton approaches Florida. We rate that Pants on Fire!