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Once Considered Conspiracy Theory, Weather Control Latest MAHA Battleground

May 20, 2025

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Reported by: Daily Caller

“He who controls the weather will control the world,” former President Lyndon B. Johnson told students at Southwest Texas State University in 1962.

Over six decades later, state lawmakers across America are trying to control the weather in their own backyards.

In late April, Florida lawmakers passed Senate Bill 56 (SB 56), the Geoengineering and Weather Modification Activities Act. The bill is a blanket ban on any form of weather modification or, as the bill calls it, geoengineering.

The bill, introduced by Republican State Sen. Ileana Garcia, defines these activities as “the injection, release or dispersion by any means of any chemical, chemical compound, substance or any apparatus into the atmosphere for the purpose of affecting the temperature, the weather or the intensity of the sunlight.”

Drawing inspiration from a similar bill Tennessee passed in 2024, Garcia argued that despite a lack of concrete evidence that there has been weather modification in Florida lawmakers are flooded with calls from concerned constituents.

“There’s a lot of skepticism in regards to this,” she testified to the Florida Senate’s Appropriations Committee on Agriculture, Environment and General Government.

“There isn’t enough data to back some of the experiments that are currently going on and there’s too much at risk and so they’re looking at, you know, a risk versus risk and a huge concern about how far people can go without any type of oversight regarding this type of issue,” Garcia testified.

Joining her in supporting the bill to the committee was recently retired Judge Bradford Thomas.

“The burden of persuasion, the burden of proof, if you will, is on the practitioners of this activity to prove it is not harmful,” he told the Caller.

Thomas served as the judge for Florida’s First District Court of Appeals for 20 years, but started his career as an environmental permitting and enforcement lawyer within Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).

Reflecting on his time in the DEP, Thomas likened the ban to similar actions taken on polluters.

“You don’t get to engage in environmental activity and say, ‘Well, prove it’s bad.’ Look how many trillions of dollars the United States has spent to clearly clean the air and clean the water, and now we’re spraying these chemicals into the air and saying, ‘Well, prove it’s wrong.’”

But not everyone is as skeptical about geoengineering and its potential impact on the environment.

Making It Rain

Augustus Doricko, the golden-mulleted 24-year-old CEO of cloud seeding startup Rainmaker, testified to the committee in opposition to SB 56.

Doricko, who said he wasn’t opposed to the spirit of the bill, believed in practice it would ultimately harm his business: a cloud seeding venture.

Testifying to the Florida Senate rules committee in ~1 hour pic.twitter.com/3Eqp4xp1p1

— Augustus Doricko (@ADoricko) March 26, 2025

Cloud seeding, according to Rainmaker’s website, is the practice of dispersing silver iodide molecules into clouds via drones to induce precipitation.

The spiritually diverse former Thiel Fellow speaks of his venture in existential terms. While professing to have studied under a wide number of faith leaders, including Buddhist monks and Muslim imams, the now-avowed Christian says he wants to create Heaven on earth.

“I view in no small part what we’re doing at Rainmaker as, cautiously and with scrutiny from others and advice from others, helping to establish the kingdom of God,” he told Business Insider (BI) in 2024.

More practically, he also argued that leading the way on cloud seeding is paramount to U.S. national security.

“We need water for our farms. We need water for our cities. We need water for our chip fabs,” he told the Daily Caller.

“China spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year on their cloud seeding program,” he continued.

China, Doricko explained, has 38,000 employees working on weather modification in Beijing.

“They have two universities that offer credentialed degrees in weather engineering. And if we as a nation don’t, at the very least, permit cloud seeding to happen in a regulated and cautious manner, let alone fund it and invest in it, then China is ultimately going to own the weather, rather than us in the next decade.”

Rainmaker now has contracts with multiple states in the American west and southwest to aid precipitation, Doricko told the Caller. He hopes to help make it snow in Utah for the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

That sort of patriotic use of power seeks to emulate China, which reportedly spent millions to keep weather conditions ideal for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Doricko assured the Caller that cloud seeding with silver iodide, the only chemical Rainmaker purports to use for dispersal, is completely safe.

“There’s no adverse ecological consequence, no adverse agricultural consequence, no impact on human health from cloud seeding,” he said

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) listed silver iodide as the least toxic form of silver in a 1980 water quality review. The agency’s Clean Water Act lists all silver compounds as toxic under its Toxic Pollutants list. It also lists silver as a Priority Pollutant.

Doricko insists that at the low concentrations his company and other ventures use the ecological effects are minimal. Numerous studies would seem to support his claim, researchers at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid posit in the summary of their 2016 study. That study, however, appears to be the first to focus on cumulative effects of silver iodide, and the researchers found that acute exposure could produce adverse effects on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

“It’s collecting in the rain water, the marine systems, the agriculture plants, the soil. Is that a good idea? No, because it is a neurotoxic element,” Dr. Denise Sibley, a licensed Tennessee doctor who testified at hearings in favor of a Tennessee bill to ban geoengineering in 2023, told the Caller.

“We’ve been doing it since the 40s,” Sibley explained. “That many decades of putting substances in the air, do you think it accumulates? Yes, it does.”

Separating Fact From Fiction

Long thought to be a conspiracy theory by some, the concerns over weather modification has run in tandem with alarmism over so-called “chemtrails.”

Garcia acknowledged the tenuous ground the subject sits on during her testimony, admitting that there’s a fine line between conspiracy theories and legitimate inquiry.

“What I wanted to do with this is try to look for a way to separate fact from fiction and start to create a methodology where people feel comfortable by confirming what it is that they’re seeing and creating a system to log, track and mitigate if necessary,” Garcia testified.

One state senator testified that he came in ready to mock Garcia and her bill, but had a change of heart, claiming hers and Thomas’s testimony swayed him.

“I came here … in this meeting with some anticipation of probably teasing Sen. Garcia a little bit, you know maybe getting some Reynolds wrap around my head,” State Sen. Jason Pizzo, an independent who left the Democrat Party, said in the hearing.

Pizzo claimed that he found Thomas’s testimony to be professional and compelling and that the bill was reasonable enough to vote for.

“So you know what? I came in here to tease you and bust you, but you’re walking out of here with my ‘yes’ vote,” Pizzo concluded.

Many from Pizzo’s old party are still skeptical, though.

Popular liberal pundit and comedian Bill Maher took aim at Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in early May, likening Kennedy’s criticism of solar aerosol injections (SAI) to the alleged chemtrail conspiracy.

“Now he’s saying that chemtrails are real, this has been a conspiracy theory for a long time,” Maher waxed. “You know the things that come out of the end of a plane? Yes, planes make smoke.”

“But Bobby says we have to end this crime against humanity. Okay, you know what, the engine on this plane is hot and the air up there is very cold,” Maher castigated.

https://twitter.com/DiedSuddenly_/status/1918828307530879060?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Many of the strongest proponents for theories about chemtrails can also be found proliferating ideas about a New World Order, “lizard people” and other unproven conspiracies.

There is substantial evidence, however, that weather modification is, and has long been, a confirmed and increasingly more common phenomenon.

Today, weather modification is a cottage industry. Millions of dollars flow into projects and private companies yearly with the express purpose of empowering corporations to change the weather.

The U.S. government and military have admitted to weaponizing cloud seeding as far back as 1967. The Department of Defense (DOD) copped to making it rain over enemy troops in Vietnam and Laos after New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh exposed the practice in 1972.

Declassified documents later revealed the campaign to be the product of Project Popeye, a joint effort between the DOD and the U.S. State Department. Project Popeye, according to the DOD, intended to use cloud seeding to “produce sufficient rainfall … to interdict or at least interfere with truck traffic between North and South Vietnam.”

Blocking Out The Sun

In his Florida Senate testimony, Doricko differentiated cloud seeding from other geoengineering techniques, most notably solar radiation modification (SRM).

“Solar radiation modification, it is something relatively new, untested, would have global consequences for multiple years. And although, as a technologist, I find that interesting, I do not think that we should deploy it anytime soon, if at all, because it will have really, really large, uncharacterized impacts,” he told the Caller.

Heyyy it’s me again. I testified in Florida again, here’s some highlights:

– cloud seeding is NOT solar radiation management. Cloud seeding makes natural fluffy clouds rain more, SRM dims sunlight

– any technology affecting the weather should be regulated. HB477 does this! pic.twitter.com/hQ4SOMrvKn

— Augustus Doricko (@ADoricko) April 1, 2025

SRM is the use of aerosols to increase the reflectivity of the earth’s atmosphere for the purpose of decreasing global surface temperatures by repelling sunlight, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Despite opposing Doricko’s position on SB 56, Thomas concurred with Doricko’s SRM assessment.

“What’s going on in Florida has nothing to do with cloud seeding. It is the injection of these chemicals to reflect sunlight back into space. It is the opposite of cloud seeding,” Thomas told the Caller.

Climate scientists are increasingly touting SRM — and a specific subset of the practice known as strategic aerosol injection (SAI) — as solutions to what they view as a climate crisis.

SAI, according to NOAA, would seek to replicate the global cooling effect demonstrated by volcanic eruptions by spraying aerosol particulates into the earth’s atmosphere or stratosphere in order to reflect the sun.

Harvard’s Salmata Institute for Climate and Sustainability touted the university’s decades-long research interest in solar geoengineering. The institute lauds Harvard professors’ influence on America’s climate and geoengineering policies dating back to President Johnson in the 1960s.

In 2017, Harvard launched the Solar Geoengineering Research Program (SGRP), funded in large part by Microsoft founder Bill Gates both through personal grants to the program and through the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER), according to The Guardian.

SGRP scrapped plans in 2021 to conduct the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), an experiment that was going to study the potential effects of (SAI) by injecting a small amount of nontoxic calcium carbonate into the atmosphere, according to Harvard. (RELATED: Scientists Actually Forced To Say Blotting Out The Sun To Stop Global Warming Is A Bad Idea)

Though Harvard ultimately canned the experiment, and SCoPEx’s mission entirely in 2024, their research continues to serve as the foundation for ongoing geoengineering projects.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), a United Kingdom agency inspired by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), announced plans to conduct a similar experiment to SCoPEx as part of a $75 million geoengineering series, according to Nature.

U.S. climate scientists and activists met in San Francisco in 2024 to discuss the possibility of increasing funding for geoengineering and SRM.

In 2023, the Biden administration released a comprehensive plan to advance research on SRM.

Billionaire Backing

Geoengineering projects with ties to figures like Gates or clandestine government agencies are precisely what spook SB 56’s advocates.

While Doricko maintained that his cloud seeding venture was significantly different in nature to SRM, Republican fundraiser Nancy McGowan is wary of his ties to technocrats and would-be climate kings.

McGowan, who has deep ties in Florida politics after working on numerous campaigns for massive state figures like Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, shuddered when she found out that Doricko had hired a powerful Florida lobbyist, in an effort to defeat the bill, she claimed.

“He’s backed by big money,” McGowan said, pointing to photos Doricko posted to X with Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos’s wife, and with former President Bill Clinton.

Sanchez heads the Bezos Earth Fund, a philanthropic effort which her husband Jeff Bezos injected with a $10 billion funding grant, the largest of its nature in history.

A 2024 PDF for the Fund’s Strategy Workshop on Scaling Greenhouse Gas Removal posited questions, such as “who will decide the implementation of geoengineering and the associated liabilities” and warned of “unilateral geoengineering by rogue states.”

Grateful that Lauren and the @BezosEarthFund realize we don’t have to choose between a healthier environment and greater human prosperity

Our future will have hundred billion people on earth and a trillion in the solar system pic.twitter.com/LInvSjdBrC

— Augustus Doricko (@ADoricko) March 12, 2024

Doricko also touted the Clinton Global Initiative’s work on water and claimed to discuss cloud seeding and water supply with Clinton in a 2024 post on X.

.@ClintonGlobal has done incredible work for global water infrastructure

It was a pleasure discussing how cloud seeding can enhance water supplies with # 42 @BillClinton ! pic.twitter.com/m0d7Yqgdo6

— Augustus Doricko (@ADoricko) April 19, 2024

Doricko maintained that he has never received any funding from either Clinton Global or from Bezos Earth Fund.

“I care about making clean fresh water abundant for the sake of our farms, ecosystems, cities and industry. That’s not a partisan issue, abundance is better for everyone. I’ve never worked with CGI or Bezos Earth Fund, but I’ll collaborate with people who wants to make the world a greener, healthier, more abundant place,” he told the Caller.

Doricko and Rainmaker were initially funded by a $100,000 grant from PayPal cofounder and billionaire mogul Peter Thiel. Rainmaker also recently received over $25 million in a Series A funding round, part of which came from Long Journey Venture Capital. Arielle Zuckerberg, youngest sister to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is a top general partner at the firm.

Make. It. Rain. LFG 🌧️ https://t.co/nImhi5jsDe

— Long Journey (@LongJourneyVC) May 5, 2025

While most published science on SRM and SAI is purely theoretical, Thomas, McGowan and other SB 56 advocates believe there are already companies doing it in Florida and elsewhere. RFK Jr. indicated that it was happening too while answering a question about SAI during an April media appearance with Dr. Phil.

“That is not happening in my agency, we don’t do that, it’s done, we think, by DARPA,” he said, while also suggesting that materials used for SAI were coming from jet fuels.

Kennedy vowed to end the practice and get to the bottom of it.

“Secretary Kennedy is dedicated to finding the root causes of the chronic disease epidemic, including environmental factors,” an HHS spokesperson told the Caller.

https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1917351658344046821?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Under the Weather Modification Act of 1976, participants in cloud seeding and other weather modification practices are required to report activities to NOAA 10 days before engaging in them, a spokesperson for NOAA relayed to the Caller.

NOAA “does not fund or engage in weather modification activities,” the spokesperson said.

Thomas argued that NOAA’s reporting requirement excludes subcontractors for the federal government, essentially granting them anonymity. He believes there are already ongoing cloak-and-dagger efforts to change the weather in Florida.

“It’s an environmental assault without the consent of anybody, including the governor,” he said.

McGowan concurred.

“This is nothing less than environmental terrorism committed every day by US agencies in violation of the 10th amendment,” she told the Caller.

SB 56 now sits on DeSantis’s desk. DeSantis said he planned to sign the bill in a May 6 statement.

“The Free State of Florida means freedom from governments or private actors unilaterally applying chemicals or geoengineering to people or public spaces,” DeSantis said.

The bill punishes violators with fines of up to $100,000 per offense and can even impose jail sentences of up to five years for extreme offenders.

Other state officials joined DeSantis in praising the bill, including Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo.

“These planes release aluminum, sulfates, and other compounds with unknown and harmful effects on human health. We have to keep fighting to clean up the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat,” Ladapo wrote on X in April.

Big thanks to Senator Garcia for leading efforts to reduce geoengineering and weather modification activities in our Florida skies. These planes release aluminum, sulfates, and other compounds with unknown and harmful effects on human health. We have to keep fighting to clean up… https://t.co/815UlUBMCZ

— Joseph A. Ladapo, MD, PhD (@FLSurgeonGen) April 2, 2025

“Florida always leads in the fight against the left’s agenda, and preventing weather modification is no different. The climate cult believes they can save the planet by blocking the sun, which is Florida’s most valuable resource,” Jeremy Redfern, communications director for Florida Attorney General Jamees Uthmeier, told the Caller.

“Just like we did by banning vaccine passports and gain-of-function research in Florida, we must rein in the left’s worst impulses as they push more extreme measures in their never-ending battle against the climate,” Redfern said.