MTG's 'absurd' flood conspiracy theory isn't too far from truth: columnist

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is agonizingly close to the truth with her latest conspiracy theory.

The Georgia Republican known for speculating that "lasers" caused 2018 wildfires in California is now blaming devastating flash floods in Texas on "weather modification," and MSNBC's Ryan Teague Beckwith pointed out that her new conspiracy theory – described as "absurd" in the column's headline – isn't too far off from a reality she denies.

"Just as people will move from denial to bargaining before reaching acceptance, a political cause facing a mortal danger can go through its own stages of grief," Beckwith wrote. "And we now seem to have reached a new stage of climate change denial, as shown by some deniers' recent attacks on weather modification."

Greene posted on social media Saturday, as floodwaters were still receding, that she would introduce a bill to ban "dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification" practices like cloud seeding, which has been used for decades to encourage rain and snow in drought-ridden areas.

"Although Greene didn't tie the proposed bill to the floods that have left at least 104 dead or missing across six Texas counties since Friday, neither did the timing of her announcement feel exactly coincidental," Beckwith wrote. "A Republican running for another House seat in Georgia, Kandiss Taylor, went further in X posts on Saturday that claimed that both the Texas floods and Hurricane Helene were caused by 'cloud seeding, geoengineering & manipulation,' calling it 'fake weather' that amounted to 'murder.'"

Greene and Taylor's conspiracy theories echoed claims by other GOP lawmakers and MAGA figures who are blaming increasingly frequent extreme weather events on anything but climate change, and legislators in multiple states have proposed or passed bills that ban geoengineering – even as they roll back regulations on polluters.

"It's a bizarre cause to take up," Beckwith wrote. "While cloud seeding is a decades-old technique for increasing rainfall commonly used in drier states, there are still questions about how effective it really is — and there is no evidence that it is powerful enough to change the direction or intensity of hurricanes or major storms."

"But that is beside the point," the columnist added. "If you take a step back, what Greene and others are suggesting is that a natural disaster could have been made worse by people putting chemicals in the atmosphere. All you need to do is substitute 'silver iodide' with 'greenhouse gases' and they'd be in basic agreement with the general consensus among the scientific community on climate change first reached in 1990."