Climate scientists and weather experts are clear: The deadly floods in Texas earlier this month were an entirely natural tragedy, with off-the-charts rainfall levels coming from lingering moisture from a nearby tropical storm.

That has not stopped unfounded conspiracy theories from spreading, mainly in extremist social media circles. Days after flash floods swept away roads, homes and a Christian girls’ summer camp, claiming more than 100 lives, posts flourished attempting to link a common practice called “cloud seeding” in a nearby county with the devastating floods.

Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier jumped in to amplify the misinformation — citing a newly passed Florida law banning loosely defined “weather modification” practices that climatologists say have nothing to do with increasingly severe weather events.

When Uthmeier posted his letter to all public airports in Florida on X this week, many who responded also aired widely debunked concerns that aircraft contrails — those streaks of condensation left behind jets —are actually “chemtrails” that are part of some sort of nebulous but nefarious government plot. While no Florida official explicitly linked this law to these theories, it hasn’t stopped proponents from championing the new law as a solution to the perceived problem.

In his letter, Uthmeier warned airports that they must comply with a new state law designed to halt weather modification activity in the state. The bill, introduced by Miami Republican state senator Ileana Garcia, makes releasing substances designed to change temperature, cloud cover or sunlight levels into the atmosphere punishable with a third-degree felony and fines as high as $100,000.

Uthmeier, whose spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment, called the new law “another landmark victory for Florida’s health, freedom, and environmental protection.”

In the letter, Uthmeier doesn’t use the phrase “chemtrails” but seemed to give a nod to the common concerns held by conspiracy theorists, mentioning spraying chemicals into the air that end up “polluting our water, contaminating agriculture, and destroying human health.”

The majority of Garcia’s public comments on the bill have focused on cloud seeding and weather modification, but she said she wanted her legislation to help separate “fact from fiction” when it comes to this enduring but fringe conspiracy theory.

“Many of us senators receive concerns and complaints on a regular basis regarding these condensation trails, a.k.a. chemtrails to many. There’s a lot of skepticism in regards to this, and basically, what I wanted to do with this is try to look for a way to separate fact from fiction,” she said in a hearing for the bill.

She also thanked supporters for the “remarkable response” to her bill in a post on X featuring several pictures of contrails, an email from a constituent complaining that the “sky was peppered with trails this morning,” alongside a screenshot of a social media post claiming that Garcia’s bill would “ban chemtrails.”

She’s not the first elected Republican to raise similar concerns, even though the Trump administration has flatly dismissed them. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week released a “fact check” shooting down the “chemtrails” claims and explaining that those white plumes behind planes are simply condensation that occurs when hot, humid air from a plane’s engine mixes with colder air in the atmosphere.

“Contrails are a normal effect of jet aircraft operations and have been since its earliest days of air travel. If you are seeing a lot of contrails in your area it is because there are a lot of jet aircraft flying overhead,” the EPA wrote. “The federal government is not aware of there ever being a contrail intentionally formed over the United States for the purpose of geoengineering or weather modification.”

A state ban on ‘weather modification’

Florida’s new “weather modification” law is vague. It does not clearly differentiate between decades-old, somewhat successful practices like “cloud seeding” — spraying common chemicals like silver iodide to coax more rain or snow from clouds — from theoretical “geoengineering” concepts scientists have brainstormed to potentially slow some impacts of climate change. Those ideas, many untested and far from reality, have also often been lumped into broader weather-control conspiracies.

In a statement celebrating his signature on the bill, Gov. Ron DeSantis specifically mentioned weather modification and geoengineering but does not mention chemtrails. His statement also explained that a public portal for reporting suspected geoengineering or weather modification activity would be opened over the summer.

For now, geoengineering is an open scientific question. Experts aren’t sure whether or not it will be necessary in the future, or if it could harm the world more than it helps, said James Hurrell, a professor of environmental science and engineering at Colorado State University and an expert on geoengineering.

Most importantly, Hurrell said, geoengineering is purely a scientific debate right now.

“There are no geoengineering activities happening in the U.S. The government is not doing this,” he said. “No one in the science community is advocating for it at this time. We’re simply using models to ask the ‘what if questions.’ We’re trying to understand if this is a scientifically plausible idea or not.”

Meanwhile, Florida’s bill does nothing to address what climatologists consider the most pressing cause of climate change, which experts say will fuel more weather disasters — the burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal.

While large-scale geoengineering remains far off, some emerging start-up efforts have been singled out by Republican political leaders. On X, Garcia specifically mentioned a two-man for-profit company called “Make Sunsets” that has been launching balloons filled with sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in California and Nevada and selling “cooling credits” for the sunlight they reflect. The EPA has also targeted this company with regulatory action and social media posts and name-checked them in their recently released fact check on geoengineering.

Under Florida’s new bill, that activity would not be allowed here. There is no evidence that the company has plans to expand to Florida. Like other recent Florida bills banning offshore wind farms and the sale of lab-grown meat, the bill appears to have been a preemptive strike ahead of any actual activity.

Florida’s bill would ban another activity that does not appear to take place currently in the state — cloud seeding.

For decades, governments have allowed companies to spritz clouds with chemicals like silver iodide to encourage extra snow or rain onto arid fields below, usually at the request of farmers and ranchers. It’s common practice in the arid West, including in Texas.

That’s what triggered the latest social media speculation. Two days before the Texas flash floods, a company called Rainmaker conducted cloud-seeding activities about 100 miles away from Kerr County, where the flooding occurred. The spraying encouraged about half a centimeter of rainfall directly below it, CEO Augustus Doricko told the Washington Post.

A few days later, theories began to spread that Rainmaker’s activity sparked the floods. Even before Uthmeier waded in, they were echoed by other current and former Republican politicians on X, which Doricko refuted.

“Rainmaker did not operate in the affected area on the 3rd or 4th or contribute to the floods that occurred over the region,” Doricko posted on X. “Rainmaker will always be fully transparent.”

Several news outlets, including the Associated Press, CBS News and Snopes, directly debunked the claim via several expert meteorologists. All said that the extra moisture in the air that led to so much rain came from a nearby tropical storm, Barry, and was not the result of any “cloud seeding” technology.

“That was something that is orders of magnitude more than anything cloud seeding can do,” Hurrell said.

A week later, Uthemeier released his letter to Florida airports.

“I can’t help but notice the possibility that weather modification could have played a role in this tragedy,” he wrote, citing a Yahoo News article that actually debunked that theory and featured an expert calling it “scientifically unfounded.”

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