By Guardian - Dharna Noor - Mon 14 Jul 2025 18.07 BST

EPA’s move comes as it slashes climate research funding and cuts weather forecasting and scientific agencies’ staff. Trump officials’ recent attempt to dispel concerns about “chemtrails” has perplexed and angered some experts who say the administration has itself promoted the conspiracy theory while also spreading climate misinformation.

“This is an intriguing strategy … in an administration that, depending on agency, is actively promulgating conspiracy theories or at least conspiratorial thinking,” said Timothy Tangherlini, a professor at the Berkeley School of Information who studies the circulation of folklore and conspiracy theories.

On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched a website about contrails, trails of white vapor emitted aircrafts. Conspiracy theorists call the streaks “chemtrails” and believe they contain polluting chemicals meant to achieve mass sterilization, weather control or other nefarious plots. Though “it is reasonable to ask questions”, those beliefs are inaccurate, the page makes clear.

Officials also launched a second webpage focused on geoengineering, which correctly notes that schemes to “cool the Earth by intentionally modifying the amount of sunlight” are “being studied”. It says “current federal research activity should not be interpreted as endorsement”, though without explicitly stating that these efforts have not been widely practiced.

The websites were published as baseless rumors swirled claiming weather-altering technology fueled recent catastrophic flooding in Texas. The EPA, however, says it “planned long ago to release these new online resources” which it had been “working on for months”.

“Regarding the flooding, EPA stands ready to help Texans get back on their feet in the wake of this tragedy,” a spokesperson said.

Sijia Xiao, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who for a 2021 study interviewed 20 current and former chemtrails believers, said the conspiracy theory attracts many people looking for simple explanations to tragedies.

“Several participants in my interviews, they related chemtrails to their personal health problems or environmental concerns like pollution,” she said. “And in this example of the Texas flood, I think people are trying to attribute a clear cause to a real life issue.”

But as it addresses false causes of the floods, Trump has continually shunned research into the climate crisis, which he has dismissed as a “hoax”. Research shows the deluge in the US south-west would have been less intense if not for the climate crisis, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.

“Rather than addressing climate change – which makes floods like those in Texas, North Carolina, New Mexico, and Illinois more intense, more deadly and more frequent – Trump’s EPA is wasting taxpayer money chasing baseless conspiracy theories that scientists debunked years ago,” said the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a climate hawk. “It’s a distraction from the Trump administration’s free pass to big oil on its pollution.”

Since Trump re-entered the White House in January, EPA has slashed funding for climate research, removed all mentions of climate from federal websites, and cut staff for weather forecasting and scientific agencies. He has also cracked down on climate accountability efforts, including lawsuits accusing big oil of a conspiracy to spread climate misinformation.

The president has also repeatedly referred to green regulations as a “scam” and repeated climate denialist talking points, while his administration has spread misinformation about elections and vaccines. As recently as two months ago, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s health and human services secretary, also suggested that the chemtrail conspiracy theory is real, saying in a televised town hall he would “do everything in my power to stop” their spread.

Even after Zeldin announced the new initiative, Kennedy appeared to maintain his position, praising the administrator and Trump for taking on the “diabolical mass poisoning of our people, our communities, our waterways and farms, and our purple mountains, majesty”.

“It’s all contributing to this environment, this idea that you should have low trust in institutions,” said Tangherlini, the folklore expert. “And when you have low trust in institutions and in the information sources that you have access to, you are going to come up with a plausible story that resonates.”

Some have been able to integrate the new EPA websites into those stories, claiming they merely provide evidence that the government is continuing to cover up information about chemtrails.

The Met Office is using alarmist language!

By derimot*no - Dr. Philosopher Erik Bye - 15 July 2025

Where is the professional pride?

Here is a report from WUWT, by Matt Ridley, which shows that the Met Office is not shying away from the climate fight: Why is the Met Office adopting the language of climate alarmism?

I (Matt Ridley) understand that it has been hot there in the south of the UK. My sympathies go out to you. While Londoners were sweltering, we had a cool breeze from the North Sea in Northumberland. The Met Office says it is “almost certain” that this June (the warmest in England since 1884, the second warmest in the UK) was made warmer by human activity.

Even if the temperatures were not affected by greenhouse gases, which they are * , the 34.7°C recorded in St. James's Park last Tuesday may have something to do with the weather station being a low-reliability “class 5” measuring station with an error rate of “up to 5°C”. It is located next to a very busy tarmac road.

It is also located in the middle of a city and therefore subject to a lot of general “urban heat island” effects. Research from Arup estimates that London’s “heat island” effect is worth 4.5°C of extra heat on average. So yes, the heat is indeed partly man-made – but not necessarily in the way the Met Office thinks.

* = Water vapour is the most effective greenhouse gas we have.

Moreover, hot days in summer are not exactly uncommon: the temperature reached 36.7 °C in Northamptonshire in 1911.

The Met Office exists to forecast the weather. But it seems increasingly that they are bored with their daily lives, so they like to lecture us about climate change. And here it seems they have been embarrassingly duped by activists. Go to their climate pages and you will find a forecast for the year 2070, which says that summers will be between one and six degrees warmer and “up to” 60 percent drier, depending on the region. Plenty of room to wiggle around in these caveats, note this.

Then the Met Office admits this: “We base these changes on the high emissions RCP8.5 scenario.” Aha! Incredibly, shockingly, this national forecasting agency has chosen as its basis for future weather a debunked, highly improbable set of assumptions about the world economy that were never intended to be used in this way.

Read the whole story here: …climate doomsday.

My (EB) final comments:

It's strange that a government institution would blame itself in this way. Using scenarios in the alerts sounds completely crazy! Then the option that suits best is chosen!

The text represents the author's opinion, not necessarily that of www.derimot.no.

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