Local Meteorologists Increasingly Find Their Job is to Fight Conspiracy Theories About the Weather

Several broadcast meteorologists tell Rolling Stone, they’re spending more time trying to fight the increasing flow of misinformation whenever there’s a major weather event.

Some say they are also being threatened while doing it.

“People are just so far gone, it’s honestly making me lose all faith in humanity,” said Washington D.C.-based meteorologist Matthew Cappucci. “There’s so much bad information floating around out there that the good information has become obscured.”

Check out the entire Rolling Stone article about it here.

Capucci said he’s disappointed that some folks believe that the weather is being controlled by some secretive malevolent overlord.

“For me to post a hurricane forecast and for people to accuse me of creating the hurricane by working for some secret Illuminati entity is disappointing and distressing, and it’s resulting in a decrease in public trust,” said Cappucci.

He told Rolling Stone he has received hundreds of messages from people accusing him of modifying the weather and creating hurricanes from space lasers.

“Ignorance is becoming socially acceptable. Forty or 50 years ago, if I told you I thought the moon was pretend, people would have laughed at me. Now, people are bonding over these incredibly fringe viewpoints.”

Meteorologist Katie Nickolaou, who works for WLNS in Battle Creek, Michigan, went viral after correcting a male commenter who tried to claim a category five hurricane can turn into a category six, at which point it becomes a tornado. 

“Those are different storms with different processes,” clarified Nickolaou. “Though hurricanes can produce tornadoes, it doesn’t affect the overall categorical rating.”

“I put on armor every day to try to go online and make sure people aren’t saying things that could harm responses,” says Nickolau. She’s had to fend off rumors that meteorologists should just use giant fans to blow the hurricane away or try nuking it. “You get a person arguing that a hurricane turns into a tornado at a category six and your brain short circuits.”

Birmingham, Alabama meteorologist James Spann said he can’t believe what he’s seeing.

“Something has clearly changed within the last year,” says Spann, who works at WBMA. “We know some of it is bots but I do believe that some of it is coming from people that honestly believe the moon disappeared because the government nuked it to control the hurricanes, or that the government used chemtrails to spray our skies with chemicals to steer Helene into the mountains of North Carolina.”

Spann posted a public service announcement on Facebook that went viral, asking people to stop flooding his page with conspiracy theories.

After Spann posted a FEMA website about rumor control, he got multiple private messages telling him to retire or personally threatening him. “You’re working with two to three hours of sleep for multiple weeks under a high stress situation and then you deal with these threats that come in, it’ll beat you down.”