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Inside the Growing Conspiracy Movement that Believes the Government Is Behind California's Drought

Former solar engineer Dane Wigington believes chemtrails are to blame for the state's record dry spell—and a surprising number of people agree.
Chemtrails photo via Wikimedia Commons user Prashanta

A former solar panel engineer named Dane Wigington has a theory about California's apocalyptic drought: It's a secret weather control operation orchestrated by the Powers That Be in a doomed attempt to slow down global warming. That might just sound like one guy's harebrained idea—and it is—but it's a harebained idea that has caught on, and appears to be sparking a burgeoning movement of drought truthers.

Annoncering

Over the past four years, California has experienced so little rain that the state has been plunged into the worst water shortage in its 500-year recorded history. The causes of the drought aren't precisely known—like any freak snowstorm or off-season hurricane, there is no specific villain, human or otherwise, to blame for California's dry spell. Extreme weather events are mostly dice-rolls of nature, helped along by the statistical trends of climate change. Local experts also blame a high pressure system unofficially called "The Ridiculously Resilient Ridge," but that goofy name is probably the most entertaining thing about California climate science.

Wigington, who was interviewed by Sacramento, California's CBS News affiliate last week, has a much more amusing ideas about what's causing the drought: The government, and more specifically, the government's chemtrails. The CBS report shows a packed auditorium in Redding, California listening with rapt attention as Wigington describes the sinister weather control operation that he's certain is being carried out.

He explained to CBS reporter Nick Janes, in somewhat general terms, how it works: "You can't interfere with a climate system, putting aerosols—fine particles—into the atmosphere without affecting the rain. You can't do it," he said. These supposed aerosols contain metals like aluminum and barium apparently meant to block the sun's radiation. But Wigington claims that now they're blocking the moisture that would allow rain.

Annoncering

Chemtrails, if you haven't heard of them, are a proposed explanation for those long-lasting, cloud-like streaks left behind in the sky by high-flying aircraft. Proponents of chemtrails conspiracies would have you believe that those planes are spraying chemicals into the atmosphere. The reasons for this vary widely, but usually have something to do with the government's plot to control the weather, or alternatively, to control our minds.

The "official story," on chemtrails—"official" here meaning what scientists say—is that those innocuous wisps are actually condensation trails, or "contrails," not chemtrails. Basically it's just something that jet exhaust does when the weather is right. Of course, that's according to NASA.

On the other hands, the homepage of Wigignton's website, GeoengineeringWatch.com warns visitors in no uncertain terms of the dangers they face from chemtrails, which he argues are being used to carry out such terrifying schemes as solar radiation management (SRM), and stratospheric sulphate aerosols geoengineering (SAG-SRM). The site also names carbon capture and sequestration as a method of weather control, but Wigington seems to approve of these practices.

Still, Wigington is a little vague on how exactly the chemtrail-based weather control scheme benefits Big Government. In 2014, he wrote that "climate engineers control who gets rain and who does not," and that there is no longer any natural weather at all.

Annoncering

All of which makes the drought sound like something that fits into a vast and sinister plan. But the lingering question is, um, why?

Wigington offers two possible reasons: "First, California is possibly a climate 'sacrifice zone'," he writes. He goes on to theorize that without a drought in the West, climate engineers couldn't have achieved record snowstorms in the eastern United States, although he doesn't explain why they wanted those snowstorms.

Second, he argues, "a population that has no water and can not grow any food does not tend to be in a position to effectively protest the crimes of it's government." He doesn't, however, detail what those crimes will be, beyond controlling the weather, obviously.

Part of what makes Wigington's ideas so compelling, though, is that they aren't pure fantasy. Geoengineering experiments are real. A paper published in the year 2000 by the atmospheric scientists Ken Caldeira and Bala Govindsamy specifically focused on the use of aerosols to help address climate change. It was even called "Geoengineering Earth's radiation balance to mitigate CO2-indiced climate change."

Experiments on atmospheric models showed promise, according to the paper. But the authors also detailed a vast array of caveats and unknowns, and finally concluded that, "given these difficulties, the most prudent and least risky option to mitigate global warming may well be to curtail emissions of greenhouse gases."

Annoncering

However, Caldeira pleads ignorance about the connection between chemtrails and drought. "I cannot talk about the science of these conspiracy theories because there is no relevant science," he told VICE. Rather than speak out about the benefits of weather control, which would make him the perfect villain for Wigington's narrative, Caldeira has actually become a pundit of sorts, cautioning against geoengineering in interviews.

This hasn't escaped the attention of Dane Wigington, who keeps a careful eye on Caldeira. Wigington, who refers to Caldeira as a "paid liar," and "the most despicable form of human," seems to view the atmospheric scientist as a duplicitous puppet master, regarding his professed caution about geoengineering as nothing but a ruse.

"I am not sure I want to deal with this much more," Caldeira told me.

As with many claims made by premier American conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones—who has been broadcasting Wigington's drought theories to hundreds of thousands of bunker-dwelling fans—operations like these can't be documented because they're classified government secrets. In other words, the lack of documentation for the actions they're theorizing is precisely because the conspiracy is so vast as to be kept successfully hidden.

Wigington has harsh words for anyone who questions him: "Those who doubt this is going on, those who deny it, those who are in fact protecting their paychecks and pensions by denying it, will not be able to much longer."

In a blog post back in February, Caldeira described being badgered by obsessives who believe he's part of a secret government conspiracy to change the weather, control people's minds or both. Ironically, he wrote that he pitied them, because while on one hand they trust people who are wrong, they're also not wrong to doubt official narratives. After all, Caldeira concluded, "[we] cannot rely on our government to tell us the truth."

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