Fact File: Experts douse viral claim that wildfires caused by ‘weather manipulation’

A post on X featuring a video compilation of wildfires has received hundreds of thousands of views. The post claims “technocratic elites” are manipulating the weather and creating wildfires across the West. Experts consulted by The Canadian Press say the post is one of many examples of how conspiracy theorists use climate change and wildfires to advance their own interests and expand their audiences.

THE CLAIM

In a July 27 post, X user Noah B. Price accuses a group of global elites of intentionally starting the wildfires: “THEY ARE BURNING THE WEST ON PURPOSE.” The group he claims is responsible is referred to in a post from the user dated Jan. 11, 2025, which he has attached to his post.

He claims that “weather manipulation” rather than climate change is causing recent wildfires, linking them to “directed energy, cloud seeding, and geoengineering.”

He then questions how and when the fires started, suggesting that they are engineered to force people to leave their homes and to get the media to call for more government intervention in people’s lives.

As of Aug. 11, the post had received around 296,500 views and been shared 6,700 times across X, with many users from Canada to the United Kingdom seemingly convinced the claims are true.

THE FACTS

The video used in the claim appears to be authentic. A reverse image search leads to a July 24 TikTok post from Marina Scalgia, a French wildlife and nature photographer. In it she talks about how wildfires have devastated regions across France and upended the world’s ecosystems.

A French caption under the video posted with the claim comes directly from Scalgia’s video.

There is nothing in the video that supports the broader claim promoted in the X post that geoengineering or cloud seeding are being used to manipulate the weather and create wildfires.

Phil Austin, an associate professor in the department of earth, ocean and atmospheric science at the University of British Columbia, said changes to the world’s weather patterns are a product of carbon dioxide emissions. The changes are “contributing to drought conditions in western North America and in Europe,” he said in an interview Tuesday, pointing to the wildfires in British Columbia and the state of Washington as a product of the drought.

Natural Resources Canada’s website says warmer, drier conditions can make an environment more vulnerable to ignition sources — lightning and human activities — and provide fuel for the fire to spread rapidly.

Neil Craik, a professor of international and Canadian environmental law at the University of Waterloo, says conspiracy theorists have often linked geoengineering to chemtrail theories about governments using airplanes to deploy chemicals into the atmosphere to control and poison people.

“It’s a very loose term, and it gets thrown around a lot,” he said in an interview Monday.

Craik said geoengineering has been proposed as a method of slowing down the effects of climate change. Carbon dioxide removal technologies, for example, involve using large industrial machines to draw in air, extract the CO2, and sequester it. And a process known as “stratospheric aerosol injection” deploys sulphur dioxide or other reflective particles in the upper atmosphere to reflect solar energy back into space.

To date, geoengineering work is small-scale and experimental, Craik said, and its impact would not cause fires or exacerbate them.

“The totality of work being done in this area is either laboratory-based or modelling, along with some proposed experiments where you would put small amounts of particles into the atmosphere and take some measurements,” he said.

Cloud seeding involves using a plane to find supercooled clouds with water locked in droplets, deploying silver iodide to turn the droplets into ice crystals and generating a reaction that results in rain. However, Austin says that given the extreme difficulty in finding the right conditions and clouds, it has rarely been done on a large scale.

Austin said it’s “outside the bounds of reality” to suggest that cloud seeding could be causing wildfires.

“It’s just physically impossible to alter the weather in that way,” he added. “The energy involved and the scale are way beyond the capabilities of humans to actually alter it.”

Chris Russill, an associate professor in Carleton University’s journalism school, said that since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and the next year renamed it X, it has become fertile ground for spreading “planned crisis conspiracies” like the one blaming wildfires on geoengineering and cloud seeding.

“Part of that is (because) people just hope to capture online engagement while trafficking these claims: they know it does well,” said Russill, who is also academic director of the Re.Climate centre for climate communication and public engagement.

Russill suggests that any online users who come across these posts should follow the “SIFT” technique, which stands for stop, investigate the claim, find better coverage, and trace the claim or quotes to the original source.

“Basically, it’s like a set of easy steps that encourages you to sort of ground the truth as you feel your emotions and your feelings starting to take shape on an issue that feels intense to you,” he said, adding that “social media does affect us at an emotional level as much as a sort of cognitive level.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 13, 2026.

Timon Johnson, The Canadian Press