Floods in Brazil spark conspiracy theories over the cause, including toxic jet vapor trails and antennas in Alaska

People being rescued from floods in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Jefferson Bernardes/Getty Images

• Floods in Brazil's Rio Grande do Sul have sparked a number of online conspiracy theories. 
• Some say the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program has caused the extreme weather.
• Scientists have dismissed such theories.

The state of Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil has been facing heavy rains since last week, with 143 people confirmed to have lost their lives in the resulting floods so far, the local civil defense agency has said.

Eduardo Leite, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, described the weather on X as "unprecedented" in the state's history, adding that it would need "a kind of 'Marshall Plan' to be rebuilt."

The state is prone to periods of severe rain and droughts due to its position at a meeting point of tropical and polar climates.

Brazil's National Institute of Meteorology has said the current extreme conditions have likely been influenced by El Niño — the warming of sea surface temperature.

Nevertheless, a number of bizarre online conspiracy theories have cropped up over what's behind it.

Floods in Porto Alegre.

Jefferson Bernardes/Getty Images

"What's happening in Rio Grande do Sul is definitely not natural," one user wrote on X. "Let's open our eyes!"

The user said they believed that the cause of the heavy rains was HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a North American scientific project that uses antennas to study a part of the Earth's upper atmosphere known as the ionosphere.

The program has long faced unfounded rumors that it was designed to control the weather, with former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez even claiming it caused the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

vapor trails — "chemtrails" — spread by the government and then activated by HAARP antennas in Alaska to alter the weather, AFP reported.

So-called chemtrails are the contrails of water vapor with soot particulates produced by burning jet fuel that freeze into ice crystals at certain temperatures, per BBC News. In the 1990s, a conspiracy theory evolved that they contained dangerous chemicals purposely put in the trails.

In recent years, influencers such as Russell Brand have promoted the theory to their big media followings

Este é o céu em Alegrete RS.
Esta geometria das nuvens, nesta escala, e antecedendo as chuvas, é probabilisticamente impossível ser natural.
Está sendo fabricada com frequências na ionosfera.
Estão usando o HAARP no RS. pic.twitter.com/Gc4PiOiPv1

— Frederico Athia (@AthiaFrederico) May 9, 2024

But Carlos Nobre, who heads Brazil's National Institute of Science and Technology for Climate Change (INCT), told AFP that scientists believed climate change has certainly played a key role.

"The warmer atmosphere can store much more water vapor, fueling more frequent and intense episodes of rainfall that lead to disasters like this," he said, while also dismissing the HAARP theory.

"There's no way an instrument in the ionosphere could make weather events more extreme," he said.

It comes after recent heavy flooding in Dubai.

Dubai's media office said the city experienced the heaviest downpour in the United Arab Emirates since records began.

Once again, social media was abuzz with claims about geoengineering — technologies could be used to alter weather or climate — and a conspiracy theory that has arisen around the term, linked to the chemtrails narrative, according to researchers from the University of Cambridge.

After the heavy rainfall flooded Dubai, cloud seeding was blamed by some on social media.

Scientists said the storms behind the floods in the city were likely made worse by the climate crisis, adding that the El Niño pattern also helped intensify the weather.

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