Meteorologist Receives Death Threats by Hurricane Milton Conspiracy Theorists

Meteorologists work around-the-clock when severe weather events like hurricanes hit.

That’s just a natural part of the job that they prepare for as they look to get vital information out to people as quickly as possible that could save lives.

But, some of these same people told Rolling Stone recently that they’ve had to deal with something else recently — death threats from conspiracy theorists.

Matthew Cappucci, a meteorologist based in Washington, D.C., spoke with the media outlet as he was driving to Florida to cover Hurricane Milton this week. He said:

“People are just so far gone. It’s honestly making me lose all faith in humanity. There’s so much bad information floating around out there that the good information has become obscured.”

In just the last few months, Cappucci added that he’s seen a big change with how information that’s posted to social media is being taken. He said:

“Seemingly overnight, ideas that once would have been ridiculed as very fringe, outlandish viewpoints are suddenly becoming mainstream, and it’s making my job much more difficult.”

As a result, disaster relief experts and meteorologists like him, he said, have to strike a balance between trying to release helpful information to people while also trying to squash any misinformation that could be very harmful to people. He explained:

“Nowadays, there’s so much bad information out there that if we spent our time getting rid of it, we’d have no more time.”

A big problem now, he said, is that many meteorologists are being flooded with different conspiracy theories. One of the main ones that has been catching on with people is that the government somehow has the ability to control the weather.

This has become especially problematic during this heightened election year, where partisan attitudes are really driving home rhetoric that the “other side” is bad, no matter what they do.

James Spann, a meteorologist in Alabama, told Rolling Stone that he’s been “inundated” with threatening messages telling him to “stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else.”

Cappucci backed that up by saying:

“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.”

Just in the week leading up to Hurricane Milton, Cappucci says he received hundreds of different messages from people who were accusing him of somehow controlling the weather to create hurricanes. All of this has left him exhausted, since he hasn’t been able to sleep.

He explained:

“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.

“An average hurricane’s life cycle burns through the energy of roughly 10,000 nuclear bombs. The idea that we can even influence something like that, never mind direct it, is just so outlandish that it’s almost, sadly, funny.”