Alex Jones has suggested that the devastating tornadoes that wreaked havoc across Kentucky and five other US states last week were actually caused by President Joe Biden wielding government "weather weapons".
Mr Jones, a far right radio shock jock and prolific conspiracy conspiracist, spuriously claimed a five-year-old speech about theoretical ways to stop global warming as proof that the US government had been working on dangerous weather control technology.
"So the question is," he asked, referring to Mr Biden’s administration, "did they use weather weapons to cause the tornadoes? That’s a legitimate question to ask."
At least 74 people have been confirmed dead in Kentucky and 100 are still missing due to the tornadoes on Friday night, with dozens more deaths across Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Illinois. Some scientists have said climate change may have played a role in the disaster, which featured the longest tornado damage path in recorded US history.
Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, said on Monday: "We tend to call these things natural disasters, but this isn’t a natural disaster. This is a disaster that was exacerbated by human-caused climate change."
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In his broadcast, first highlighted by the left-leaning campaign group Media Matters for America, Mr Jones said: "I can play you an hour-long lecture by John Brennan, when he was CIA director, admitting that, ‘oh, other governments don’t like what we are doing, it can cause weather problems’. Weather weapons that were developed in the Fifties.
"So, they just think you’re stupid and they don’t want you knowing they are doing all of this. They’ve got carbon systems they are putting in – big, huge geo-engineering systems, terraforming systems, that are sucking carbon dioxide out of the air when it’s a trace gas that we need."
His supposed proof turned out to be a speech by Mr Brennan in 2016 in which he discusses the hypothetical potential of geo-engineering technology to mitigate climate change, such as by injecting particles into the atmosphere that would reflect some of the sun’s rays away from Earth.
The speech was clearly discussing future technologies that did not yet exist, which had caught Mr Brennan’s "personal attention" because they could lead to future conflicts and geopolitical tensions that the CIA might have to navigate.
"As promising as it may be, moving forward would also raise a number of challenges for our government and for the international community," he said. "The technology’s potential to alter weather patterns and benefit certain regions of the world at the expense of other regions could trigger sharp opposition by some nations."