Why do conspiracy theorists believe natural events are intentionally manipulated?

BY MICK WEST

Many conspiracies are seasonal. Some revolve around a particular date like 9/11 or 11/22. Some actually hinge upon the season. Each winter, a few people think there’s something wrong with the snow, or that the increase in airplane contrails indicates some kind of secret climate modification program. Each late summer as wildfires burn in the West and hurricanes take aim at the East, some people think it’s all a deliberate part of some secret, sinister plan.

One of the reasons people start to ascribe conspiracy theories to natural events is a desire for proportion. Some people feel a significant amount of cognitive dissonance when presented with a hugely significant event (such as the destruction of a small town) that seemingly happened at random.

The conventional explanations of power lines sparking, too-dry trees, and high winds seem overly mundane for events of this magnitude. To the conspiratorial mind, there must be someone pulling the strings.

This desire for a more satisfying alternative explanation leads towards three avenues of investigation. First they must bolster their suspicion with evidence. What is it about these apparently natural events that indicates they were intentionally manipulated? Second, conspiracists need a plausible sounding mechanism for how nature is being manipulated. What is the technology? Then, finally, we need both a villain and their motive. Who is doing this, and for what reason?

Evidence

For many of the suspicious, the sheer scale of the event is evidence enough. A record breaking flood, snowfall, or fire cannot, they reason, be a random occurrence. Of course it can, for two relatively simple reasons. First, we are in an unusual period of climate change and global warming. Second, the records don’t actually go back very far. Very few fires in the West were recorded before the mid 1800s. With under two hundred years of history, records are eventually going to be broken. It would be statistically inevitable even without global warming.