No, a 'weather machine' isn't causing the deep freeze. That's impossible | Fact check

Gabrielle Settles, USA TODAY
·4 min read

The claim: Extreme cold weather is being created by machines

A woman in a Jan. 11 Facebook video (direct link, archive link) shows news headlines about the deep freeze that hit the country in January.

“Remember the cold winter that Biden had talked about?" the woman asks. "An arctic blast is supposed to hit the United States as soon as this week.

"If y’all wonder why they’re making it so cold, they showed you right here in this episode with their special weather machine,” the woman says in front of screenshots from "The Simpsons."

The caption of the Facebook post references two scientific programs, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, known as HAARP, and the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, that are often erroneously blamed for altering the weather and atmosphere.

The post was shared more than 2,000 times in over a week.

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Our rating: False

Experts and evidence have repeatedly shown that natural causes are responsible for extreme weather, not man-made machines. The technology used in HAARP and CERN is not strong enough to make such an impact.

Arctic blast is coming from the North Pole, not a machine

Experts have previously told USA TODAY that no technology is capable of creating intense storms. The real culprit for extreme cold weather is the arctic blast coming from a polar vortex, a large stream of air that circulates above the North Pole.

Normally, a polar vortex remains over the North Pole. But sometimes it stretches or breaks, leading arctic air to blow south, as USA TODAY previously reported.

Daniele Visioni, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University, told USA TODAY that creating such conditions with a machine would be impossible.

“There is nothing that would be capable of disrupting or changing things like the large-scale global weather patterns,” Visioni said. “There is no technology whatsoever that would be capable of affecting something as big as the polar vortex.”

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Neither HAARP nor CERN are responsible for frigid temperatures, experts said.

HAARP studies the ionosphere, which forms a boundary between space and Earth’s atmosphere.

The program uses a transmitter to study the ionosphere, but contrary to many previous debunked claims, it cannot control the weather, HAARP Director Jessica Matthews previously told USA TODAY.

"Radio waves in the frequency ranges that HAARP transmits are not absorbed in either the troposphere or the stratosphere – the two levels of the atmosphere that produce Earth’s weather," Matthews said in a previous interview. "Since there is no interaction, there is no way to control the weather."

CERN is the program that's responsible for discovering the Higgs boson particle – also known as the "God particle" – a finding that scientists say helps explain the Big Bang theory and how the universe was formed.

But CERN has been falsely claimed in the past to have created a black hole that swallowed the earth or opened a portal to hell. Experts previously told USA TODAY that it would take an accelerator “the size of the universe” to create a black hole of that capacity, let alone a portal to another dimension.

USA TODAY reached out to the users who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: There's no technology that could have caused arctic blast | Fact check