Spanish weather forecasters face an alarming jump in online attacks

Back in 2023, Spain was in a terrible drought. One TV weatherwoman, Isabel Moreno, began showing a map of Europe. Day after day, week after week, you could see rain falling across northern Europe, but nary a drop there. One day, Moreno decided to lead her forecast with four words: The Rain Skirts Spain. She thought it sounded punchy.

“And suddenly I started getting dozens and dozens of threats,” Moreno told a Spanish radio station recently. “People said, ‘Why isn’t it raining? Is it because of the little airplanes?’ They accused me of being part of a conspiracy, insulting me and threatening my life.”

The little airplane conspiracy involves a secret cabal of scientists and governments seeding the sky with chemicals that destroy rain clouds. 

The smoking gun for those who buy into the plot? The so-called white chemtrails in the sky that are left behind by the planes. This chemtrail conspiracy has been debunked by scientists all over the world. But that just makes some people believe it more. 

In 2023, The World interviewed farmers in southern Spain during that year’s drought, and while discussing solar energy, farmer Antonio Torres kept glancing at the sky.

“… Look at the white tendrils up there,” he said. “spinning me around.”

What Torres saw was a bunch of what the aviation industry calls condensation trails, or “contrails,” caused by jet fuel. But for Torres, it was something else.

​“Every day that we have clouds, four or five planes appear spraying silver iodide to dissolve them,” he said.

It was a government conspiracy, he said, to dry out his land — and drive him from it. Why? So, the solar panel companies could move in.

It didn’t occur to Torres that Spain’s prolonged drought could have been the result of more extreme weather patterns caused by climate change.​

Spanish public TV weatherman Martin Barreiro said when meteorologists weigh in to explain this, it makes some people uncomfortable. “Because climate change means humanity must change,” he said. “And some people who are reluctant to accept this become climate change deniers. And worse, they even begin to doubt the daily forecast.” 

And to target the public faces of those forecasts: the friendly and once-rusted weatherman or woman.

Rubén del Campo, with Spain’s meteorological agency, told The World that 1 out of 4 comments on the agency’s posts on X are hateful or threatening.

“It wears you down,” del Campo said. “I once saw a post with my picture, saying that I’d forbidden people to talk about cold fronts.”​

One out of four is a minority, but del Campo said, when you’re talking hundreds of thousands of hateful comments on a single post, it can be brutal.

“There’s self-censorship happening among us,” he said. “The science is still getting done, but fewer meteorologists are willing to show their face to explain it to the world. If you’ve got important findings but don’t share them publicly, they lose their impact.”

And, if it requires warning the public about extreme weather linked to climate change and no one steps forward, del Campo says people’s lives could be endangered.