Nathan Radke

And because my students are like a good general barometer of what's happening in social media in general, when they started talking about the ocean, I went to social media and I said, ooh, I bet you there's going to be some ocean conspiracies surfacing there.

OK, so you remember back in January, we had some like properly impressive snowfalls and we had that one particularly gnarly winter storm that swept across most of the U.S.

and Canada.

It's still on the streets where I'm living right now.

There's still tons and tons of it outside.

And it interfered with travel and commuting.

And in Canada, we mostly shoveled through it.

But of course, down in the States, they're not used to this much snow.

And so a lot of places were just shut down for a few days to minimize chaos.

And when you have people shut in at home, something weird is going on.

That's just a great recipe for conspiracism.

I mean, absolutely that is the case.

And anytime there's an unusual weather event, which of course these days is a lot of the time, unfortunately, there's always a lot of conspiracy theories that come along with it.

And so in recent years, weather's become more extreme.

There's been a lot of discussion, sometimes even from politicians, about how this storm or that storm was actually caused by some kind of weather control device.

I mean, this is classic stuff.

It's in part because we want somebody to be behind the things that happen.

And like the weirder the event is, the more we want it to have been deliberately caused.

So a couple weeks ago, we actually had two blizzards at once.

We had the blizzard of snow in the streets, and we also had the blizzard of memes and speculation on social media.