What People Are Misunderstanding This Week: Is Snow Fake?

Posted on February 10, 2026 by resourcefulman

Memphis City Council members Pearl Eva Walker and Yolanda Cooper Sutton (as well as many other internet users) claim that the snow is not real snow.

Sutton recently posted a video on her Facebook page to demonstrate the artificiality of snow. In the footage, which shows her husband holding a snowball and a lighter, Sutton says, “We decided to see what actually falls to the ground.” Her husband holds a flame to the snowball, and it doesn’t melt.

“It doesn’t melt [it stinks] when you light it! Oh my god, what’s going on!!!” Sutton asks.

All available evidence suggests that snow does indeed exist.

First, the snow is real, but I understand why the Memphis City Council members might be suspicious. These videos are convincing, and they’re not the work of AI or a deliberate hoax using fake snow. They’re documented evidence of what happens when you hold a flame to real, fallen snow. You’d expect that holding a flame to a snowball would cause it to melt and turn into water in your hand, but that doesn’t happen. Nothing against those who conduct their own experiments, but they’re missing the point that snow can be unpredictable.

Why does it seem like snow doesn’t melt from fire?

Snow is 90–95% air , so it contains much less water than you might expect, regardless of how it melts. But the key process is sublimation , which is the transformation of a solid directly into a gas, bypassing the liquid state. When you apply a flame to snow, especially tightly packed snow, most of it turns into water vapor without first turning into liquid water. Sublimation also explains why snow can appear to disappear even when the temperature doesn’t rise above freezing. You can see the sublimation process in action in the video below.

Snow is also porous. When a snowball melts, water is drawn into the center of the mass by capillary action , filling the voids that were once air. The video below shows a stove being dropped onto uncompacted snow on the ground. Some of the snow sublimates under the heat, while some of the surface snow melts, turning into water and being drawn into the empty spaces of the snow beneath. You can see how by the end of the video it transforms from “fluffy” snow to a more moist one. (By the way, those idiots are about to burn a trailer.)

What if the snow turns black?

Burn marks on “burning snow” also have an explanation: the flame of a match or lighter is the result of combustion of fuel: butane from the lighter, or wood or paper from the matches. When the fuel burns, carbon soot forms, which reacts with the cold snow, condensing on its surface. The soot is not burn marks on the snow itself, but on the butane or wood/paper. It’s safe to say that the snow itself doesn’t burn because it never ignites.

All that remains is the smell of burning plastic that some report. This is actually the smell of butane from the lighter that hasn’t completely burned, and/or the smell of mercaptans, which are sometimes added to butane to make it more detectable . The result is a chemical odor that can easily be confused with the smell of burning plastic, especially if you hold the flame close to soot that has already settled on a cold surface. In this video, a conspiracy theorist uses a candle instead of a lighter and notes that there is no smell of burning plastic. That’s because there was no butane involved.

What do you think at the moment?

How to Create the Illusion of “Burning Snow” Yourself

You can try all of this yourself to impress your friends with the wonders of sublimation and/or fool a ton of people on social media. It’s simple:

Take some snow and compact it into a firm ball. The harder surface will help the soot stick better.
Apply a flame from a regular butane lighter for a few seconds. If you use matches, there will be no smell of burning plastic.
That’s a pretty cool burn mark, right? Notice how little water drips and how the snow “disappears.”
Notice the edges of the burn scar. Here, the meltwater has shifted toward the center of the snowball.
If you want to debunk the snow burning conspiracy theory, just hold some snow in your hand and you will see it melt and turn into water.

Is it possible to make artificial snow?

What if the government, for some reason, wanted to create an artificial snowstorm? It’s possible—manufactured snow can be seen at ski resorts during harsh winters; you can buy your own snowmaking machine on Amazon for under $100 . The problem would be scale. All the conspiracy theories about “they control the weather” fall apart when you consider the scale.

Artificial snow is made by spraying a mist of pressurized water into sub-zero air. A ski resort can easily cover a few slopes, but an entire city or state would require a massive amount of snow. Industrial snow machines use about 160,000 gallons of water to create one acre-foot of snow . Covering a 25-square-mile city with six inches of snow would require about 1.28 billion gallons of water pumped through thousands of snowplows. It’s expensive, requires a ton of fuel, and won’t fool anyone—the machines are incredibly noisy, and the snow won’t fall from the sky; it’ll blow out of the snowplows. You’ll end up thinking, “What am I even doing with my life?”

You could also try seeding existing clouds with silver iodide to induce snowfall, but that’s also expensive, and no one knows for sure if it works at all .

Bottom line: we can’t control the weather.

Humanity can collectively alter weather patterns—global climate change and all that—but we can’t control the weather. We can’t make it snow on command in Memphis without anyone noticing the thousands of roaring machines pumping artificial snow into the air, any more than we can control hurricanes . The snow falling from the sky is real, and it’s made of frozen water crystals, just as it always has been.

More…

Entertainment