Geoengineering
Part 3
‘CONSPIRACY theories swirl about geo-engineering but could it help save the planet?’ This was the highly emotive and manipulative heading of a recently published BBC In Depth article.
After a spring and summer of unprecedented cloud cover and rainfall, why would not an increasingly aware public wonder whether we are already suffering the consequences of solar radiation management or other geo-engineering weather modification programmes? I for one cannot remember when I last saw a clear blue sky without cloud formations intermingled with crisscrossed aircraft trails.
But any such conjecture is leapt on by the BBC and labelled as conspiracy theory. The author of the BBC article cites as ‘proof’ the twice as many mentions of geo-engineering this year on X/Twitter than over the last six months of 2023. Another interpretation might well be a rising public concern about the reckless experiments with weather modification far more harmful than the unproven man-made global warming they are claimed to mitigate.
This sudden foray by the BBC into geo-engineering looks suspiciously like a ‘covid misinformation’ style response to shut any questioning down whilst, at the same time, softening us up for this latest ‘climate control’ lunacy. ‘It sounds like the stuff of science fiction’, the author writes apparently ingenuously, ‘but the idea of reflecting solar radiation, the technical term for sunlight, is not as crazy as it might sound and sometimes happens in the natural world. During volcanic eruptions, huge amounts of ash and aerosols – tiny particles – can be transported into the high atmosphere which can then reflect solar radiation back into space.’
He then happily explains how millions of tons of sulphur dioxide, similar to a volcanic eruption, could be pumped into the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation and bring about global cooling.
This is the insane thinking behind the Gates-backed Stratospheric Perturbation Control Experiment at Harvard, a long-term Solar Radiation Management (SRM) programme which I detailed in Part One of this series. In Part Two I focused on cloud seeding – the increasingly ‘normalised’ and widespread weather modification intervention which remains unregulated despite scientists’ and environmentalists’ concerns about its ecological impacts. This part concluded with mention of China’s massive weather modification programme. The techniques by which this country managed to create rain and snow across 5.5 million square kilometres, while also suppressing hail across 580,000 square kilometres, are detailed further here. This is unknown and highly risky territory, not only for wider weather impacts but also in terms of geo-political conflict.
In this third part of this series I address two other experiments designed to bring ‘global warming’ under control before returning to our own skies. One is marine cloud brightening and the second, albedo modification. The former, now routinely used over Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, uses a seawater sprayer, rather like a marine snow machine, to generate hundreds of trillions of microscopic sea salt crystals that float into the sky to form a fog and bolster existing reflectivity. The sprayer is moved around, utilising atmospheric conditions at any given time and place.
Albedo modification also aims to reflect more sunlight back to space by enhancing earth albedo – that is, the reflectivity of its surface. Proposals and experiments span a wide range, from growing crops that reflect more light, to the clearing of forest in snow-covered areas, to covering large desert or ice areas with reflective materials, and even to whitening mountaintops and roofs with white paint. The California-based Arctic Ice Project (formerly Ice911)began experimenting with reflective silica glass as cover material more than a decade ago, conducting trials on frozen lakes in Canada and the US, the largest of which is North Meadow Lake near Utqiagvik, Alaska.
Both are promoted and justified as temporary protective measures to buy time while ‘global action is taken to stabilise temperature’, although Wired warns of an innate conflict here for environmentalists concerned that ‘such plans could prolong our addiction to fossil fuels’. Both technologies have a common goal: to increase the earth’s albedo. Yet like SRM, this makes a complete mockery of that other highly subsidised ‘green’ investment – solar power. What is the sense in covering farmland with solar panels and the pylons to transmit their alleged power output while the sunlight that will activate them is being blocked?
We may think such projects are too far away to affect our own weather, but can we assume that no such experimentation has begun here? This is the final concern of this series. What our government has been risking and is involved with, which if not actively concealing, is not bringing to public attention.
How many people were aware for example that British researchers launched a solar geo-engineering test flight back in September 2021. This experiment, the MIT Technology Review revealed last year, was largely designed to test equipment in which a high-altitude weather balloon would release ‘a few hundred grams of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere’. The Review described it ‘as a potential scientific first in the solar geo-engineering field’ which ‘took place in spite of deep concerns about the nature of the technology’.
Andrew Lockley, the independent researcher previously affiliated to University College London, Research Gate named in the article as leading the effort, was said to have been furious that word of his project got out.
‘Leakers be damned!’ he wrote in an email to MIT Technology Review. ‘There’s a special place in hell for those who leak their colleagues’ work, tormented by ever burning sulfur, ’ he went on, ‘but I have taken a vow of silence, and can only confirm that our craft ascended to the heavens, as intended. I only hope that this test plays a small part in offering mankind salvation from the hellish inferno of climate change.’
No question, then, as to where this ‘scientist’ is coming from. Elsewhere he has advocated the privatisation of such projects and for what he calls ‘philanthropic geo-engineering’.
Yet nothing is known about the real-world effect of such deliberate interventions at large scale, nor their dangerous side effects for food production and indeed for all life. Complacency ignores this and is encouraged to do so by the last Tory government’s endorsement, with the enthusiastic backing of the all-powerful Lord (Patrick) Vallance, of geo-engineering technology as a necessary ‘final’ means of mitigating (the myth of) man-made global warming.
As yet, we do not know on whose authority the Lockley experiment took place, nor whether there have been others since, nor how many. What we do know however is that the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), a secretive government agency (modelled on the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA) instigated by Dominic Cummings in 2021, has been given £800 million to play with projects ‘that lie on the edge of the possible’. One of the first will be to look for ways to ‘responsibly manage our climate and weather.’ As though that were either possible or responsible.
Dr Mark Symes, overseeing this programme, has no such worries: ‘We’re going to focus on weather – so short-term, local effects. For example, you might think about seeding clouds so that there was rain over the Atlantic and not over the land to prevent flooding in the UK. Or you might think about generating a fog over a local area to, say, shield a city during a heatwave.’ Significantly, he added ‘We have people in the UK working on weather management technologies. In some cases, they have small working devices. They are waiting for someone to take them seriously.’
So the technologies are there. What we do not know is which are already in use or how many experiments have already taken place over our skies. That some have is a certainty, and I will discuss this in the final part of this series.