https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/27/climate-change-geoengineering
Washington Post Editorial Board: ‘Humans might need to re-engineer the climate’ –
“A conversation about the risks and potential benefits of re-engineering the climate is urgently needed.” … “Climate engineering scholars David Keith at the University of Chicago and Wake Smith at Yale think it would take no more than 15 souped-up Gulfstream jets to send up, say, 100,000 tons of sulfur per year into the lower stratosphere to block solar rays, at an annual cost of some $500 million. This could happen in as little as five years.”
Flashback 2023: Washington Post: A ‘climate solution’ that spies worry could trigger war –
Solar geoengineering holds promise for reducing global temperatures. Absent international agreements, it could also spark conflict. -It sounds like something out of science fiction: A country suffering from heat, flooding or crop failures decides on its own to send out a fleet of aircraft to spray a fine, sun-blocking mist into the earth’s atmosphere, reducing temperatures and providing relief to parched populations. Other countries view it as a threat to their own citizens and ready a military response.
But members of the U.S. intelligence community and other national security officials were worried enough last year to plot how to avert a war triggered by this kind of climate engineering. In a role-playing exercise, they practiced managing the tensions that would be unleashed, according to people familiar with the exercise, a sign that they see it as a credible threat in need of a strategy.
The practice, known as solar geoengineering, is theoretically possible. And as the world’s most vulnerable populations suffer more sharply from rising temperatures, global decision-makers will likely come under heavy pressure to deploy the technology, scientists and policymakers say. Compared to other methods to combat the effects of climate change, it’s likely to be cheaper and faster.
Because the technique could weaken the sun’s power across the globe — not just above whichever country decided to deploy it — security officials are concerned about the potential to spark conflict, since a single capital could make decisions that shape the entire world’s fate.
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Biden: ‘The weather may be beyond our control — for now’ – Biden joins Bill Gates & China in seeking to control the weather – August 9, 2022
Bill Gates’ Savior Complex: Funds Sun-Dimming Plan To Save the Human Race
Marc Morano: This is Bill Gates funding this as well through Harvard University. This is retro 1970s. In the 1970s, they believed fossil fuels were creating aerosols blocking the sun, creating man-made global cooling. So they came up with the same kind of geo-engineering solutions back then. They wanted to put black soot on the Arctic to melt it. There was one proposal was to use nuclear energy to loosen the Arctic ice caps because they thought they were growing too much. John Holdren (Science Czar) in the Obama Administration supported geo-engineering, if you will, of the climate. This is radical, risky, unproven, with unknown effects but they are doing it as a sort of lever over us. The Biden Administration is saying ‘We know this is dangerous, we don’t know the effects, but darn it, people aren’t buying electric cars fast enough, or they aren’t embracing the Green New Deal policies, so we have to risk our entire planet with this research.’ It is basically weather modification. China has been doing it for years. Another form of what the government is been doing. ABC News meteorologists (Ginger Zee) talked about the cloud seeding to increase rain, snow or storms, They will — the government will control the weather, and you will be Happy. That seems to be the new motto.
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August 26, 2023
Michio Kaku, a physics professor at City College of New York: “Even in [the] sixties, the CIA used this to bring down monsoons during the Vietnam War to wash out the Vietcong.”
Kaku: “Instead of doing a rain dance, we physicists are firing trillion watt lasers into the sky to actually precipitate rain clouds and actually bring down lightning bolts. This is potentially a game-changer.”
“It is experimental, however in the laboratory, so far it works when you have water vapor and you have dust particles or ice crystals. You can precipitate rain. It condenses around the seeds. These seeds can also be created by laser beams by firing trillion watt lasers you rip apart the electrons creating what I call ions and these ions act like seeds like dust particles bringing down rain and even lightning.”
CBS News anchor Nora O’Donnell: “They were talking about climate change yesterday and now we’re learning that scientists and researchers are looking at how to change the weather on purpose. That’s right. Lasers now could one day manipulate rain and lightning.”
Background Info:
CNN in 2022: Scientists in the US are flying planes into clouds to make it snow more – CNN: “It’s called cloud seeding, and it’s nothing new. It’s been around since the 1940s and countries all over the world have been doing it for various reasons (most notably China), but it’s a growing practice in the US, especially in the drought-stricken West.”
Ginger Zee On Climate Change’s Impact On America’s Vulnerable River System | The View – Broadcast Apr 18, 2023 – Ginger Zee: “There are some solutions happening. Here’s where it’s always going to get controversial, perhaps. Cloud seeding is something that I studied in school for meteorology — weather modification. Back when I went to school, it was like pooh-poohed a little bit, too expensive; it’s not efficient enough. Well, guess what? When you get desperate, and then technology gets better. Twenty years later, here we are, cloud seeding is ramping up so big. You see me there, showing that flare on the plane. They send silver iodide into the clouds, and it then it makes it snow more. So they can’t make a cloud, right? But they’re taking storms already there and then giving it a little boost. That part is not new. What’s new is they have hundreds of these ground cloud seeders. so they are actually puffing the silver iodide with a flare into the air. That thing sits all over the Rocky Mountains, all over the American West. Ten states are doing this. My friend Russ (Schumacher) is the State Climatologist of Colorado, and he said, ‘You got to see with cloud seeding. It is huge, and it’s only getting better by next year.”
Bill Gates’ Savior Complex: Funds Sun-Dimming Plan To Save the Human Race
NYT: Dangerously Stupid Science: Solar Geoengineering: The National Academies said the United States must study technologies that would artificially cool the planet by reflecting away some sunlight, citing the lack of progress fighting global warming.
Dangerously Stupid Science: Solar Geoengineering
A sun reflector for Earth? Scientists explore the potential risks and benefits
Bill Gates Is Thinking About Dimming the Sun
Claim: Bill Gates Is Funding a Chemical Cloud That Could Put an End to Global Warming
Scientific American: Eight States Are Seeding Clouds to Overcome Megadrought – 2021: This is not a page from a science fiction novel. “Cloud seeding” is a real practice—in fact, it’s been around for decades. It’s used today to boost precipitation in at least eight states across the western U.S. and dozens of countries around the world. … Open flames burst from the throats of metal chimneys, mounted on squat towers nestled among the peaks. With a low hiss, puffs of particles belch from their mouths into the air, where the wind catches them and whisks them away. These aren’t ordinary particles. They’re tiny bits of crushed-up silver iodide, a crystal-like photosensitive substance once used in photography. But it’s not used to take pictures out in the mountains. It’s meant to make snow. … The crystalline silver iodide particles have a structure similar to ice—and inside a cloud, like attracts like. Water droplets begin to cluster around the particles, freezing solid as they gather together. These frozen clusters eventually grow too heavy to stay in the air. They fall from the cloud and drift gently toward the Earth, dusting the mountaintops with fresh snow.
Book excerpt on geoengineering the climate from “Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse than You Think”
Green Fraud: Pages 113-114
Book excerpt:
We’re in luck! Geoengineering solves both global cooling AND global warming.
Newsweek noted that one of the “more spectacular solutions proposed” for the coming ice age was “melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers.” A similar “solution” was also suggested by Leonard Nimoy in a 1978 episode of In Search Of…. The man who played Spock presented other such “solutions” for global cooling, including using nuclear energy to “loosen polar ice caps” or blanketing the ice caps in soot to help melt them.
Fast forward to the modern climate change debate, and the same type of ideas are being offered. In 2018, the idea of geoengineering the Earth or its atmosphere was proposed to fight “global warming.” A 2018 headline in the UK Independent blared: “First Ever Sun-Dimming Experiment Will Mimic Volcanic Eruption in Attempt to Reverse Global Warming.”
The article explained, “Plans to geoengineer the atmosphere by blocking out sunlight have been floated before, but an experiment launched next year by Harvard researchers will be the first to test the theory in the stratosphere.” Research team member David Keith boasted, “If solar geoengineering is as good as what is shown in these models, it would be crazy not to take it seriously.” The experiment “has been partly funded by Bill Gates of Microsoft.”
In 2009, Obama White House science advisor John Holdren suggested that we inject pollutants into the atmosphere to cool the planet and cancel out the warming impacts of pollution. As Keith reported, “Holdren told the Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays….‘It’s got to be looked at,’ Holdren said. ‘We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.’”
End excerpt
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We already know the risks, last time a significant amount of sulfur was injected into the atmosphere it caused crop failures and famine.
In 538, the Roman statesman Cassiodorus described the following to one of his subordinates in letter 25:[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536
Just take the scrubbers off the coal fired power stations. That’ll let the sulfur out.
How many tonnes do you want? Maybe we’ll have to go back to high sulfur coal sources to ensure the work is done efficiently and timely.
As a bonus, we get to use the power too.
And diesel.
But why do these articles avoid the subject of acid rain?
I wondered about that too.
I guess “Global Warming” is a more useful scare tactic.
Farmers won’t like someone making things a couple of degrees colder and their growing season a couple of weeks shorter. So far, farmer strikes have scuttled facets of the enviro plans in France, Germany, and the Netherlands.
It wasn’t that long ago that jet fuel contained 3000 ppm mass sulfur.
Wot about acid rain?
That is SOOO yesterday’s scare!
If ever a concept of human folly was required to bring us in touch with the meaning of “Unknown unknowns” this is surely it. (HT to Donald Rumsfeld)
Can the madness of climate alarmists reach any higher level of delusion than this? Over wealthy individuals thinking intervening with the world wide weather balance, by injecting chemicals into the atmosphere is a positive idea? That tells us everything we need to know about the insanity living with us in the 21st century.
Make the most of life while you can folks, because if this idea gains traction and is implemented, there is a grave doubt about our future. We may never reach the 22nd century.
This brings a whole new meaning to Net Zero….
Net Zero Energy.
Fertilising the atmosphere with CO2 is not okay, but desiccating the atmosphere by forcing the water out is.
Explain.
“Explain”
The climate alarmists are idiots who don’t know what they are talking about.
Whatever happened to the ‘precautionary principle‘ – Don’t mess with something that could have massive negative consequences in case it does.
Doublethink….
Story tip – Green jobs
Councillors have approved planning permission for an electric arc furnace at British Steel in Scunthorpe – risking thousands of jobs and the ability for the UK to make virgin steel.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/scunthorpe-british-steel-jobs-risk-electric-arc-furnace
Pump sulphur into the air? We can do that by burning coal…. Doh!
Not needed. We can cool the earth and restore fisheries by fertilizing the ocean with iron nanoparticles. Phytoplankton will blossom, sequester co2 to the bottom of the ocean and feed all the fish along the way.
I remember the smog of the Los Angeles basin in the 1960s and 70s. No thank you.
I remember that, too. Orange skies, and a foul odor hanging in the air.
I was a visitor to Los Angeles at the time, and started suffering headaches as soon as I arrived, which I assume was caused by what I was breathing.
“I was a visitor to Los Angeles ” in 1963. Nasty stuff.
Some other major cities also had a brown pall (dome) over them.
Except for one summer in Atlanta, we always lived in small towns
or rural places.
Yes, grade school 1963 – 1966 in West Covina. I remember not being able to see more than a couple blocks on summer days. La Puente Hill was a mile away, never see it. Lungs hurt when playing. It was horrid.
Then we moved to Laguna Niguel by the coast. Day and night difference. Rarely, the smog would move over us when conditions (deep inversion and Santa Ana) were just right.
I remember when the smog was bad enough you couldn’t see the mountains. We used to joke that they had been repossessed.
Story – tip – Green job
https://www.gbnews.com/news/scunthorpe-british-steel-jobs-risk-electric-arc-furnace
Charles, the moderation is abysmal.
Am I on premod???
Or is it references to a certain news channel???
Maybe it’s Sc un thorpe
Remember, it was just in 2020 that the amount of sulfur allowed in bunker fuel for large ships was reduced from 3.5% down to 0.5%. It resulted in noticeably less cloudiness over the oceans where there is a lot of ship traffic and has been calculated to increase shortwave solar heating by 0.1 W/m2.
China is seeding clouds with ‘Dry Ice’. Isn’t that Carbon Dioxide? Isn’t CO2 the stuff the wicked lunatics in these programmes are trying to keep out of the atmosphere?
Where is the rationale for that as a solution, it’s like the old joke, to keep the patient well, we had to let him die.
Dry ice is indeed frozen CO2.
Search up ‘ Dry-ice blasting ‘
The well-known silver iodide and Dry Ice methods of cloud precipitation work only on clouds that are well below freezing. Warm clouds are common, too. and Dr. Florence W. van Straten of the Naval Weather Service reasoned that they should precipitate if some of their droplets could be made warmer than the others.
Dr. van Straten solved it with carbon black. When these particles are released in a cloud, she reasoned, the water droplets that capture one or more of them should grow warmer by absorbing sunlight, and should lose their moisture by evaporation to droplets that have stayed comparatively cool because they have captured no particles. Then the cool, fattened-up droplets should fall slowly through the cloud, growing gradually bigger by jostling small droplets and combining with them. Eventually they should grow big enough to fall from the cloud.
This system, worked out theoretically, worked like a charm in actual fact, the Navy announced last week. It was tested last July over the coast of Georgia.
When carbon black is released in moist, cloudless air the effect is opposite but no less magical. Its black particles catch sunlight and heat the air between them. The heated air rises, expands and grows colder. Some of its moisture condenses, and a new, white cloud appears in the sky. This system will not form clouds in dry air, but when the air is moist enough, it works almost every time.
This was reported TIME OCTOBER 6, 1958, so been around for over 65 years.
From the article: “But members of the U.S. intelligence community and other national security officials were worried enough last year to plot how to avert a war triggered by this kind of climate engineering. In a role-playing exercise, they practiced managing the tensions that would be unleashed, according to people familiar with the exercise, a sign that they see it as a credible threat in need of a strategy.”
I think there is a very good chance of war if one country decides to experiment with the Earth’s weather. Such attempted actions might spark a civil war or two.
These damned climate alarmists can’t even prove that CO2 is a danger, yet they want to go ahead and rearrange the Earth’s atmosphere in hopes of fending off an imaginary danger from CO2. These fools have talked themselves into believing something that has no scientific support. There is no evidence that CO2 is, or will, broil the Earth.
This alarmist climate change mass delusion is a threat to the human race. Our leaders have lost their senses.
Global greening, longer growing seasons, warmer at night….could only improve the human condition…
Narcissism 101 has this to say “There is a compulsion of some professionals to constantly assert their competence, even when they are wrong.”
Gore, Kerry, Obama and many other politicians fit the bill. Mann and his supporters are almost certainly candidates along with much mercenary science and of course we have the UN, WHO, WMO and, it would seem, a great proportion of academics without personal integrity who subscribe to the genre without question.
Is it any wonder these bottom rate idiots are taking us down, down, down with them when our woke society hasn’t got a mere fraction of a gram of grey matter in its collective head which might enable it to at least fight back some of the time.
is painting my roof white still out?
Only if it can handle the load of snow that will not melt until spring.
How many tons of sulfur were being injected into the atmosphere when we were still using coal as a primary energy source for electricity generation?
This proposal sounds like the same thing, only injecting at higher altitudes.
It seems like the additional rocket manufacturing facilities required to lift enough SO2 20km into the stratosphere might be a strategic weapons risk….
Reusable high altitude balloons could do the job a lot cheaper. Or so say some of the solar geo-engineering advocates. The fact that solar geo-engineering is technically feasible, is likely to be effective in quickly reducing the earth’s global mean temperature, and is apparently economically feasible in comparison with the enormous costs of Net Zero, is the reason why it is getting so much attention in the press. Along with the possibility that the Chinese might decide to pursue a unilateral program of solar geo-engineering from their own territory, a program which would have worldwide impact.
“What could possibly go wrong?” 🤡
Do you want the full list or merely desire the highlights?
Sum total: Everything imaginable.
Back in the ’70’s there was a song.
“What’s that smell?”
A more expensive and technically more difficult approach to solar geo-engineering is to use metallic nanoparticles of aluminum or aluminum oxide as the reflective media, thus avoiding the problem of acid rain.
These metallic nanoparticles of aluminum or aluminum oxide would eventually end up on the ground and in the oceans and so must be injected on a continuous basis. It’s an approach which might be five or ten times more expensive than sulfur injection, but still very cheap in comparison with the costs of Net Zero.
Injection of nanoparticles into the stratosphere might be thought of as an mRNA vaccine for the planet. The use of solar geo-engineering as an mRNA vaccine for the planet could very reliably reduce the earth’s global mean temperature by 2C in a relatively short period of time.
However, the benefits of solar geo-engineering are theoretical while the dangers of its possible collateral damage certainly are not.
Nevertheless, the Chinese are said to be giving serious consideration to pursuing their own unilateral solar geo-engineering program. That the Chinese might actually do this is one possible reason why the American news media is publishing these articles.
If the Chinese did go through with it and the earth’s global mean temperature did indeed fall 2C within five years time, would climate alarmist nations then impose economic sanctions on China for having ended the climate change gravy train?
Why not carbon particles?
This is just hot air. Any attempt to do this will be meet with absolutely effective opposition.
met!
This will definitely cool the earth, no question about it. It also validates Bjorn H Samset’s research from a decade or so ago that links global warming to cleaner air.
Bottom line: In my opinion, the rise in the earth’s temperature over the last 60 years is directly due to reducing air pollution. There is no need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to pollute the atmosphere with sulphur; simply repeal the Clean Air Act.
Repealing the Clean Air Act would be economically beneficial in that companies wouldn’t have to spend a ton of money on reducing emissions. It’s a win-win.
This also proves that it’s not CO2 that’s causing a rise in the earth’s temperature; it’s the fact that we’re cleaning up the air.
But we must ask: ‘What is the correct temperature for the Earth’? I would suggest that we should have the Earth warmer than it is today, not cooler. After all, the Earth is currently in an interglacial period of an ice age. It’s rather arrogant for humans to say that the Earth is too warm, especially since it’s now warmer because we’re reducing our air pollution.
There were legitimate health benefits as a consequence of the Clean Air Act of 1970.
Yes, and I said this 50 years ago when the threatening ice age was the rage: less pollution will warm the earth.
Volcanos are one of nature’s experiments that prove this.
If this is pursued, we might find out if it is really Nuclear Autumn or Nuclear Winter.
My post was TIC; it was more mocking the concept of blowing $500 million per year to create acid rain when all we need to do is roll back clean air standards in order to achieve the same effect for free. Actually, it would be a financial positive because companies wouldn’t have to spend a ton of money for clean emissions.
The whole concept that the Earth is too hot (again, the Earth is in an interglacial period of an Ice Age) is comical. We really, really should be out there mocking this point.
As for CO2, its net effect on the Earth’s temperature is de minimis in my opinion. I’ve not seen a valid correlation to temperature to date. OTOH, more CO2 has made the Earth more green so we can support a larger world population.
IIRC, Dr Patrick Moore (one of Greenpeace’s cofounders) stated that one of the Earth’s mass extinction events occurred due to low CO2 levels. Little/no plants = no animal life.
I wouldn’t worry about a Nuclear Autumn or Nuclear Winter. The sulphur would fall out of the atmosphere in a reasonable time; likely as acid rain. So that’s nice.
They will probably bring about the next Glacial Period trying to keep it cold in this naturally cold interglacial period.
Outside of the Tropics, everyone has to have some kind of shelter from cold weather.
I think warming, which might delay the next Glacial Period, would be better.
The laws of unintended consequences part will be sobering. The removal of sulfur from
from diesel caused the seals on the input shaft of some ag tractor injector pumps to fail.
This causes the fuel load to move from the tank through injector pump into the crankcase,
then out the breather tube/cap and onto the floor.
Nothing like walking into the shop one morning to find a tank load of diesel on the floor mixed with oil.
After spending a good amount to time and money to replace the bad seal each load of
diesel now needs to have a fuel conditioner added to prevent this from happening again.
Geo engineering will have some kind of unintended consequences—guaranteed.
A lot of people “ WANT TO BELIEVE “ that there is a higher power in charge of human destiny, Church, State or Mother Nature, and have a religious zeal to their beliefs instead of cautious scepticism. Climate Scientists included.
“Other countries view it as a threat to their own citizens and ready a military response.”
Rightfully so. They talk about “existensial threat” – well, this is far more of a threat than a little warming.
As for the laser thing – that reminds me of HAARP, which I believe is a topic not allowed here. Is Kuku saying he takes it seriously?
Sulfur.
The Clean Air Act of 1970 addressed acid rain caused by sulfur in the atmosphere.
How is this a good plan?
Firing trillion watt lasers will have what effect on satellites and radio communications?
Curious readers want to know.
Cloud seeding causing extra rain/snow in one area leads to droughts in another.
How is this a good plan?
The lawsuits involved in attempting such a thing will not be worth it.
Back in the 1970’s people were worried about “acid rain”, or sulfur dioxide (SO2) reacting with rain water to produce dilute sulfurous acid, which was adversely affecting tree growth.
In response, the EPA imposed regulations on coal-fired power plants requiring scrubbers, and requiring desulfurization of kerosene and diesel fuel, to which refiners responded by building hydrotreaters, where oil distillates are reacted with hydrogen over catalysts to produce hydrogen sulfide gas, which is then reacted to produce elemental sulfur as a liquid or solid.
Most of the Ultra-Low-Sulfur Diesel (ULSD) sold in the USA contains less than 15 wt ppm of sulfur (the limit in Europe is 10 ppm), while most crude oils contain between 5,000 and 30,000 ppm sulfur. The processes to desulfurize petroleum distillates are very efficient, and scrubbers on coal-fired power plants can remove 99%+ of the sulfur dioxide from flue gas.
Thanks to these processes, the air over major American cities is a lot cleaner now than it was 50 years ago. If people want to experience what happens when massive amounts of sulfur compounds are injected into the atmosphere, they should travel to Beijing or Mexico City, where the sky on clear days is yellow instead of blue.
If that results in sunny days being clearer and slightly warmer, then so be it–trees and crops will grow faster, helped along by the additional CO2 in the air. Why should we suddenly undo over 50 years of beneficial air pollution control over a fraction of a degree?
“Why should we suddenly undo over 50 years of beneficial air pollution control over a fraction of a degree?”
Because that’s how grifters make more money…
(OTOH, Bill Gates is simply dumber than a fencepost)
Bad ideas never ever go away. Learn some history, dolts.