University of Chicago backs mad scientist's plan to block out the sun



A subset of alarmists is convinced that to curb so-called global warming, they must block out the sun, at least partially. David Keith, founding faculty director at the University of Chicago's Climate Systems Engineering Initiative, is among them.

Keith, a multimillionaire who was previously at the University of Calgary and Harvard University, seeks to pollute the stratosphere ultimately with millions of tons of sulfur dioxide.

Blasting aerosols and other reflective substances, such as diamonds or aluminum dioxide, into the atmosphere, roughly 12-16 miles above the Earth, might replicate the effects of volcanic eruptions in blocking sunlight and lowering global mean temperatures.

The 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, which injected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, resulted in a rapid half-degree drop in global temperatures. According to NASA, this drop lasted or two years until the sulfate dropped out of the atmosphere.

Without the guidance of Ivy League technocrats or the help of volcanoes, the species unwittingly found another way to lower global temperatures and scatter solar rays: using fossil fuels.

Emissions from cars, homes, and industry have long mixed in with low-altitude clouds, causing them to brighten and bounce more sunlight, resulting in a cooling effect. However, climate alarmists' ongoing campaign against the use of affordable energy — again, to supposedly curb global warming — might diminish this secondary benefit, thereby exacerbating global warming.

"I think most people are aware that there's a greenhouse gas effect that warms climate," Sarah Doherty of the University of Washington's Marine Cloud Brightening Program told the Weather Channel earlier this year.

"But what most people aren't aware of is that the particles that we've also been producing and adding to the atmosphere offset some of that climate warming," continued Doherty. "So, the overall effect is one of climate warming, but it would be a lot more without that particulate pollution."

Extra to reducing this low-hanging particulate pollution released by a productive society, Keith wants to release his alternative pollutant with a "purpose-built fleet of high-altitude aircraft."

In a February paper in the MIT Technology Review, he co-authored with Harvard Kennedy School research fellow Wake Smith, Keith noted that "offsetting a substantial fraction of global warming — say, 1 °C of cooling — would require platforms that could deliver several million metric tons per year of material to the stratosphere."

"Neither rockets nor balloons are suitable for hauling such a large mass to this high perch. Consequently, full-scale deployment would require a fleet of novel aircraft — a few hundred in order to achieve a 1 °C cooling target," said the paper. "Procuring just the first aircraft in the manner typical of large commercial or military aircraft development programs might take roughly a decade, and manufacturing the required fleet would take several years more."

While Keith acknowledged his scheme's current technological limits and cautioned against near-term deployment, he nevertheless advocated for policymakers to consider the possibility of deployment "earlier than is now widely assumed."

On the basis of his calculations, Keith, who made roughly $72 million off the sale of his carbon capture company to Occidental Petroleum, recently suggested to the New York Times that following through on his scheme would not only lower temperatures but might also change the hue of twilight.

Of course, orange twilight is far from the only possible side effect of such efforts to meddle with the sun and sky.

Numerous scientists have indicated that solar geoengineering might lead to humanitarian and ecological disasters.

In recent years, hundreds of scientists have signed an open letter calling for an international non-use agreement on solar engineering, stressing that "the risks of solar geoengineering are poorly understood and can never be fully known. Impacts will vary across regions, and there are uncertainties about the effects on weather patterns, agriculture, and the provision of basic needs of food and water."

Blaze Newspreviously reported that a 2017 study published in Nature Communications indicated that aerosols released only in the northern hemisphere might increase droughts, hurricanes, and storms elsewhere.

"This is a really dangerous path to go down," Beatrice Rindevall, chairwoman of the Swedish Society for Nature, told the Times. "It could shock the climate system, could alter hydrological cycles and could exacerbate extreme weather and climate instability."

Oxford University atmospheric physicist Raymond Pierrehumbert has characterized solar geoengineering as a threat to mankind.

"It's not only a bad idea in terms of something that would never be safe to deploy," said Pierrehumbert. "But even doing research on it is not just a waste of money, but actively dangerous."

"There certainly are risks, and there certainly are uncertainties," Keith told the Times. "But there's really a lot of evidence that the risks are quantitatively small compared to the benefits, and the uncertainties just aren't that big."

While still a professor at Harvard, Keith attempted to run an experiment, possibly over Arizona. Unable to find a partner to launch a high-altitude balloon and met with objections by Indian groups and other critics, Harvard contracted the Swedish space corporation to run the test. That test was similarly met with controversy and aborted.

After his experiments were foiled, Keith pledged not to be "open in the same way" with future endeavors. He also left Harvard for the University of Chicago, which the Times indicated is permitting him to hire 10 new faculty members and kick off a new $100 million geoengineering program.

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Dubai rocked by heaviest downpour in 75 years and fatal floods following cloud-seeding missions



The United Arab Emirates and neighboring states were rocked this week by the heaviest rains on record, which resulted in devastating floods, dozens of deaths, significant damage, and diverted flights.

A government meteorologist indicated early on that the UAE's well-known geoengineering efforts were at least partly to blame. However, now that there is a body count, the government task force responsible for cloud-seeding missions in the region is attempting to deny responsibility.

Liberal media outlets such as the Guardian and Wired and so-called experts have dutifully accepted these denials, insinuating that climate change or other factors may instead be responsible.

When it rains, the NCM makes it pour

Cloud seeding is the controversial weather modification technique whereby aircraft, rockets, cannons, or ground generators release various chemicals and tiny particles, such as potassium chloride, into clouds in an effort to artificially increase precipitation.

Professor Ari Laaksonen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute indicated that there are two principal cloud-seeding techniques. Hygrocopic cloud seeding serves to speed up droplet coalescence in liquid clouds, "leading to production of large droplets that start to precipitate." The other technique, called glaciogenic cloud seeding, serves to "trigger ice production in supercooled clouds, leading to precipitation."

Cloud seeding not only works but has reportedly helped increase Utah's water supply by an estimated 12% in 2018.

The UAE has been conducting cloud-seeding missions for decades.

According to the Khaleej Times of Dubai, the UAE has ramped up its efforts under the UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement, managed by the Gulf state's National Center of Meteorology. This particular scheme was kicked off by the Ministry of Presidential Affairs of the UAE.

Alya Almazroui, director of the initiative, told the Khaleej Times in September, "By experimenting with various seeding approaches, we anticipate that these campaigns could lead to a more effective cloud-seeding approach and, consequently, increased rainfall in the targeted areas."

On average, the NCM reportedly conducts more than 1,000 hours of cloud-seeding missions every year, using aircraft equipped with hygroscopic flares full of nucleating agents.

It appears as though the NCM may have succeeded in its efforts at the expense of numerous lives.

Disaster and denial

ABC News Australia reported that a year's worth of rain descended on the UAE Tuesday, paralyzing Dubai and effectively closing the Dubai International Airport — the world's busiest hub for international air travel.

Extra to prompting hundreds of flights to divert course, rains fed destructive floods across the Emirates and Bahrain, killing at least 20 in Oman and one person in the UAE. Underground parking lots were flooded and metro operations were shuttered. Power was also knocked off in certain areas.

Dubai's media office acknowledged Tuesday that the downpour the UAE experienced this week was the heaviest it has experienced in 75 years.

Dr. Ahmed Habib, a meteorological specialist with the Gulf state's National Center of Meteorology, told Bloomberg that the NCM dispatched seeding planes from Al Ain airport on Monday and Tuesday to "take advantage of convective cloud formations."

Bloomberg indicated that NCM flew several cloud-seeding flights prior to the downpour. The Associated Press also indicated at least one aircraft associated with the cloud-seeding initiative flew around the country on Monday.

The NCM claimed on Wednesday it had instead seeded the sky on Sunday and Monday. State media did not acknowledge earlier flights.

Omar AlYazeedi, deputy director of the NCM, later told CNBC that the agency "did not conduct any seeding operations during this event."

Habib also later changed his tune, suggesting that the six cloud-seeding flights he had previously told the press about had indeed flown missions but had not seeded any clouds.

Various so-called experts have apparently taken the NCM at its word and seized on the opportunity to instead blame climate change.

Daniel Swain, a "climate scientist" at the University of California, Los Angeles, tweeted, "Did cloud seeding play a role? (Spoiler: likely no!) But how about #ClimateChange? (Another spoiler: likely yes!)."

"When we talk about heavy rainfall, we need to talk about climate change. Focusing on cloud seeding is misleading," Friederike Otto, a supposed global warming specialist at the Imperial College of London, told the Associated Press. "Rainfall is becoming much heavier around the world as the climate warms because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture."

"Rainfall from thunderstorms, like the ones seen in UAE in recent days, sees a particular strong increase with warming. This is because convection, which is the strong updraft in thunderstorms, strengthens in a warmer world," Dim Coumou of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam told Reuters.

Maarten Ambau, an atmospheric physics professor at the University of Reading, told the Guardian that "cloud seeding, certainly in the Emirates, is used for clouds that don't normally produce rain. ... You would not normally develop a very severe storm out of that."

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Scientists just test-fired a cloud device over American soil with the ultimate aim of blocking sunlight



The USS Hornet may be a decommissioned aircraft carrier, yet it has nevertheless become the launch-site for a controversial new war in the skies.

The Marine Cloud Brightening Program's Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement project, led by researchers from the University of Washington, took to the deck of the Hornet Tuesday to launch streams of particles into the sky above the San Francisco Bay. Their ultimate objective is apparently to block and reflect sunlight in hopes of limiting "global warming."

CAARE researchers behind the geoengineering scheme opted not to announce their experiment, reportedly citing concerns that there might be significant backlash.

After all, the American public — or at the very least, the residents of Alameda — might first want to hear from the hundreds of scientists who have called for a non-use agreement for solar radiation management and stated in an open letter that the "risks of solar geoengineering are poorly understood and can never be fully known. Impacts will vary across regions, and there are uncertainties about the effects on weather patterns, agriculture, and the provision of basic needs of food and water."

The experiment

Clouds bounce some of the sun's rays back into space. This supposedly helps cool temperatures locally.

The University of Washington's Department of Atmospheric Sciences conceded that fossil fuel emissions and other human activities have long generated aerosols in the atmosphere that mix in with low-altitude clouds, causing them to brighten and reflect more sunlight, having a cooling effect on the earth's climate.

"I think most people are aware that there's a greenhouse gas effect that warms climate," UW MCB program director Sarah Doherty told the Weather Channel. "But what most people aren't aware of is that the particles that we've also been producing and adding to the atmosphere offset some of that climate warming. So, the overall effect is one of climate warming, but it would be a lot more without that particulate pollution."

With climate alarmists concerned over supposed global temperature increases and the corresponding war on fossil fuels sure to rob the clouds of a contributing brightener, some scientists are keen to pump out aerosols of their own.

Robert Wood, the lead UW scientist running the cloud project, noted on his university blog that the team at the CAARE facility developed a "Cloud-Aerosol Research Instrument (CARI)." This device, which has multiple nozzles and resembles a snow maker, can apparently fire trillions of salt particles into the air.

The UW indicated that once emitted, such particles would only remain airborne in the atmosphere for a few days.

Wood told the San Francisco Chronicle simulations project that if 15% of Earth's marine clouds were artificially brightened, the globe might cool by approximately one degree.

According to the New York Times, CAARE researchers used their CARI device last week aboard the USS Hornet, firing particles and testing to make sure their cloud-brightening machine would function as desired outside a lab.

The Chronicle indicated that the next step of research will entail actually attempting to meddle with the clouds off the coast of California.

The concerns

"Every year that we have new records of climate change, and record temperatures, heat waves, it's driving the field to look at more alternatives," Wood told the Times. "Even ones that may have once been relatively extreme."

Contrary to Woods' intimation, many still regard marine cloud brightening to be an extreme and potentially fruitless initiative.

In addition to noting that MCB and other forms of solar radiation modification may ultimately accomplish little in the way of lowering global temperatures, the Congressional Research Service noted in a May 2023 report that some "modeling studies of [marine cloud brightening] have suggested it could alter precipitation patterns at global and regional levels."

A 2017 study published in Nature Communications indicated that aerosols released just in the northern hemisphere could possibly even lead to an increase in droughts, hurricanes, and storms elsewhere.

Late last month, a group of 31 top atmospheric scientists noted in a paper published in Science Advances that there is presently a "lack of a clear understanding of the relationship between aerosol and meteorological conditions and liquid water and cloud fraction adjustments and their timescales."

"Regional changes in temperature and rainfall could influence heat stress, water availability, crop productivity and the ability of communities to thrive," added the scientists who emphasized the need to evaluate the viability and risks of MCB.

The widespread concerns over the feasibility and fallout of such experiments has prompted the Biden administration to distance itself from the CAARE experiment, even though President Joe Biden signed Congress' Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022, providing funding for a "scientific assessment of solar and other rapid climate interventions in the context of near-term climate risks and hazards," including aerosol injection.

The White House told the Times in a statement, "The U.S. government is not involved in the Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) experiment taking place in Alameda, CA, or anywhere else."

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Environmentalists’Life-Threatening Sulfur Launch Exposes Carbon Indulgences As A Scam

A climate startup that launched sulfur to block the sun follows ‘environmental, social, and governance’ investing to its logical conclusion and could significantly damage our planet.

Rogue geoengineering outfit claims to be dumping unmonitored particles into stratosphere to change the weather



A rogue solar geoengineering start-up claims to have begun using balloons to launch reflective clouds into the stratosphere for the purpose of changing the weather.

Although the initiative may be presently little more than a publicity stunt, Luke Iseman, cofounder and CEO of Make Sunsets, told the MIT Technology Review that he hopes this provocative cloud-seeding effort will help launch what may be a lucrative "cooling" industry.

What are the details?

According to Make Sunsets' website, "we need to start cooling the world immediately."

While Iseman condoned property destruction in a blog entry as one way to bring about this end, the method he has personally resolved to use is geoengineering, specifically by way of "albedo enhancement" or albedo modification (i.e., the reflection of sunlight).

David Keith's research group at Harvard University defined albedo modification as a solar geoengineering method designed to "reflect a small fraction of incoming sunlight back to space in order to attenuate anthropogenic changes in temperature and other climate variables."

Spraying sulfate aerosols and other reflective substances (e.g., calcium carbonate particles, aluminum dioxide, or diamonds) into the atmosphere, around 12-16 miles above the Earth, can allegedly accomplish what volcanic eruptions have otherwise achieved in the way of partially blocking sunlight and temporarily cooling global mean temperatures.

MIT Technology Review reported that Make Sunsets appears to have launched balloons containing reflective particulates from a site in Mexico.

The company's website claims the test flights deployed less than 10 grams of "clouds" each, suggesting that "one gram of sulfur delivered to 20km altitude creates as much radiative forcing as one ton of CO2 released in the atmosphere does in a year."

Iseman claims that his artificial clouds, not composed of vapor but rather of fine particles, will remain in the sky anywhere from six months to three years, depending on the altitude and latitude at which they are released.

It is not clear where Make Sunsets' test balloons went or what effect they might have had, because Iseman did not equip them with monitoring apparatuses.

These experiments were potentially deleterious feats of "geoengineering activism" carried out "basically" to "confirm that [he] could do it."

While Iseman's team did not seek or acquire any approvals from government authorities ahead of the tests, the Biden administration recently expressed interest in developing technologies that could help partially block out the sun.

TheBlaze previously reported that President Joe Biden signed Congress' "Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022" on March 15, providing funding for a five-year research plan to be coordinated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The OTSP will come up with a "scientific assessment of solar and other rapid climate interventions in the context of near-term climate risks and hazards."

Stratospheric aerosol injection, the method employed by Make Sunsets, is among the various solar geoengineering interventions the OTSP will study.

While government agencies proceed with these studies, Iseman intends to continue with his tests "as quickly and safely as we can," convinced they are not "morally wrong."

The real dangers of fake clouds

Like Iseman, Chris Sacca, founder of the climate tech investment fund Lowercarbon Capital, is convinced that "sunlight reflection has the potential to safeguard the livelihoods of billions of people."

Others in the field do not share their confidence.

Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, told the MIT Technology Review, "The current state of science is not good enough … to either reject, or to accept, let alone implement" these geoengineering efforts.

"To go ahead with implementation at this stage is a very bad idea," said Pasztor.

Noah Diffenbaugh, professor at Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, told KNTV that this type of geoengineering is "a relatively cheap, relatively effective potential intervention at the global scale that’s likely to have a lot of side effects."

A 2017 study published in Nature Communications indicated that while SAI might be used to produce "preferential local climate responses ... for the geoengineering parties, there could be potentially devastating impacts (eg, Sahelian drought) in other regions."

Dr. Anthony Jones, lead author on the study, told Carbon Brief, "If solar geoengineering were to be deployed solely in the northern hemisphere, then the resultant changes would reduce precipitation in the Sahel, and other regions such as India, and reduce the number of storms in the North Atlantic basin."

"To put it short, northern hemisphere solar geoengineering would be good for the southeast US, the Caribbean, and Mexico in terms of dissipating storms, but be very bad for the Sahel. In contrast, solar geoengineering in the south would enhance precipitation in the Sahel, but would also enhance the number of storms in the North Atlantic," added Jones.

Lili Fuhr of the Center for International Environmental Law suggested that SAI initiatives amount to a "gigantic gamble with the systems that sustain life on Earth. It could be weaponized, it could be misused – imagine if, say, India and Pakistan disagreed over one of them doing this."

A 2016 study published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics suggested that "for stratospheric particle injection schemes, stratospheric ozone depletion would be a major concern ... especially in the near future."

The Guardian reported that 380 scientists signed an open letter demanding a global non-use agreement for solar radiation management, citing a number of the above concerns and others.

One of the chief concerns raised in the letter is that the "risks of solar geoengineering are poorly understood and can never be fully known. Impacts will vary across regions, and there are uncertainties about the effects on weather patterns, agriculture, and the provision of basic needs of food and water."

The scientists demanded that experiments like Iseman's be banned internationally.

Making a cool profit

Although Make Sunsets' efforts down the road could possibly help generate cyclones, hurricanes, and droughts further afield, it might not be a total loss for Iseman and the two venture capital funds backing him. Iseman's company is already selling "cooling credits."

For $10, Make Sunsets promises to "release at least 1 gram of our clouds into the stratosphere for you, offsetting the warming effect of 1 ton of carbon for one year."

This promise stands despite the founder's admission that there was no equipment on the balloons he launched to verify the efficacy of the tests. The company also noted on its site that "there's a lot of uncertainty and assumptions here" concerning its claims about offsets and utility.

Edward Parson, an expert in environmental law at the University of California Los Angeles, told the Guardian that Iseman's claim that his company could restore the world to its pre-industrial temperature norms is "absurd."