Geoengineering technologies are the stuff of Hollywood catastrophe flicks. It seems scientists want to play God with our climate and nothing will stop them. Researchers have recommended sending out a giant glass sunshade into space to reflect light; the eruption of artificial volcanoes, or spraying of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere; dissolving mountains and putting remains in the sea; and, least dramatically, perhaps, filing the ocean with iron filings to stimulate algae blooms. Here are 4 geoengineering projects doomed to fail while they pollute our Earth.
“People are right to be revolted and alarmed,” says Matthew Watson, the head of the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (Spice) team. “That’s a good thing. It should not sound easy. If we do this, it will be the clearest indication we have failed as planetary stewards. It will be a desperate thing to do.”
Critics of geoengineering claim the government started modifying the environment years ago, through chemtrails. Critics have been mocked as conspiracy theorists, however the concern is shared by rational scientists and experts as well as many environmental activists, for reasons that stretch back to the Vietnam War.
Between 1967 and 1972, the US air force carried out “Operation Popeye”, the first use of weather as an instrument of war. Almost 3,000 flights were sent into the skies above the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where planes seeded clouds with silver iodide particles, causing storms and extending the monsoon season. “Popeye” turned the strategic pass into a bog — and appalled the international community. In 1977, the Enmod (Environmental Modification Convention) treaty outlawed weather warfare.
“The UN General Setting up must dust it down,” points out Jim Thomas of the ETC group, a company that advocates maintainable development. The action team on Disintegration, Modern technology and Concentration views any kind of technological best option to climate modification as a “harmful interruption”, taking focus away from typical CO2 decrease methods, such as replenishable energy resources. A “postponement needs to be called” on research, even in the lab, he says.
Except on that critical factor, the line between underwriters of geoengineering and those that want it prohibited is amazingly slim. While a handful of experts assume we should geoengineer or encounter catastrophe, they form a minority. Geoengineering is “the wrong answer”, states Flavor’s Matthew Watson, who blogs as the Hesitant Geoengineer.
From computer system modelling, many researchers know exactly how wrong geoengineering initiatives are. Spraying large amounts of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere would, for instance, obscure the visibility of the sun’s rays and affect all life on Earth. Rainfall patterns could also go haywire, the ozone layer could break up. Dump iron filings into the sea and you might well kill off swathes of marine life. There are far too many risks that exceed the benefits of controlling a climate which many scientists don’t even believe is a problem anymore. It’s a natural course for the Earth and all claims regarding global warming have been exaggerated for political gain.
4 GEOENGINEERING PROJECTS DOOMED TO FAIL
1. STRATOSPHERIC AEROSOLS
The Technology: Scientists are already trying to stop the sun’s rays and heat from reaching the Earth’s atmosphere by reflecting some of the sun’s rays back into space using aerosals. They’ve been called chemtrails, aerial spraying, aerosol emissions, cirrus clouds, among many other terms. The largest reports come from Canada and U.S. but it happens all over the world including countries such as France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom among many others. Thousands of planes spray chemicals, salt or other particulates into our atmosphere in an attempt to curb global warming (so they say).
How Scientists Want to Play God: The release of chemicals or particulates, like highly polluting sulfur have been discussed for almost a decade by many scientists worldwide waiting in the wings for funding. They want to add more small reflecting particles in the upper part of the atmosphere (the stratosphere which is located between 15 and 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface). The goal is that these stratospheric aerosols will be engineered to migrate to particular regions (e.g. over the arctic) or to rise above the stratosphere. A CFR geo-engineering meeting summary document from 1999 (PDF pages 12,13,14) also categorically stated that the ultimate goal under “A technology strategy for global warming” is the implementation of a global Carbon Tax. So they want to play God and tax man at the same time.
Why it Won’t Work: This is among the riskiest and most ridiculous of global warming fixes. Global weather patterns could be drastically affected. Artificial weather modification can impact all of us by reducing water supplies, changing agricultural crop production cycles, reducing crop production, and water availability. Since most experimental weather modification programs use chemicals released into the atmosphere the public could be subjected increasingly toxic or unknown substances that could adversely impact agricultural crops and trees. If we artificially change the growing seasons, our pollinators like bees and birds (many now in sharp decline across the United States), may not survive, leaving many flowers, native plants, agricultural and trees crops that are not pollinated. Native grasses, plants, trees, and agricultural losses could be devastated not only in the United States but on a worldwide basis.
2. SPACE REFLECTORS
The Technology: Scientists would assembling a giant glass sunshade in space then firing it into orbit to reflect a small proportion of the sun’s rays, according to astronomer Roger Angel.
How Scientists Want to Play God: Scientists claim a reduction of just 2 percent in sunlight reaching the Earth would make warming more manageable.
Why it Won’t Work: Asteroids, primarily. Glass discs would be vulnerable to space debris, and maintenance of a “space umbrella” requires time, expertise and money. Any attempts to control the exterior perimeter of the Earth through God-like intervention in space reflectors is an exercise in futility since any type of technology, regardless of how advanced, would never withstand the strength of even small asteroids and space debris which would essentially render these reflectors useless.
3. OCEAN FERTILIZATION
The Technology: Dropping iron filings into the ocean could theoretically generate blooms of carbon-absorbing plankton. The plankton then take in CO2 at the surface, then carry it with them as they drift to the ocean floor after death, creating “carbon sinks”.
How Scientists Want to Play God: Scientists think that they can optimally fertilize the ocean (artificially) to help restore lost/threatened ecosystems. They theoretically assume iron infusions could preferentially favor certain species and alter surface ecosystems even though they have no evidence on the overall impact since the effects are unknown.
Why it Won’t Work: Population explosions of aquatic life that disturb the food chain may impact many wildlife populations. This has already been shown to lead to an unnatural imbalance between fish, whales and jellyfish. A 2010 study showed that iron enrichment stimulates toxic diatom production in high-nitrate, low-chlorophyll areas which, the authors argue, raises “serious concerns over the net benefit and sustainability of large-scale iron fertilizations”. It takes a long time for comparatively little effect, and the impact on marine life could be devastating. Where plankton blooms in contained water sources, fish can suffocate. Fertilising the oceans would also marginally acidify them.
4. ARTIFICIAL TREES
The Technology: Advanced technology already exists to extract CO2 from the air. Klaus Lackner of the Columbia University Earth Institute has developed machinery that would replace a tree and extract 1,000 times more CO2 a day from the atmosphere than a natural tree.
How Scientists Want to Play God: Scientists think that building these artificial tree systems around the world could replace nature’s blueprint with a more advanced form of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere.
Why it Won’t Work: 1) High cost: direct air-capture measures like this would cost a minimum of $600 per tonne of CO2 removed. 2) The effects of removing 1000 times more CO2 out of the atmosphere than natural trees could have a detrimental effect on ecosystems and upset he homeostatic equilibrium of these systems which may dramatically affect the food chain.
Global Dimming
Comparing Israeli sunlight records from the 1950s with current ones, Dr Stanhill was astonished to find a large fall in solar radiation.
“There was a staggering 22% drop in the sunlight, and that really amazed me.” Intrigued, he searched records from all around the world, and found the same story almost everywhere he looked.
Sunlight was falling by 10% over the USA, nearly 30% in parts of the former Soviet Union, and even by 16% in parts of the British Isles.
Although the effect varied greatly from place to place, overall the decline amounted to one to two per cent globally every decade between the 1950s and the 1990s.
Dr Stanhill called it “global dimming”, but his research, published in 2001, met a sceptical response from other scientists.
It was only recently, when his conclusions were confirmed by Australian scientists using a completely different method to estimate solar radiation, that climate scientists at last woke up to the reality of global dimming.
This visible air pollution created by geoengineering reflects sunlight back into space, preventing it reaching the surface. But the pollution also changes the optical properties of clouds.
Because the particles seed the formation of water droplets, polluted clouds contain a larger number of droplets than unpolluted clouds.
Recent research shows that this makes them more reflective than they would otherwise be, again reflecting the Sun’s rays back into space.
Scientists are now worried that dimming, by shielding the oceans from the full power of the Sun, may be disrupting the pattern of the world’s rainfall.
There are suggestions that dimming was behind the droughts in sub-Saharan Africa which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1970s and 80s.
Others have speculated that the UN’s depopulation plan (Agenda 21) is using geoengineering as one of its most effective platforms.
There are disturbing hints the same thing may be happening today in Asia, home to half the world’s population.
“My main concern is global dimming is also having a detrimental impact on the Asian monsoon,” says Professor Veerhabhadran Ramanathan, professor of climate and atmospheric sciences at the University of California, San Diego. “We are talking about billions of people.”
The Industrial-Military Complex For Complete Weather Control Against Global Warming
HAARP is a large 180 antennae grid that projects powerful electromagnetic pulses to heat a specific point in the earth’s ionosphere. This has the effect of creating electromagnetic frequencies that can be bounced back to earth at desired locations, causing major disruption to weather and geophysical elements, even deep underground. Up to 3.6 billion watts can be generated by HAARP, heating the ionosphere to over 50 000 degrees and “lifting a 30 square kilometre area of the ionosphere, thereby changing localised pressure systems or even altering the route of jet streams.”
The Case Orange report cites evidence that Raytheon could develop the capacity to “exercise a form of complete “weather control”, a situation bearing a marked similarity to the Monsanto corporation’s stated ambition “to control the food chain.” It is noteworthy that there are currently more than 500 ‘climate ready’ genetically modified plant gene patents awaiting licensing approvals in Washington and Brussels. ‘Climate Ready’ GM seeds and plants are promised by their creators to be capable of producing a crop under both flood and drought conditions.
The human rights and environmental watchdog ‘ETC Group’ describes the atmospheric geoengineering developments as follows: “The roll-out of ‘Plan B’ (a reference to the use of geoengineering if other efforts to curtail emissions should be deemed ineffective) is being skilfully executed: Prominent high level panels sponsored by prestige groups, a spate of peer-reviewed articles in science journals and a line up of panicked politicians in northern countries, nodding nervously in agreement as scientists testify about the “need to research Plan B.”
Rady Ananda states at the end of his paper: “Case Orange ties-in a 1996 report by top military personnel in the US entitled “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” with details such as government spraying schedules, chemical orders, correct nomenclature used in airline operation manuals and calls for geoengineering by economists, to support its notion of “heavy involvement of governments at top level in climate control projects.” Ananda continues: “Owning the Weather in 2025 provides a specific time line for the use of En Mod technologies in cooperation with the Weather Modification Association, a business-government group promoting the ‘beneficial‘ (my emphasis) uses of environmental modification:
2000-2025 Use chemicals for atmospheric seeding by civilian (as well as military) aviation
2004 Create smart clouds through nanotechnology, with exponential increase from 2010
2005 Introduce carbon black dust.”
The UN Enlisted In Geoengineering Military Combat Against ClimateIn 2007, The World Meteorological Organisation (of the United Nations) published a statement that included “Guidelines for Planning of Weather Modification Activities.” This document clearly implicates the UN in plans to conduct aerosol spraying activities on a wide scale.
In a section of the Case Orange report dealing with ‘the bare necessities of geoengineering through cloud generation for the survival of the planet’ the authors state: “Our investigation team comes to the conclusion that climate control programs, controlled by the military but approved by governments, are silently implemented in order to avoid the worst case scenario they obviously do not want. The two basic instruments are temperature control through the generation of artificial clouds and manipulation of the ionosphere through ionosphere heaters.
“Both remain basically military combat systems with the option to go into the offensive if deemed necessary. However, since several ionospheric heaters are installed at various places around the globe, one can assume that there is wide cooperation between governments in order to reach climate targets by 2025: controlling the weather and the planet.”
The spraying schemes seem to be organised in a logical pattern so that the whole of Europe is covered in a 3 day period. Coloured maps of Europe indicate when each regime is to take place.
In the report’s section entitled “Recommendations”, the authors state: “Persistent chemtrails have a devastating impact on eco-systems on this planet and to quality of life in general.” The authors call for the full disclosure of the current En Mod activities to the public, as well as for all civil aviation laws to be abided by.
Moratorium On Geoengineering Activities Led NowhereIn response to policy interest in geoengineering as a means to control climate, a sub-committee of the United Nations Convention of Biodiversity proposed, in May 2010, a moratorium on geoengineering activities. This proposal was heard at the Tenth Conference of Parties to the UN Convention of Biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan but no outcome on curbing geoengineering initiatives were concluded.
The Case Orange report further states that the US permits open air testing of chemical and biological weapons, which overrides the civil law mentioned earlier in this article. The authors paraphrase the permissive law thus: “The Secretary of Defense may conduct tests and experiments involving the use of chemical and biological agents on civilian populations.” It seems that ‘national security’ concerns can be used by the President to overrule environmental and public health considerations. Is the same true in Europe?
Other significant reports include an important paper by Dr Ilya Perlingieri, entitled “The Consequences of Toxic Metals and Chemical Aerosols on Human Health”. She states: “Over the past decade, independent testing of Chemtrails around the country have shown a dangerous, extremely poisonous brew that includes: barium, nano-aluminium coated fibreglass (known as CHAFF), radioactive thorium, cadmium, chromium, nickel, dessicated blood, mould spores, yellow fungal mycotoxins, ethylene dibromide and polymer fibres. Barium can be compared to the toxicity of arsenic and is known to adversely affect the heart. Aluminium has a history of damaging brain function.”
About the Author
Marco Torres is a research specialist, writer and consumer advocate for healthy lifestyles. He holds degrees in Public Health and Environmental Science and is a professional speaker on topics such as disease prevention, environmental toxins and health policy.
