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Introduction

 My first encounter with clandestine geoengineering was unexpected, and unsettling. It happened ten years ago, when I awoke at 3 AM on a warm October night. Suddenly wide-awake, I decided to get up and stand outside in the moonlight that was flooding the house. I stood outside by our garage, looked up and beheld a gargantuan murky cloud. An unaccountable, horizon-to-horizon corrugated, scabrous serpent-cloud, inert and staggeringly immense, hung motionless aloft for as long as I stared at it. Illumined by grisly moonlight its sheer extraordinariness — its inexplicable garishness — created a visceral impression that has never left me. A year earlier an acquaintance had attempted to speak to me about aerial chemical spraying, chemtrails he called them, and I’d held up my hands reflexively, palms out, signaling him to cease and desist. I didn’t want to hear about it. Standing in the moonlight I thought of that moment, reflecting, ‘My god, he was right.’

It has taken me ten years to gird myself to undertake an exploration of that dark apparition, an investigation that uncorks as many questions as it answers. Science historian James R. Fleming has made it incontestably clear that geoengineering is a creature birthed and brought to life inside the military.[1] The reason so many questions about geoengineering remain difficult to answer is that military research and operations are typically classified, usually highly classified, and thus impenetrable to public view. The highly militarized national security state and its permanent war economy [2] that evolved ever since the end of World War II guards its secrets with ferocity and guile, and for the most part the public, certainly the US public and its corporate media, stays dutifully silent when confronted with claims that an issue cannot be broached due to reasons of “national security.” This situation of complicit silence, enforced at the outset of the Cold War, has persisted despite the end of that war in 1989-1991, and has been magnified since September 11, 2001.

One of the most puzzling questions I’ve stumbled on is what I think of as the Jekyll-and-Hyde conundrum: it turns out geoengineers are a diverse but divided community, a profession that exhibits dissociative identity disorder — a split personality. Mr. Hyde, the “dark side” personality, sometimes referred to as a “weaponeer,” has worked out of public sight for the military for many decades to weaponize the weather, the climate, and other Earth systems such as the ionosphere. One of Mr. Hyde’s foremost redoubts has been the University of California Berkeley’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), co-founded in 1952 by the father of the H-bomb, Edward Teller.[3]Mr. Hyde’s legacy stretches back seven decades; his work since the Vietnam War has continued out of public sight (and will do so for as long as the militarized national security state holds our allegiance). Dr. Jekyll, on the other hand, represents by and large the open and typically optimistic public, civilian face of the geoengineering community, the “good” scientist, oriented to solving the “climate problem.” Ever since 2006 when Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen aired a new version of an old Hydean scheme to spray sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere to cool down the climate,[4] the good scientist (and geoengineer) has been scrupulously oriented to help humanity without regard to national identity. But not all the players are so oriented, as we shall learn.

Crutzen was the first to break the ranks of the climate scientists and initiate an open discussion about geoengineering, dragging the once-arcane notion out of obscurity and irrevocably linking climate scientists to climate engineers. The geoengineers emerged into the light as climate engineers and the term “geoengineering” entered daily public discourse for the first time. Located in universities, prestigious research institutes, and erstwhile nuclear weapons labs, the geoengineers have an even more obscure brotherhood inside the military, whose legacy is unacknowledged.

One purpose of this essay is therefore perhaps unavoidably therapeutic: I wish to help promote an integration of two scientific communities, or more precisely, to persuade the cheery Dr. Jekyll to recognize his alter ego, the dark and mysterious Mr. Hyde, and to do so within plain sight of the entire global climate-change science and activist community. Why? Because until this self-reckoning happens no good will come of Dr. Jekyll’s supposedly benign schemes to deal with Earth’s climate. The clever and above all determined Mr. Hyde, an inveterate national security warrior, will use such schemes for his own anachronistic national security ends. He always has. And history demonstrates these ends do not servethe benefit of all humanity.

Unlike partisan warfare, climate change involves the entirety of the human family, the entire biosphere, the fate of a living totality, planet Earth. A partisan identity inevitably will subvert geoengineering efforts that impinge on a whole-Earth system like the climate.

The road to Paris and beyond

A wall of silence surrounds the subject of geoengineering past and present. But now geoengineering future bubbles brightly in our ears. The disconnection between a fecund and little understood past and its presumed, shortly-to-be-hatched progeny is an unsettling one. Neither parent nor child seems to recognize each other.

The Royal Society begins its definition of geoengineering as “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment” and by itself this serves as a historically valid definition. The Society adds: “to counteract anthropogenic climate change,” which serves to make the new but more narrow definition of geoengineering as climate engineering, or in its most current iteration, “climate intervention.”[5]Broad or narrow, for nearly three-quarters of a century geoengineering has been conducted for reasons that have little to do with the mandate to ameliorate climate change and much to do with war, and secondly with commerce.

This odd paradox shadows the world climate negotiations due to resume in the Paris suburb of Le Bourget on November 30 to achieve, after over 20 years of trying, a legally binding universal agreement to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and limit the rise of global temperatures to 2° C above pre-industrial levels. According to John Shepherd, chair of the Royal Society’s 2009 geoengineering study that featured ‘Plan B’, “We are already staring 1.6° C in the face.”[6]  Six years later climate scientists warn Greenland and Antarctic ice melt is already so rapid that the 2° C increase limit is no longer reliable and that a “sea level rise of several meters” could render such coastal cities as London, New York, and Shanghai uninhabitable during this century, unless immediate countervailing global action is taken.[7]

We have been prepped to bite the new geoengineering bait for some time now. In 1997 Edward Teller popularized the idea of a “sunscreen” for planet Earth in the Wall Street Journal.[8]Two years later Dr. Teller’s protégé Ken Caldeira co-wrote the paper that “crunched the numbers” to show that indeed a stratospheric aerosol sunscreen could work to counteract the effects of sharply increasing CO2.[9]Ever since geoengineers and their funders[10]have inched their way toward a rough consensus, hedged about with caveats, that solar radiation management (SRM) — placing reflective aerosols in the stratosphere — is the best, and least expensive, solution currently available to “the climate problem.”

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Earlier this year geoengineer Caldeira proclaimed, “There is a chance climate change will prove truly catastrophic, with people suffering and dying in many parts of the world….The only thing politicianscan do to cause Earth’s climate to cool within their terms in officeis to reflect more of the sun’s warming rays back into space” [emphasis added].[11]Though the movement toward consensus about climate intervention is not without serious debate and strenuous dissension, the repetitivewarnings of imminent climate disasters sways the dialogue ineluctably toward eventual “intervention.” And this is likely the outcome the US and its NATO allies wish for, and perhaps as well the Russians, as it would serve as a perfect cover for what many believe are ongoing, classified geoengineering activities.

The path of climate intervention is well worn. It reveals tracks old as well as fresh, footprints we are ill advised to ignore, despite the complicit silence of corporate media, academia, and of course, governments and their military establishments.

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And so the road to Paris is paved with intentions both good (Jeykllian) and above all unknown (Hydean), and obscured by a long history of denial, prevarication, and collective inattention.

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The dawn of the Age of Geoengineering: The Sorcerer’s apprentices at play 

During WW II “a revolution took place, one that was initiated and sustained not so much by the military as by science,” according to historian Kathleen Williams. Immediately after the war, “Military stimulation of science and technology became institutionalized” and the “Cold War ensured the military funding of science would continue…changing both academic science and the military.”[12]Sixty years ago the writer Robert Jungk noted: “In the universities, once homes of free speech throughout the world, the spirit of secrecy took possession.”[13]The Department of Defense (DoD) alone has accounted for “nearly 70 percent of all government funds directed towards research and development” of basic scientific knowledge.[14]The 350-year tradition of independent, individual investigation of nature and matter gave way to the era of ‘Big Science’, meaning scientific research with big, government-funded budgets. Big Science unequivocally included weather and climate modification, as well as other forms of geoengineering, all of which have been invariably cloaked in secrecy. And “secrecy always lowers the standard of environmental accountability”[15]— not to mention democratic accountability.

Two protégés of Irving Langmuir, a Nobel laureate chemist, Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut, launched the era of modern weather modification — what Langmuir himself termed “Control of Weather” from the outset of their work together at a General Electric research lab — in late 1946 and early 1947 when they demonstrated that storm clouds could be made to yield snow or rain with small quantities of either dry ice (frozen CO2) or silver iodide applied to clouds.[16]Within short months the US military had hired all three scientists and launched its first weather-modification research effort, code-named Project Cirrus. Between 1947 and 1952 the classified program conducted approximately 250 cloud and weather experiments, including a misbegotten attempt to steer a hurricane off Georgia in mid-October 1947.[17]Given the testimony of many high officials over many decades, exemplified by one Air Force general’s famous remark — “If you control the weather, you can control the world”[18]— it is unsurprising weather and climate modification research for military purposes has continued up to the present moment.

Meantime humanity’s first modern geoengineering experiment had already begun. Starting in the summer of 1945 with the Trinity Test, nuclear experiments continued vigorously well beyond the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty. The tests released huge amounts of radionuclides, such as strontium-90 and cesium-137, into the planet’s atmosphere and into the flesh (and bones) of living beings everywhere on Earth. Atmospheric tests did not end until 1980, and their total fallout has been estimated equivalent to 40,000 Hiroshima-size bomb detonations, releasing hundreds of megatons of environmentally destructive force into the biosphere. In aggregate, over 1,900 nuclear tests (over half by the US) have inflicted untold and publically unquantified damage to Earth’s biosphere. Estimates of the resultant incidence of cancer and cancer mortality run into the millions and hundreds of millions.[19]

Rocket technology and nuclear technology developed in tandem in the US and USSR after WW II, fertilized by the exodus of German scientists to both countries. The US and the Soviet Union were the only nations to conduct high-altitude, upper atmosphere nuclear tests, starting in April 1958 and concluding late in 1962.  Physicist James Van Allen discovered Earth’s radiation belts in Earth’s magnetic field on the basis of data gathered by the US’s first satellites — Explorer 1 and Explorer 3 in January and March 1958. But before Van Allen could finish his scientific work, the US military made the decision to conduct what it called “the biggest scientific experiment ever undertaken.”[20]

Code-named Project Argus, the navy and air force detonated three fission bombs 100 to 325 miles over a remote sector of the South Atlantic Ocean and two hydrogen bombs 100 miles over the Pacific, near Johnston Island. Project Argus’ “research” explosions were kept classified for the next quarter century. The explosions took place in Earth’s ionosphere, defined in 1950 by the Institute of Radio Engineers as “the part of the earth’s upper atmosphere where ions and electrons are present in quantities sufficient to affect the propagation of radio waves.”[21]  The Argus detonations wiped out radio communication over a large swath of the southern Atlantic Ocean for several days.[22]

Earth’s atmosphere consists of several layers, each significantly related to the other, from the lowest layer, the troposphere, where the air we breathe and the weather we experience occurs, to the stratosphere, which also holds the ozone layer, to the mesosphere, the thermosphere, and finally the exosphere, which shades into outer space. The ionosphere stretches from the mesosphere through the thermosphere and into the lower reaches of the exosphere, from 31 to 621 miles above Earth. It was this region that drew the military’s fiery curiosity: how could it be influenced, what were its secrets, and powers?

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Its appetite for knowledge whetted by Argus, the military exploded a much larger bomb in July 1962 as part of Project Starfish, a 1.4 megaton device — the largest ever detonated above Earth’s atmosphere. Starfish “disrupted the Van Allen belts and created an artificial magnetic belt and ‘an aurora tropicalis’ visible as far away as New Zealand, Jamaica, and Brazil,” according to James Fleming, who added, “[t]hree Soviet high-altitude explosions that year had similar effects.”[23]Rosalie Bertell, an expert on the weaponization of geophysical systems such as the ionosphere, wrote: “According to American scientists, it could take many hundreds of years for the Van Allen Belts to restabilize at their normal levels.”[24]

These experiments were inspired by Nicholas Christofilos, a physicist who worked under Edward Teller at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in order to find out if the military could create an artificial Van Allen beltto better conduct radio and other electromagnetic communication by injecting charged particles from nuclear explosions into space.[25]Argus and Starfish vindicated Christofilos’ theories. Later in 1962 Teller could boast, “We know how we can modify the ionosphere. We have already done it.”[26]Future experimentation with Earth’s protective ionosphere and magnetosphere layers was expanded from the 1960s to the 1980s using electromagnetic wave technology, and was ramped up in the 1990s with the US Navy and Air Force’s construction of the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program’s (HAARP) ionospheric-heater “research” station in Gakona, Alaska.[27]

At the same time Argus was being wound down Project West Ford, an experiment carried out by MIT on behalf of the military in 1961 and 1963, attempted “to create a telecommunications shield in the ionosphere” by placing 350 billion “copper needles” in orbit to facilitate global radio communication.[28]This shield was placed 3,000 kilometers in the ionosphere to form “a belt 10 km (6 miles) thick and 40 km (25 miles) wide” in order to “counteract the interference to radio communication caused by solar wind.”[29]West Ford caused a howl of protest from astronomers around the world, and was allowed to atrophy, leaving the needles suspended until they fell to Earth over ensuing years (some are estimated to still be in the ionosphere). As James Fleming wryly noted, “This is indeed geoengineering.”[30]

Captain Howard T. Orville, the first chairman of the US Advisory Committee on Weather Control established in 1953, was convinced that after Sputnik 1 and 2 the Soviets had a weapon whose potential “could even be more disastrous than nuclear warfare”[31]and became an advocate for researching the use of weather control as a weapon. Orville is quoted asserting “that the Dept. of Defense was studying ‘ways to manipulate the charges of earth and sky and so affect the weather’ by means of ‘an electronic beam to ionize or de-ionize the atmosphere over a given area.’”[32]The active concern of military planners then as now was who will “control the earth’s thermometers”[33]— “[w]ho is going to decide?”[34]All these questions and statements were made over half a century ago, a very long time in the scope of modern science.

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After Argus, Starfish, and West Ford, research on the ionosphere proceeded apace with construction of a worldwide network of radio frequency transmitters, and later ionospheric heaters, in the US, Canada, Norway, Greenland, Australia, Puerto Rico, and Peru, in partnership with what the National Academy of Sciences calls the “ionospheric modification (IM) community”[35]of major research universities and institutes working in cooperation with the Pentagon. Research also continued in the Soviet Union. “Atmospheric modification experiments,” Dr. Bertell informs us, “can be categorized as either chemical [aerosols] or wave [electromagnetic] related.”[36]The ionosphere is an “active electrical shield protecting the planet from the constant bombardment of high-energy particles from space” and probing it with radio waves has led to the understanding that a “strong electrical coupling exists between the ionosphere and the lower atmosphere.”[37]IM community research has led to many discoveries useful to the military for global over-the-horizon communications, earth-penetrating tomography (also useful to fossil-fuel and other mining companies), surveillance, and weather or climate modification, among other purposes.[38]

By 1996 the US Air Force (USAF) could speak of “owning the weather in 2025” and proclaim the goal of “complete dominance of global communications and counterspace [sic] control.”[39]A year after the USAF published its 5-volume Air Force 2025report trumpeting godlike power over the atmosphere and space, Secretary of Defense William Cohen projected US military capabilities onto the nation’s then putative but non-existent enemies: “Others are engaging…in an eco-type terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, [and] volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves….It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our efforts” to develop these kinds of weapons.[40]  As if to reinforce this claim, two years later a retired French military officer, Marc Filterman, wrote in the Intelligence Newsletterthat the US and Soviet Union had “mastered the know-how needed to unleash sudden climate changes (hurricanes, drought) in the 1980s.”[41]Filterman also noted it was possible to use “weather war” weapons “to trigger atmospheric disturbances by using Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) radar.”[42]

Ever since the early days of Project Cirrus weather modification has been both weaponized and commercialized. Since the early 1970s over sixty countries[43]and most US western states have used weather modification technology to manipulate their weather, programs that almost certainly have had and continue to have an as yet unspecified effect on the planet’s overall climate. One region’s or one country’s drought becomes another’s flood, and one’s rain, a neighbor’s drought. The artificial weather seamlessly becomes the artificial climate. Thousands of regional weather modifications made over the past 65 years, such as the UK’s Project Cumulus (1949–1955)[44]and the US’s Project Skywater (1961–1988),[45]have collectively impacted the world’s meteorological and hydrological cycles in ways that remain largely unclarifiedand ignored by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and IPCC climate modelers.

ENMOD, geoengineering, and secrecy 

When the US was bogged down in Indochina, it launched its highly secret weather modification program Operation Popeye to “make mud, not war” over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This program was executed from 1967 to 1972 without the knowledge of either the governments of South Vietnam, Laos, or Thailand (from where the spray planes took off and landed, at Udon Air Base) or of the US ambassadors to those countries.[46]Not only pivotal ambassadors but top Congressional committee chairs as well as “many usually well-informed members of the Nixon administration had been kept in the dark,” according to New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh.[47]When syndicated columnist Jack Anderson reported on Operation Popeye in March 1971, Congress demanded disclosure in a series of hearings that lasted for two years as the military refused to divulge information. Quoting a well-informed official, Hersh explained, “This kind of thing [secret weather-modification warfare] was a bomb…and Henry [Kissinger] restricted information about it to those who had to know.”[48]Although Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara reportedly ordered a halt to the operation, according to Hersh’s sources “it went underground—into the dark”[49]and continued there until Hersh exposed it in his July 1972 New York Times reports.

Covert means covert. Few, very few of the many people needed and cleared to implement a classified military operation know the entirety of ‘the big picture’ even as it unfolds, except on a strict, hierarchical need-to-know basis. The military and intelligence communities work according to principles of  “compartmentalization” (operations, including research, are broken into segments, none of whose participants understand the details of the whole enterprise) and “need-to-know,” that together function as “containment,” so that the overall project or program’s intent is masked or opaque to all but a very few decision makers.[50]Ambassadors and powerful senators are among those high up in the hierarchy who may be foreclosed. As former insider Daniel Ellsberg admitted: “Once I was inside the government, my awareness of how easily and pervasively Congress, the public, and journalists were fooled and misled contributed to a lack of respect” for them.[51]

The anthropologist Hugh Gusterson observed: “Secrecy is a means by which power constructs itself as power, and the knowledge of secrets is a perquisite of power.”[52]

Pervasive secrecy and democracy cannot coexist. The experiment that began with the inauguration of George Washington as the first US president in 1789 will be undone when secrecy reaches a threshold beyond which the mores of empire eclipse those of a democratic republic. In a report submitted to the Congress after the Vietnam War, the highly influential UCLA-based geoscientist Gordon J. F. MacDonald argued that the key lesson of that war was not the failure of Operation Popeye to alter its outcome but “that one can conduct covert operations using a new technology in a democracy without the knowledge of the people”[emphasis added].[53]This lesson has been bred into the bones of the military establishments of the Western democracies ever since Vietnam.

In reaction to the massive use of weather modification, defoliants, and herbicides such as Agent Orange, and other toxic aerosols in Vietnam — directly killing one to 3.5 million Vietnamese, maiming tens of thousands still being born with birth defects, and disrupting the ecology of 40 percent of their land, “reducing dense jungles and mangrove forests to barren wastelands”[54]— the world community created the 1978 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD). Rattled by the uproar caused by Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the subsequent US Senate hearings, the US ratified ENMOD in 1979.

However, rather than halting weather and other environmental modification programs, the treaty had the effect of causing them to be more rigorously disguised as “research” or sequestered inside the unscrutinized budgets of “‘black’ or secret operations,”[55]and thus outside either the purview of ENMOD or US citizens and their institutions of representation. After ENMOD the military-science-industrial research complex went further underground.[56]Two decades later, 9-11 drove it yet deeper underground with the advent of a new, corrosive ethos of perpetual war[57]that again made the words ‘national security’ an unchallengeable barrier to independent inquiry, a supreme state prerogative.

Gordon MacDonald had warned that ENMOD or environmental warfare “could damage an adversary without revealing its [the aggressor’s] intent” and that “applying such techniques [of war] under cover of nature’s irregularities presents a disquieting prospect.”[58]MacDonald added that a secretly waged weather war “need never be declared or even known by the affected populations. It could go on for years with only the country’s [aggressor’s] security forces involved being aware of it,” as the complex randomness of the weather makes accusations plausibly deniable.[59]

Is global warming good or bad? 

 In the 1950s and early 1960s climate change geoengineering proposals in both the US and Soviet Union were oriented toward causing global warming for the benefit of human activity, with the melting of the Arctic then the glittering jewel on the geoengineer’s horizon, and a prospect devoutly hoped for by Soviet geoengineers and planners.[60](One fifth of Russia’s territory lies north of the Arctic Circle and includes an Arctic-frontier coastline thousands of miles long.) This original or early orientation of geoscientists has been quietly maintained for decades despite the ever-growing consensus about global warming, and has been funded by the big energy companies who have been wedged inside the great climate change debate since its inception.[61]In a March 25, 2012 letter to The Economist, Matt Andersson, an aerospace executive and intelligence industry consultant, bluntly stated: “The public and press are largely uninformed (and misled) as to the actual Geo-engineering operations being conducted by military and certain cooperating commercial interests to effectively ‘melt’ the arctic for naval navigation and resource extraction.”[62]

Four years before Andersson wrote his blunt letter, Shell (the US subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell), spent over $2 billion for leases in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s North Slope. Undeterred by the fate of its abortive attempt to drill there in the summer of 2012, Shell’s massive refurbished Transocean Polar Pioneer drilling rig was being towed northward in June 2015, “pushing into the Arctic as it faces intense economic pressure to replace its diminishing oil resources.”[63]The company’s CFO noted the Arctic’s fossil fuels potential was “by far the largest unexplored and undeveloped [fossil] liquids resource on Earth.”[64]In 2008 the US Geological Survey’s Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal claimed that 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves were located above the Arctic Circle.[65]That same year Dimitry Medvedev, then Russia’s president, addressed his nation’s Security Council: “Our biggest task now is to turn the Arctic into Russia’s [resource] base for the twenty-first century.”[66]Is the otherwise perplexing discord between NATO and Russia about access to natural resources — viewed through a zero-sum-game lens? A US Space Command document, Vision for 2020, asserts: “Space power…will be increasingly leveraged to close the ever-widening gap between diminishing resources and increasing military commitments.”[67]By “commitments” one assumes the US Space Command refers to the US/NATO ring of bases that stretch from Norway and Estonia in the West to South Korea and Japan in the East to guarantee access to those militarily strategic resources, above all energy resources, essential to the military’s survival.[68]

The world’s fossil fuel industry recognizes that world demand for oil and gas is outstripping production, and that fossil fuels are likely to continue to supply 80 percent of humanity’s energy needs as late as 2040, despite the recent exponential growth of renewables.[69]Such recognition is especially acute inside the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels, the Pentagon, and by extension the militaries of the world’s great and emergent powers. Without oil to fuel their ships, tanks, planes, missiles, and satellite-launchers, the world’s militaries will radically shrink into paltry images of their former selves.

“It’s no coincidence that our [NATO’s] strategic interest in the Arctic warms with the climate,” a US Admiral said during a NATO workshop on security in the Arctic.[70]At the same time Shell’s Polar Pioneer inched its way northward, the US Navy, which has been planning for ice-free Arctic operations since 2001, was launching the largest war game exercises in Alaskan Arctic waters in over 30 years of conducting them, a new five-year program of war readiness called Northern Edge. By its own admission, the naval exercises “may result in damage [that] could take years to decades from which to recover” but as journalist Dahr Jamail reports, “they are preparing for what’s coming in the Arctic as the race for what’s left” of the world’s oil and gas.[71]

Despite the 21stcentury Arctic black-gold rush, in the wake of ENMOD a scientific consensus had already begun to form around the need to counteract the buildup of anthropogenic CO2. By the early 1980s new geoengineering proposals were being made in science journals to bring about, for example, “desired changes in Earth albedo [reflectivity] through judicious introduction of small particles [that] can probably be accomplished at acceptable cost through the use of modified combustors on high-flying aircraft.”[72]Such geoengineering proposals generated a host of new technology patents, in particular for aerosol spray techniques as well as specifications for aerosol particles suitable for geoengineering sprays. These were the unclassified patents open to public scrutiny.[73]We do not know what classified geoengineering patents the military holds, only that it presumably holds many pertinent to what it conceives to be national security interests.

Climate change has been a national security concern for at least a quarter century,[74]roughly speaking ever since the problem of global warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases was dramatically publicized in the hot summer of 1988 when NASA’s James Hansen testified before Congress to warn humanity faced an uncertain future if steps to reduce CO2were not taken soon. According to the physicist and science historian Spencer Weart, in that same year “the International Panel on Global Climate Change (IPCC) was designed by the Reagan administration, primarily as a replacement for the self-appointed committees of scientists” that “the administration thought were unduly alarmist. The IPCC was designed so that it can make a statement only by the unanimous consent of all the scientific representatives of all the world’s governments….a recipe for conservatism, if not paralysis.”[75]In hindsight it would appear the omniscient hands of the fossil fuels industry and its martial cohort were at work at the very outset of the great climate debate.

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Three years after Hansen’s salvo the National Academy of Science (NAS) published its signal study Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, which stated that “Despite the great uncertainties, greenhouse warming is a potential threat sufficient to justify action now” and that research should be undertaken to learn more about “the potential of geoengineering options to offset global warming and their possible side-effects.”[76]Some observers believe this particular NAS study and the massive 944-page similarly titled technical study co-sponsored and published by NAS a year later in 1992 effectively launched a new wave of climate engineering experiments.[77]These coincided almost exactly with US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul D Wolfowitz’s first articulation of the post-Soviet US military policy of what later came to be known as “full spectrum dominance,” leaked in March 1992 to TheNew York Times.[78]

Further hint of a new military research agenda was betokened in 1990 and 1991 when the US Air Force (USAF) Academy offered its underclassmen chemistry courses using spiral-bound textbooks or manuals with the name “Chemtrails” printed on their front covers. [79] Coincidentally at this time two chemists filed one of the most famous of the many unclassified geoengineering patents, “Stratospheric Welsbach Seeding for the Reduction of Global Warming.” The 1991 patent, now owned by Raytheon, one of the world’s premiere weapons and weather information companies, is of particular interest because it calls for “dispersing tiny particles of a material within the [greenhouse] gases’ layer, the particle material characterized by wavelength-dependent emissivity or reflectivity.”[80]In other words the mix of particles sprayed would behave exactly opposite to the greenhouse gases, both reflecting incoming sunlight back into space during the day and permitting Earth’s radiated heat to escape back into space at night. The patent specifies Welsbach materials, as well as “Welsbach-like materials” such as “the oxides of metals which have high emissivity” (aluminum oxide and thorium are notably cited) and which “may be seeded by dispersal from seeding aircraft…at an altitude on the order of 10 kilometers.”[81]

As if on cue, in June 1991 Earth conducted a geoengineering experiment of her own, as Earth is wont to do every decade or so, one that would later be described as a prime example of “stratospheric aerosol geoengineering” or what the geoengineers now refer to as “the Pinatubo Option.”[82]According to the US Geological Survey, the Philippine island of Luzon’s Mt. Pinatubo ejected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, more than 1 cubic mile of material that rose in an ash cloud 22 miles into the air and caused global temperatures to drop from 1991 to 1993 by about 1° F (0.5° C).[83]Geoengineers ever since have looked to the 1991 Pinatubo explosion as their inspirational lodestar, incontrovertible proof that stratospheric aerosols can cool the planet abruptly.

But only for one or two years, or as long as the ejected aerosols stay aloft.

Strategic aerosol geoengineering (SAG) aka solar radiation management (SRM) aka chemtrails

As noted, the term “chemtrails” originated with DoD in 1990. It was picked up later in the decade and adopted by concerned citizens who had begun to post thousands of photographs and videos on the Internet,[84]recording new “persistent” aerosol trails in the skies not seen up to this time (or rarely seen outside theaters of war). Many of these citizens were alarmed by the health effects the new aerosols were having, suspecting they were linked to sudden spates of mysterious illnesses, as reported by independent journalists from 1999 onward, in North America,[85]Europe,[86]Australia and New Zealand.[87]These reports, published in independent local newspapers such as Columbus Alive and nonprofit magazines such as the Earth Island Journal, contained eyewitness rumors of a new order in the heavens above.

The reports were based on not only ordinary citizens’ sightings but on the testimonies of insiders, such as an airline mechanic[88]and later an airline manager who confirmed the existence of the CIA’s Project Cloverleaf to “allow commercial airlines to assist [the military] in releasing these chemicals into the atmosphere.”[89]The reports also referenced taped testimonies of a senior US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) official and a Canadian international airport environmental manager,[90]as well as an unrecorded interview with a USAF scientist at the Wright-Patterson Air Base in Ohio who explained the different reasons for barium and aluminum aerosol spraying.[91]The USAF scientist stated that aluminum oxide was used “to create an artificial sunscreen to reflect solar radiation back into space to alleviate global warming” and that “barium may be sprayed in a similar manner for the purpose of ‘high-tech 3-D radar imaging’…[and] used as a ‘wire’ to shoot an electromagnetic beam through to take 3-D images of the ground far over the horizon.”[92]The FAA official confirmed that air traffic controllers [ATCs] at the major airports of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Washington, DC, and elsewhere throughout the country told him they “were being ordered to route airliners beneath formations of Air Force tanker planes spraying something that regularly clouds their [the ATC’s] screens.”[93]

During this early period of what the USAF calls “aerial obscuration” Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio introduced the Space Preservation Act of 2001 (HR 2977), which sought a permanent ban on the weaponizing of outer space with “Plasma, electromagnetics, sonic or ultrasonic weapons [and] laser weapons systems.” It also explicitly outlawed “chemtrails.”[94]Asked why he would introduce a bill outlawing chemtrails when the government itself denied their existence and explained them as a “hoax,” Kucinch answered: “The truth is there’s an entire program in the Department of Defense…that’s developing these weapons.”[95](He was later quoted saying, “Chemtrails are real.”) Though it still remains in the Congressional Record, HR 2977 was supplanted by HR 3616, eviscerating the original bill, with chemtrails and other space-based weapons no longer mentioned and therefore not prohibited under federal law.[96]

The pioneering journalists who covered the early chemtrails story from 1999 to 2005 also reported that individual citizens collected post-spray rainwater samples and had them tested by independent laboratories in several countries throughout the Western world. These tests showed elevated levels of aluminum and barium most frequently, but also many other toxic elements such as strontium, thorium, copper, titanium, arsenic, lithium, boron, iron, sodium, calcium, lead, selenium, magnesium, chromium, and cadmium, among others as well as strange gels, polymers, and a variety of microorganisms. Post-spray rainwater tests have been conducted throughout the world, most commonly in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.[97]

Aerosolized aluminum, leached by rainwater into a chemically mobile state, is toxic to biota and may be linked to boreal forest disease and mortality — including mortality due to forest fires — in North America, Scandinavia, and Russia.[98]Aluminum, in particular, is a known human health toxin — a neurotoxin associated with such exponentially occurring neurological diseases as Alzheimer’s and autism — and unless toxic aerosol spraying is assumed, its notably high presence as a chemically mobile element in rainwater remains puzzling (as well as untested by university-based scientists or government agencies).[99]

According to a reporter for the Las Vegas Tribune who covered the many anecdotal reports of clogged emergency rooms around the country in 2005, “Severe headaches, nosebleeds, shortness of breath, joint pain and a dry hacking cough ‘that never leaves’ are being reported by countless Americans jamming Emergency Rooms from coast to coast…doctors and nurses across the U.S. report hospital wards filled to overflowing with bronchitis, pneumonia, and acute asthma admissions at up to twice-normal winter rates.”[100] Long-lasting flu-like symptoms without fevers were common. Long before this report, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut wrote the Environmental Protection (EPA) Administrator on March 5, 1999 regarding his constituents’ “concerns about the possible release of toxic chemical substances from jet contrails,” noting  “recent outbreaks of flu-like symptoms and other sicknesses…that may possibly be linked to jet fuel exhaust fumes.”[101]The senator also noted similar reports of toxic spraying in 41 other states. A response from the EPA was not forthcoming.

Complaints like these induced DoD and all other government agencies, universities, and corporate media to ridicule the term chemtrails as a “hoax” perpetrated by “conspiracy theorists.”[102]Various community and citizen groups’ appeals for official explanation were met by silence or ridicule; or if the protest was not stood down but persisted, it was termed a matter of “no significance”; with yet more persistence, it yielded a reply like, “due to military exercises whose purpose is unknown”; and finally, it was rejected as a subject that could not be discussed, “due to national security.”[103]

Whose conspiracy?

Most people, when confronted with the idea of clandestine geoengineering, find the idea psychologically incomprehensible. If shown reliable photographic evidence or real-life visual evidence, they will proclaim the idea impossible if only on the basis of its secrecy: such a massive operation, fulfilled by thousands of human beings along a strict chain of command, could not possibly be kept secret! This is a psychological response, blind to history. Some 130,000 US, Canadian, and British scientists, administrators, military, and political figures were involved in the Manhattan Project. It was kept secret for years. Leonard Cole documented the US Army’s covert tests using biological and chemical agents on unwitting urban civilian populations in the 1950s and 1960s. These tests were kept secret for years and even decades. Conducted on the ground or from ships, in subways and otherwise in public view, the tests elicited scant interest among the populations being tested with clouds of bacteria and chemicals — an indifference, or lack of suspicion, that certainly made the Army’s job easier.[104]

Daniel Ellsberg, who had a top-secret clearance for many years, insists that “the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public….The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import…can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders” [emphasis added].[105]

Power that does not exercise control over language rides a precarious horse, especially in the age of mass communication. The CIA appropriated the venerable word conspiracy and created the terms ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ in a 1967 dispatch secured by the New York Times in 1976 under the Freedom of Information Act.[106]Written in response to mounting criticism of the Warren Commission and marked “PSYCH,” the dispatch worried that published criticisms “tend…to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society” as well as “the whole reputation of the American government.”[107]The CIA document recommends to editors and politicians alike, that when confronted with criticism of the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman theory, they counterclaim, “Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested [i.e., involving the government] would be impossible to conceal.”[108]Using this myth over the ensuing decades the state has managed to hoodwink most of the people, most of the time.

Political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith masterfully deconstructs the meaning of this dispatch for the US, whose “Founders worried most about the potential for power to become concentrated in the executive because of real or pretended threats to national security.”[109]In the context of national security the “Founders do not appear to have anticipated the mobilization of political officials and insiders as a unified force” that is “becoming a sort of super-faction, a transcendent function with interests that are higher, more general, and…more important” than the interests of the rest of the citizenry.[110]This ruling faction naturally has a special interest in the rigorous application of the conspiracy theorist label, “a powerful smear that,” in de-Haven-Smith’s words, “preempts public discourse, reinforces rather than resolves disagreements, and undermines popular vigilance against abuses of power.”[111]

In the decades since the Vietnam War the state’s and corporate media’s appropriation of the term “conspiracy theorist” has cast a pall over the search for truth about the exercise of power, and especially the state’s covert exercise of its military, intelligence, and technological prowess. This has profoundly colored the search for answers about the military’s ongoing geoengineering activities because secret operations are classified, hence unprovable by standard criteria, and thus remain invisible to the public. Accusations that cannot be verified because of classified information can be safely dismissed with plausible denial. The doctrine of plausible deniability was specifically adopted by the US government at the outset of the Cold War in 1948: “‘covert operations’ are understood to be all activities…so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.”[112]

This information cul-de-sac created by the post-WWII US national-security state was further compounded by DoD’s overt policy of telling outright lies. Science journalist Bill Sweetman, citing a Pentagon manual, tells us “the Department of Defense explicitly authorizes the dissemination of misleading information in order to protect classified programs.”[113] According to Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, “Once we know that the DoD practices this kind of deception, it becomes harder to discern what’s for real and what is not.”[114]This is an understatement, as far as ascertaining responsibility goes. Lacking incontrovertible proof of wrongdoing, plausible denial will always serve the perpetrator’s need for cover.

In the climate of fear and extreme dissimulation that followed in the wake of 9-11, reporters and activists who claimed there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, no yellowcake, were discredited and effectively silenced by the government’s and the complicit press’s claims they were “conspiracy theorists.” By projecting their own complicity onto their critics and enemies (conflating the two in the process), US and UK power elites disguised their own intentions and actions. The destruction of nations that followed the “coalition of the willing,” gruesome immolations of whole societies and peoples, was the first casualty of the official conspiracy, the one that denied the truth of the unofficial conspiracy that no casus belli existed. There are of course two sides to this linguistic coin of the realm: the side of power that uses its potent “conspiracy theorist” pejorative to ensure such “theorists” are shunned, and the obverse side comprised of the mass of citizens whose credulous silence confirms the term’s premises whenever it’s applied to noncompliant activists and reporters.

In this way environmental organizations, for example, have been persuaded to avoid rhetorical contamination that would compromise their funding and to remain safely silent about geoengineering, thus steering clear of one of the world’s major environmental problems. After a decade of close study Dane Wigington, one of the most prominent anti-geoengineering activists, believes weather modification and other geoengineering operations past and present are “likely the single greatest factor in climate disruption and making the overall climate worse,”[115]a possibility unexamined not only by climate scientists, but also by the world’s best-funded environmental groups — despite the fact that climate change is an issue of supreme importance to both communities.

The words of Malcolm Muggeridge, written over half a century ago during the onset of the Vietnam War, sum up where we stand today: “In the eyes of posterity it will inevitably seem that…the vast clandestine apparatus we built up to prove our enemies’ resources and intentions only served in the end to confuse our own purposes; that practice of deceiving others for the good of the state led infallibly to our deceiving ourselves, and that the vast army of Intelligence personnel built up to execute these purposes were soon caught up in the web of their own sick fantasies, with disastrous consequences to them and us.”[116]

As the world approaches Paris toward yearend, the atmosphere of mistrust between officialdom and unruly “ignorant” citizens presents a thoroughly unwholesome situation. Unless the parties confront the truth of their shared secret past, what can Paris beget but more mayhem, likely in the form of officially sanctioned, overt geoengineering that will then further disguise the covert geoengineering that many now believe plagues the world? With so much unknown, undisclosed, and unacknowledged about current geoengineering activities entangled in the complexity of the planetary geophysical system — the climate — how can a democratic process of law and regulation be established? How can trust between elites, activists, and ordinary citizens be forged?

According to a 2011 sample survey of US, Canadian, and British people 16-17 percent of respondents gave some credence to the chemtrail conspiracy theory.[117]That suggests on the order of 70,000,000 people in these three countries alone are wondering about what is really going on in the skies above them. No high official has stepped up to reassure these people in a credible, meaningful way. Social scientist Rose Cairns, in a recent paper for the UK’s Climate Geoengineering Governance research project, comments on the striking absence of social scientific research into an arguably significant social phenomenon. She deconstructs the impasse between the two sides, pointing to “the unstable boundary between the conspiratorial and the normal”[118]and reminds us “we are living in a ‘climate of fear about our future climate,’” [emphasis added].[119]Such beliefs as the chemtrail conspiracy “reflect not so much a lack of science as a lack of trust”[120]in “the increasingly secretive nature of government actions ‘behind closed doors.’”[121]She adds that the issue of trust “is likely to be perennially problematic, were a programme of solar geoengineering to go ahead.”[122]

Cracks in the wall

 Public unrest with official stonewalling about geoengineering is growing. Various European Green parties, including Sweden’s, Spain’s, and Cyprus’, have broken the environmental movement’s silence. The Cyprus Green Party required its government to test air, rainwater, and soil for heavy metals and other signs of geoengineering that neighboring Greek scientists have observed in their soils (elevated levels of barium and aluminum).[123]When the government failed to do the tests to the Green Party’s satisfaction, the party vowed to conduct a public education campaign and join forces with other EU Green parties to seek answers from officials.[124]In 2013 a conference was held at the European Parliament under the rubric “Beyond Theories of Weather Modification — Civil Society against Geo-engineering,” convened under the aegis of the European Green and Liberal parties. The conference, according to Christof Lehmann of nsnbc, spoke of an “acute lack of democratic instruments within the EU system” among other “stumbling blocks for progress…[on] geo-engineering and weather modification.”[125]The EU conference conveners resolved to conduct ambitious public education campaigns.

In 2013 a Canadian MP submitted a petition to the House of Commons stating, “high altitude spraying has been observed occurring throughout Canada for many years and continues to this day” and “has been carried out without the knowledge or consent of the People of Canada.”[126]Some 3,500 Canadian citizens signed the petition. In February 2015 two Rhode Island legislators introduced “The Geoengineering Act of 2015” to the Rhode Island General Assembly. The act listed many possible effects of “climate remediation…that is in the experimental stages,” and warned that allowing “aluminum oxide particles…or other compounds used in geoengineering schemes, to eventually fall from the stratosphere into the troposphere and ‘rain out’ onto the land and ocean” is an undue hazard that “should be strictly regulated by the state.”[127]On the West Coast activists, attorneys, environmental corporate executives, and other professionals are in the discovery stage of a class action lawsuit against the state of California for not disclosing public health threats brought to the attention of the relevant state regulatory agencies without result. The organizers of this possibly precedent-setting initiative believe “a class action lawsuit is the quickest and most cost effective way to get geoengineering stopped.”[128]

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