Welcome to Our Geoengineering Age!
In case you missed the recent memo, the US government is officially funding the study of geoengineering.
This "news" story exploded across the web over the past two weeks - reinforcing the official OGA narrative - human-powered 'greenhouse gas' emissions are dangerously warming the planet, and geoengineering may be our 'best hope' for a planetary 'cool down.'"
Vermont skies over Quechee Gorge - Saturday, February 15th around noon. Photo credit: Andrew McClymont. We received Saturday 2/15/2020 reports of geoengineered skies from all over our Green Mountains.
Here is a screen shot of the top 6 searches for this story on DuckDuckGo, with dozens of other links "below the fold."
This so-called "backup plan" for geoengineering to save us from "global warming" will "now receive $4 million in funding," according to David Fahey, director of the Chemical Sciences Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory.
Any alert global citizen keeping an eye on the sky is, of course, well aware that the US government is not only funding geoengineering, but is actively engaged in the practice of geoengineering, and has been for years.
Thousands of pages of public records, hundreds of interviews and eyewitness accounts, and dozens of patents make it abundantly clear that the US government has been pursuing "weather and climate modification" for decades. For detailed environmental history, geopolitical analysis, and and the emerging science behind geoengineering's impacts, visit our pages here at our OGA web site. In the meantime...
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Via Climate Wire, E&E News first reported that Fahey told his staff that the U.S. government is ready to study two types of geoengineering.
Geoengineering Type #1: "Solar Radiation Management"
"Solar radiation management, a type of geoengineering that involves spraying aerosols into the atmosphere in the hopes of reflecting sunlight and cooling the planet. This type of geoengineering is extremely controversial and previous studies have linked the technology to potentially dangerous outcomes for various parts of the planet."
Geoengineering Type #2: "Ship Tracks"
Using aerosols to create artificial, low-lying clouds over the ocean. “This technique is borrowed from “ship tracks”—or long clouds left by the passage of ocean freighters that are seen by satellites as reflective pathways. They could be widened by injections of vapor from seawater by specialized ships to create shading effects,” E&E reports.
Here are additional details from this article, exploring "experts" concern about "side effects," and the CIA's use of geoengineering as a weapon of war.
The concerns surrounding geoengineering are widely known to anyone following the research. Claims that geoengineering could be employed without significantly altering the planet or without making things worse were rebuffed by a number of experts.
Alan Robock, a climate and aerosols expert at Rutgers University who previously conducted research for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has said that researchers claiming that there will be no significant effect do not take into account the reality that geoengineering may have additional side effects, like warming certain parts of the atmosphere, changing atmospheric circulation, or affecting the ozone layer.
“I do not agree that ’no area will be significantly worse off under a solar geo-engineering scenario’,” Robock has said. “Worse as compared to what? If we rapidly begin mitigation now, that is rapidly reduce our CO2 emissions to zero by switching our power to wind and solar, we will be much better off than a business-as-usual future, or one with geoengineering.”
Interestingly, Robock has previously stated that he believes the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) may already be using geoengineering techniques as a weapon of war. In 2015, while speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, California, Robock stated he was phoned by two men claiming to be from the CIA, asking whether or not it was possible for hostile governments to use geoengineering, or mass manipulation of the weather, against the United States.
The public and scientific community should examine all of the available evidence which currently shows geoengineering might lead to potential loss of blue skies, lower crop yields, and increases in land and water temperature. According to a recent study published in Nature, geoengineering could lead to lower crop yields. This study is not the first to draw attention to the dangers of beginning geoengineering programs. According to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, if geoengineering programs were started and then suddenly halted, the planet could see an immediate rise in temperatures, particularly over land.
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Here's a longer portion of the $4 million story courtesy of Climate Wire and reprinted in Science magazine - notice the players, the money, and the "controversial" nature of geoengineering, code for 'we're doing it now, but we'd like to keep clandestine just a bit longer.'
But in a sign of how controversial the topic is, Fahey recommended changing the nomenclature from geoengineering to "climate intervention," which he described as a "more neutral word."
Fahey also emphasized this is not an approval to move forward with geoengineering. Rather, it's to prepare the U.S. government for a political decision if the world fails to adequately limit the rise of global warming.
"Geoengineering is this tangled ball of issues and science is only one of them," he said.
"One of the things I'm interested in doing is let's separate the science out," he added. The idea is to give policymakers a clear view of how a hurry-up bid to save the planet would work.
Even then, the results likely wouldn't be immediate. Fahey showed slides and graphics that noted that a Plan B might take until the next century to complete the cooling.
Still, better science might "buy time" to improve the efforts, he said.
There would be drawbacks, he noted, after being asked by a researcher whether injections of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere might reduce seafood by acidifying the oceans.
"When you put aerosols up into the atmosphere, it does a lot of things," Fahey, a physicist, responded. "That opens up this whole menu of things that you'd have to worry about."
He said other aerosols such as calcite or titania "might have less impact, but nobody knows. We want to look at them in the laboratory."
Several smaller nations have complained that the use of aircraft to inject aerosols into the atmosphere might alter the weather or destroy the ozone layer, which protects humans from some of the more harmful radiation from sunlight.
Fahey suggested that a scientific approach would require solving a list of unknowns, including tests to find out what's in the stratosphere today and how to get aerosols to spread there homogeneously. Another likely area of research: unintended consequences.
"We have to use atmospheric observations to find out what we're doing," he added.
At the moment, the government has no planned experiments and NOAA's authority does not extend into the stratosphere. But there is a bill in Congress called the "Climate Intervention Research Act" that would broaden its jurisdiction.
"There could be more than $100 million attached to this, I'm told," he explained.
Until now, neither Congress nor the administration has ventured to tackle the Plan B issue.
The closest thing to testing it is a Harvard University-sponsored project called the "Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment" (SCoPEx).
It proposes a small-scale test using a propeller-driven balloon. It would ascend to a height of 12 miles over New Mexico and then release less than 2.2 pounds of calcium carbonate.
The idea is to create a tubular area in the sky—about six-tenths of a mile long and 109 yards in diameter—through which the sensor-packed balloon could slowly move back and forth, mixing the air and monitoring the solar-reflecting abilities of the scattered materials. It also would track the impact of the treated area on the surrounding atmosphere.
When SCoPEx would happen remains unknown.
Harvard, sensitive to the question of how to govern such experiments, has appointed an outside advisory committee to help oversee and evaluate the test. According to David Keith, a Harvard physicist who is one of the leaders of the project, the outside committee would help determine if and when the experiment should move forward.
Funding for the experiment will come from Harvard research funds and a list of outside contributors to a fund controlled by Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program. Compared with U.S. space, defense and climate-related experiments, the cost of the effort would be minuscule.
Keith could not be reached for comment about Fahey's announcement, but Fahey said NOAA supports the Harvard stratospheric test and has contributed an instrument to help it measure the dispersion of particles.
"We're going to have to give up some things to go into Plan B. That's why we would be motivated to try designer aerosols, but we may not have time," Fahey explained.
"That's what Harvard wants to do. It goes back to the question of which path you want to be on," he added, noting the difference between a possible international decision to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or being late and forced to implement a Plan B to stop runaway climate change.
"I don't want to be on the late path, but the question is which paths are going to be open to us," he said. "I think nobody can play out all the chess moves on this issue. It is so complicated."
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Oh, what a tangled web we weave," famously observed the Bard, "When first we practice to deceive."
Keep your eyes on our skies!
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