Geoengineering ‘Plan B’ to Spray Particles in the Sky to Cool Earth

Matt Agorist January 27, 2020 – Free Thought Project

It was reported this month that the top climate change scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has received $4 million in funding from Congress along with permission to study two highly controversial geoengineering methods in an attempt to cool the Earth. According to Science Magazine, David Fahey, director of the Chemical Sciences Division of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, told his staff last week that the federal government is ready to examine the science behind “geoengineering”—or what he dubbed a “Plan B” for climate change.

Over the past several years, the “conspiracy theory” of spraying particles into the sky to cool the Earth has become more mainstream. It came to a head last year when CNBC put out a video titled How Bill Gates-Funded Solar Geoengineering Could Help End Climate Change. 

The video is nothing short of an infomercial for chemtrails. It is truly bizarre how this subject has moved from the fringes of conspiracy circles and into the mainstream and no one is even batting an eye. Now that Bill Gates has endorsed and funded it, the world is suddenly open to the idea of attempting to modify the planet’s weather by spraying chemicals into the atmosphere to block out the sun.

Now, the government is throwing their hat into the mix as well. This “Plan B” approach is two pronged, according to NOAA.

One is to inject sulfur dioxide or a similar aerosol into the stratosphere to help shade the Earth from more intense sunlight. It is patterned after a natural solution: volcanic eruptions, which have been found to cool the Earth by emitting huge clouds of sulfur dioxide.

The second approach would use an aerosol of sea salt particles to improve the ability of low-lying clouds over the ocean to act as shade.

The Free Thought Project has reported on the first method before when Harvard scientists began talking about doing it. Harvard scientists announced that they will attempt to replicate the climate-cooling effect of volcanic eruptions with a world-first solar geoengineering experiment, last year. The university announced in July of 2019 that it has created an external advisory panel to examine the potential ethical, environmental and geopolitical impacts of this geoengineering project, which has been developed by the university’s researchers.

Known as the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), the experiment will spray calcium carbonate particles high above the earth to mimic the effects of volcanic ash blocking out the sun to produce a cooling effect. This appears to be the same as NOAA’s “Plan B.”

Naturally, there are many critics of geoengineering.

The idea of geoengineering the planet has become so controversial that the government will soon be referring to it by a different name in a likely attempt to distract. Fahey recommended changing the nomenclature from geoengineering to “climate intervention,” which he described as a “more neutral word.”

This is exactly like renaming the U.S. Department of War to the Department of Defense.

As not to be too controversial, however, Fahey emphasized that this is not an approval to begin geoengineering. Rather, it is a move by the US to prepare for the possibility that it may do this one day.

“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.

This type of talk is concerning to many people, including environmental groups, who say such efforts are a dangerous distraction from addressing the only permanent solution to climate change: reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

The idea of injecting particles into the atmosphere to cool the earth also seems outright futile considering what scientists are trying to mimic—volcanic eruptions. If we look at the second largest eruption of the 20th century, Mount Pinatubo, which erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it injected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide aerosols into the stratosphere. Scientists from the USGS estimated that this 20 million tons only lowered the temperature of the planet by about 1°F (0.5°C) and this only lasted a year because the particles eventually fell to back to Earth.

While this talk of geoengineering may sound like something out of a dystopian science fiction movie, the reality is that it has long been on the table of governments and think tanks from around the world. In fact, just last November, a study published in Environmental Research Letters, talked about doing the exact same thing—geoengineering and planes spraying particulates into the atmosphere to curb global warming. Read more