Such scenes as this one of solar radiation management in the Netherlands are often visible to the people of Chattanooga in their own skies, from Ooltewah to Tiftonia, from Apison to Soddy-Daisy. (Photo Earth-matters.nl)
A National Academy of Sciences report on sky striping, like that taking place here in Aurora, Colo., says it is a risky intervention that might not save the planet. (Photo Tina Mucci)
From plume to cloud, a persistent contrail begins its quiet work of solar radiation management, as it’s called in a major government study. (Photo Facebook)
Sky striping is being considered as a possible last-ditch future policy to “avoid the worst effects of global warming” by “dispersing chemicals such as sulfates high in the atmosphere so they could reflect sunlight,” says Techtimes.com. (Photo Facebook)
In Cleveland, Tenn., a wintry sky is a little cooler, thanks to stratospheric aerosol geoengineering that scientists say should be considered as national policy. (Photo Beth Ford)
By David Tulis
The U.S. government proposes a massive weather modification program to undo a global warming trend it blames on human activities such as industry, highways and population per se.
It is publishing two books, one proposing “solar radiation management,” the other a deindustrialization in the name of humanity. Both agendas continue a heady nation-state agenda where necessities of policy drive profound interventions. Stiffer controls on productivity and industry drive Plan A, as it’s called. A magnificent official pollution program is Plan B, one that will increase the albedo — the reflectivity of the earth — to counteract what the multiple authors call anthropogenic global warming. Or global warming caused by mankind.
Of interest is Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool the Earth by the National Academy of Sciences. If you sign in at its site, you can download the prepublication version of the book at no charge. Or ask me and I can email Climate Intervention as an attachment for your personal use (12 megabytes is the size).
Graying out the skies
The authors and their “intelligence community” backers espouse launching a program to blanket the earth with dull gray clouds to deflect energy and heat from the sun. But their paper provides enough qualification and warnings about prospective dangers as to be “nuanced,” as The Associated Press calls it. In 2009 report, NBC asked the right question, “Willing to give up blue skies for a climate fix?”
The program discussed in veiled is largely in effect already, affecting local economy in Chattanooga (as I have reported) and giving us cause to further withdraw consent from the American state and any gratitude we might once have expressed to its use of power.
The book contains concessions about the dangers to humankind of such an intervention, viewed as national policy at least since 1965 (p. 23). It makes admissions about the prospect of weather modification being a new cause of war, famine, floods and mega-storms. It leaves unaddressed several areas, which appear covered with a curtain, behind which one might sort out the conflict between current weather control practice over Chattanooga and the purported need for chemical-dumping jet fleets to cool the planet with a glittering sky shield. Behind the curtain is the mystery of the existing SAG and SRM program in military jurisdiction and in secret, and the mechanism that will justify to the public starting a massive chemtrail program.
Among the major gaps is its lack of concern for human health among those people who would breathe the fallout from the program. The material used or proposed for the reflective cloud is overlooked. Climate intervention is the term for the large-scale program in view. Weather modification is the term for localized adjustments in weather.
In the latter context, the paper offers this point as regards the agents: “Various glaciogenic (for cold clouds) and hygroscopic (for warm clouds) seeding agents have been tried, including silver iodide, lead iodide, aluminum oxide, barium, soot, frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice), common salt, and water sprays. In the United States, silver iodide, which produces small particles that closely resemble ice crystals, is the commonly used agent for cold clouds” (p. 201)
Aluminum appears one other time, three pages later, in reference to electrical storm intervention using “thin strips of aluminum foil or ‘chaff.’” But aluminium figures in many stratospheric aerosol geoengineering patents and may be the primary dispersed agent. Federal law has no objection to aluminum as pollution, according to Bob Colby of the Chattanooga/Hamilton County Air Pollution Control Bureau in an interview.
Already, resistance among public
The report deals with claims of an existing sky striping program in an appendix, “Lessons from Public Reactions to Weather Modification Activities.” The authors claim sky stripes are mere water vapor. They include in their summary of chemtrail activists’ worries a true usage. “The history of weather modification — especially its military applications during the Vietnam war — has led some skeptical individuals to believe that contrails are visible signs of some nefarious plot. This skepticism has led to the notion of ‘chemtrails’ — a widely publicized conspiracy theory *** . Supporters of the chemtrail conspiracy believe that some, perhaps all the contrails left by aircraft are really chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes by a government agency for purposes undisclosed to the general public. They have speculated that the purpose of these releases may be for weather modification, climate intervention through solar radiation management or Earth radiation management, psychological manipulation, human population control, or biological or chemical warfare. Further, they hold contrails responsible for a wide range of respiratory illnesses and other health problems.” (Italics added.) The accounting of the suspicions by Dane Wigington and many others is largely correct.
In an infobox the paper says “Chemtrail conspiracy believers speculate that contrails are formed by deliberate chemical releases for the purposes of albedo modification, psychological manipulation, population control, weather modification, or biological or chemical warfare, and are the cause of respiratory and other illnesses.” It says these concerns are a myth and activists’ explanations of sky striping “debunked. *** [Sky stripes] are simply normal water-based condensation trails from the exhausts of the engines of high-flying aircraft.”
Damage to human health overlooked
Other than citing concerns such as mine for the human organism (in local economy), the paper gives slight attention to damage to human health, mentioning that detail in passing. “Unfortunately, today’s aerosols emissions create large health and environmental problems,” we learn. “Thus, it is important for society to know whether it is possible to alter Earth’s albedo by much greater amounts while being sure that the effort will do a large amount of good and only a small amount of harm” (p. 31). Skin cancer would increase if the aerosol sky dome alters sunlight and increases UV-B light (p. 58).
The human health gaps in the report are widely shared by writers, scholars and scientists writing about the paper in the week after its release. Ted Parson, a UCLA law professor, writing at Legal Planet, talks about the risks of sky striping but only in the sense that a program may or may not cool the planet. He says nothing about torts, mass torts, state as criminal, liability of state actors, liability of contractors or reimbursement for those on the ground sickened by inhaling or ingesting the pollution.
Friends of the Earth opposes a mass chemtrailing program not because of human health, but because it diverts the public from the goal of deindustrialization, the “need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions, lower our consumption levels and rapidly transition to renewable energy.” While it overlooks human health, its strenuous objection to a mass chemtrailing program indeed points to perils.
The side effects of geoengineering interventions are unknown and untested. In order to have any noticeable impact on global temperatures, geoengineering projects would have to be deployed on a massive, global scale. These “experiments” would not only take action in the absence of scientific consensus, hence violating the precautionary principle, but could also easily have unintended consequences due to mechanical failure, human error, inadequate understanding of ecosystems, biodiversity and the Earth’s climate, unforeseen natural phenomena, irreversibility or funding interruptions.
These experiments also violate the 2010 moratorium established by the 193 countries who are parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity due to uncertainty around geoengineering’s environmental, social, cultural, and economic risks. The UN Environmental Modification Treaty has prohibited the hostile uses of environmental modification since 1976.
Only the few wealthy nations, elite citizens and corporations with immense funding and technology at their disposal could conduct geoengineering experiments. One country’s experiments, therefore, could have devastating effects on other countries and the global climate system.
Geoengineering conflicts with sustainable and just solutions to the climate crisis. Real climate justice requires dealing with root causes of climate change, not launching risky, unproven and unjust schemes. Friends of the Earth supports the current moratorium agreed upon through the Convention on Biological Diversity and would condemn any proposals to move geoengineering towards real world experimentation.
The group is statist and progressive in its orientation, and shares in the illusion that no one knows anything yet about climate intervention as it apparently hasn’t been tried. But its analysis about a projected program to gray out the sky is fair warning for Chattanoogans and those living elsewhere.
What sky striping means for us
The sky striping program as proposed promises to be malevolent in effects on the human condition and on personal individual health. That the report overlooks this consideration, that environmentalists overlook this condition says a great deal about whom you should consider your friends and protectors. Local economy and its ideas are suspicious of centralized systems and government intervention of any sort. The “good people” don’t know when to stop. It’s time to divest national, and invest local. Sell your shares in their government; invest your shares in local.
This graphic from Der Speigel in Germany suggests how the mass chemtrailing program would work.
Sources: “Geoengineering: Unjust, unproven and risky,” news release, Friends of the Earth, Feb. 11, 2015 http://www.foe.org/news/news-releases/2015-02-geoengineering-unjust-unproven-and-risky
You can download the book from the National Academy of Sciences here. http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/public-release-event-climate-intervention-reports/
A green group is amassing links to stories about the chemtrail paper in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Slate and other establishment and the environmental outlets here. http://dcgeoconsortium.org/2015/02/10/media-coverage-of-nas-climate-intervention-reports/
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