July 7, 2023

Remarkably, the Biden White House has signaled its “great leap forward” into the global warming, aka climate change, hoax by endorsing a 2021 National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report calling for implementing various geoengineering schemes to block the amount of sunlight reaching Earth. The announcement came via a June 2023 report issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. That report proclaimed on page eight the following:

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The risks of inaction to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly and significantly and limit warming to 1.5° above preindustrial levels are increasingly clear. This urgency warrants additional research to evaluate the efficacy, trade-offs, or other relevant considerations of SRM [Solar Radiation Modification].

Among the schemes the Biden administration appears willing to consider [Figure 1] are stratospheric aerosol injection [SAI]; that is, injecting chemicals like sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere “to alter stratospheric heating, circulation and chemistry (including accelerating ozone depletion),” and decreasing the amount of high-altitude cirrus clouds (CCT) to increase the amount of terrestrial radiation lost to Earth at night. All these methods involve injecting chemicals into the atmosphere to “alter fluxes of both longwave (red) and shortwave (yellow) light.

Figure 1

Solar Climate Intervention Methods (Geoengineering)

Source: White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, “Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to Solar Radiation Modification,” June 2023, p. 14.

While none of these SRM climate schemes have anything to do with reducing the use of hydrocarbon fuels, climate hysterics appear to have realized that the sun, not carbon dioxide (CO2), is the thermostat that controls Earth’s temperature. The hubris of geoengineering is the presumption that we humans are capable of utilizing technology to create the perfect climate.

Image: A sunspot by NSO/NSF/AURA. CC BY 4.0.

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In the March/April 2009 issue of the Council on Foreign Relations magazine Foreign Affairs, a group of five authors led by David Victor, a professor at Stanford Law School, published an article entitled “The Geoengineering Option: A Last Resort Against Global Warming?” In the paper, Victor and his coauthors described their geoengineering strategies as “deploying systems on a planetary scale, such as launching reflective particles into the atmosphere or positioning sunshades to cool the earth.”

The article’s fundamental premise was that, by increasing the atmosphere’s reflectivity, more of the sun’s rays would reflect into space. “Increasing the reflectivity of the planet (known as the albedo) by about one percentage point could have an effect on the climate system large enough to offset the gross increase in warming that is likely over the next century as a result of a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Victors and his coauthors argued.

Another scheme involved launching sulfur particles and other reflective materials into the upper stratosphere using high-flying aircraft, naval guns, or giant balloons. Alternatively, a plan was to shoot air pollution in microscopic particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays into outer space. As a result, Earth would absorb less carbon dioxide.

One of the more bizarre of the proposed geoengineering schemes involved using 1,900 wind-powered “cloud ships” (alternatively called “albedo yachts”). The ships would sail the world’s oceans to suck up seawater and spray it out in minuscule droplets through tall funnels designed to create large white clouds.

Despite the slim chances that any of these schemes might work, Victor and his coauthors still felt geoengineering was essential to prevent climate warming. “The highly uncertain but possible disastrous side effects of geoengineering interventions are difficult to compare to the dangers of unchecked global climate change,” Victor and his team insisted. Evidently, the magic of geoengineering intrigues the Biden White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, despite the almost silly nature of the schemes.

What the Biden administration climate hysterics fail to realize is that the sun, currently in Solar Cycle 25, is rapidly approaching a new maximum that could send massive solar flares toward Earth, disrupting electronics, everything from internet operation to functioning GPS systems. Approximately every eleven years, the sun goes from a low point in solar activity, a solar minimum, to a solar maximum. The first solar cycle to be recorded occurred between 1755 and 1766.