What are they doing to our skies? Part Two
JONATHON RILEY
The Telegraph’s bland report last week that ‘Experiments to dim the Sun will be approved within weeks’ seems finally to have woken the public up to the biggest modern insanity and human hubris of all. Until last week’s headline, the topic has not generated the alarm it should. Although ongoing for more than ten years, the public have stayed asleep as to the history, government backing, ubiquity and potential devastating impact of these reckless and unregulated projects. Last year I asked Lt Gen Jonathon Riley to investigate the subject for TCW and we are repeating his ‘What are they doing to our skies’ series of four articles this week to prompt more awareness of the full picture of and investment in this unprecedented interference with nature. Today’s article, first published on June 3, 2024, gives further details of a range of government backed weather modification and solar radiation management projects around the world.
INCESSANT rain. It has hardly stopped this year, and the effects on our farming and food production are devastating. Farmers’ Weekly warned in March that further wet weather heralded a farming catastrophe, and further wet weather there has been, through spring and into summer. The £50million earmarked by the Environment Department (Defra) for rain-affected farmers will do nothing to stop crop failure, food shortage and potential food security crisis.
It is quite possible this level of rainfall, also manifested in severe flooding across Europe, is part of the natural cycle. But it should remind us of the perils of playing with our skies. There is evidence that rain-making operations in 1952 caused the storm that nearly wiped out the Devon village of Lynmouth, killing 35.
Today we are in unknown territory about the effect on weather patterns that may be the unintended by-product of now routine weather modification or other geo-engineering. One form of this is cloud-seeding such as in Saudi Arabia and Dubai, where recent unprecedented rain led to flooding and deaths. Another even more risky intervention is solar radiation management (SRM), which involves spraying our skies and other techniques to reflect back or block out sun. We are told these latter are for theoretical modelling only, but active experiments have been reported, as I detailed in Part One.
SRM has been under consideration in this country as well as the US for well over a decade; the justification given is that such interventions may become necessary ‘to minimise or reverse anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change’. The 2010 Commons Science and Technology Committee report on the Regulation of Geoengineering under the heading ‘weather modification techniques’ (Page 15, paragraph 24) provides some insight. Weather modifications such as cloud seeding ‘which affect the weather for no longer than a season’, they advised, did not fall within the definition of geoengineering and therefore, by implication, were in no need of further regulation beyond the 1977 ‘hostile use’ convention referred to in the report. A policy paper titled ‘UK government’s view on greenhouse gas removal technologies and solar radiation management’ published ten years later in 2020 discusses the injection of harmful materials into the atmosphere. It states the absolute need for greenhouse gas removal, though it has no plans to deploy SRM, advises of research it has commissioned into the effects of SRM on climate – a ‘Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project’.
Most people are in blissful ignorance of any such research or planning, unaware of what could be done to them, or already is being done, or perhaps simply do not care. But they really should.
What is clear is that such deliberate intervention in the climate system is becoming progressively less taboo with each year of emissions control failure. Over a decade ago the US government, with several of its science agencies, asked the National Academy of Sciences to provide advice on this subject. Its 2015 report, Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth, said it was a last-ditch response to climate change but that ‘the likelihood of eventually needing to resort to these efforts grows with every year of inaction on emissions control’.
The full and terrible risks of SRM, such as of the projects conceived at Stanford and Harvard, described in Part One, are set out in this paper, and underline the importance of finding out what is already going on in our skies; how it could be affecting us.
There is no question about the use and prevalence of cloud seeding across the globe. Since its inception in the 1940s, it has evolved beyond a potential solution to occasional droughts or as a tool for firefighting into other more routine – government and business driven – geo-engineering catalysts for weather modification. Several technologies (and chemicals) are used – ground based and from aircraft as described in this Daily Mail article, typically spraying salt or silver iodide particles around which ice forms in the upper atmosphere to create rain. Cloud-seeding technology in all it various forms has been providing business opportunities from the 1990s onwards as these US Patent applications, here and here, show. This patent for example for coating a salt crystal with titanium dioxide to enhance the condensation process received provision approval for the Gulf in 2017. The size of the market across five major regions North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Rest of the World, projected through to 2032, is set out by Fortune Business Insights. Government and military as well as commercial use is indicated.
The prevalence, the inherent recklessness and the covertness are all problematic. A review in earth.org in April puts it bluntly: we simply do not know the impact of cloud seeding, whether increased precipitation in one area can inadvertently trigger a drought elsewhere, or cause excessive rain leading to flooding. This review also warns that the most commonly used chemical – silver iodide – raises serious ecological concerns regarding its toxicity for terrestrial and aquatic life. Yet countries as disparate at the Russian Federation, Thailand, the US, China and Australia are routinely using such means for repressing heatwaves or wildfires, drought mitigation, to clear fogs, minimise hail or to induce snow in ski resorts.
More countries than ever, reportedly now including France and Spain, are either already using or ‘exploring’ such methods as, they believe, ‘accelerating climate change deepens concerns over water security’.
A question for written answer E-007937-15 put to the European Commission by Ramon Tremosa, a Catalonian MEP and economics professor at the University of Barcelona, suggests that such programmes may have been in operation in Spain as early as 2015. It asserts that four employees of Spain’s Meteorological Agency ‘confessed’ to Spain ‘being sprayed nationwide by aircraft spreading lead dioxide, silver iodide and diatomite through the atmosphere with the objective of keeping rain away and allowing temperatures to rise, ‘creating a summer climate for tourism while benefiting corporations in the agricultural sector’.
It also alleged this was causing severe instances of the stormy weather phenomenon known in Spanish as gota fría; that it was causing respiratory diseases in local populations due to the inhalation of the lead dioxide and other toxic compounds; and that the aircraft were taking off from San Javier military airport in Murcia. Tremosa asked: ‘What is the Commission’s view of this situation? Does the Commission think that there are commercial reasons for these actions by governments, in particular, relating to the interests of food sector corporations, energy companies and the pharmaceutical and medical industries?’ The Commission’s short answer to all was No.
Do we accept such denials and inquire no further? A peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science Internationalpublished in 2017 alleged that coal fly ash (resulting from the burning of coal) had been sprayed into the troposphere since the late 1990s. It further contended that there had been a deliberate effort to deceive the public about this.
Last year a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) review on weather modification recommended far greater prior research and more rigorous monitoring of weather modification programmes, suggesting that no such regulation yet exists.
Others who have registered their concerns include Laura Kuhl, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and International Affairs at Northeastern university in Boston, US. Policy discussions about the use (and misuse) of cloud seeding are lacking, she says, though the technology is widely deployed. Others warn that weather modification and geo-engineering will increase environmental problems, not reduce them; that the reductionist science behind them is prompted by ‘hurried considerations of selling carbon credits on dubious basis, instead of making real gains in terms of environment protection’.
Once scaled up such efforts pose a serious threat to international relations as well as to the environment, as is already the case with China where weather modification is planned on a vast scale regardless of its impact on neighbouring countries.
In Part Three I will explore what we know and don’t know about government and corporate weather modification activity in the UK.
This article (What are they doing to our skies? Part Two) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Jonathon Riley
See Parts 3 and 4 Below
What are they doing to our skies? Part Three
‘CONSPIRACY theories swirl about geo-engineering but could it help save the planet?’ This was the highly emotive and manipulative heading of a recently published BBC InDepth article.
After a spring and summer of unprecedented cloud cover and rainfall, why would not an increasingly aware public wonder whether we are already suffering the consequences of solar radiation management or other geo-engineering weather modification programmes? I for one cannot remember when I last saw a clear blue sky without cloud formations intermingled with crisscrossed aircraft trails.
But any such conjecture is leapt on by the BBC and labelled as conspiracy theory. The author of the BBC article cites as ‘proof’ the twice as many mentions of geo-engineering this year on X/Twitter than over the last six months of 2023. Another interpretation might well be a rising public concern about the reckless experiments with weather modification far more harmful than the unproven man-made global warming they are claimed to mitigate.
This sudden foray by the BBC into geo-engineering looks suspiciously like a ‘covid misinformation’ style response to shut any questioning down whilst, at the same time, softening us up for this latest ‘climate control’ lunacy. ‘It sounds like the stuff of science fiction’, the author writes apparently ingenuously, ‘but the idea of reflecting solar radiation, the technical term for sunlight, is not as crazy as it might sound and sometimes happens in the natural world. During volcanic eruptions, huge amounts of ash and aerosols – tiny particles – can be transported into the high atmosphere which can then reflect solar radiation back into space.’
He then happily explains how millions of tons of sulphur dioxide, similar to a volcanic eruption, could be pumped into the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation and bring about global cooling.
This is the insane thinking behind the Gates-backed Stratospheric Perturbation Control Experiment at Harvard, a long-term Solar Radiation Management (SRM) programme which I detailed in Part One of this series. In Part Two I focused on cloud seeding – the increasingly ‘normalised’ and widespread weather modification intervention which remains unregulated despite scientists’ and environmentalists’ concerns about its ecological impacts. This part concluded with mention of China’s massive weather modification programme. The techniques by which this country managed to create rain and snow across 5.5 million square kilometres, while also suppressing hail across 580,000 square kilometres, are detailed further here. This is unknown and highly risky territory, not only for wider weather impacts but also in terms of geo-political conflict.
In this third part of this series I address two other experiments designed to bring ‘global warming’ under control before returning to our own skies. One is marine cloud brightening and the second, albedo modification. The former, now routinely used over Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, uses a seawater sprayer, rather like a marine snow machine, to generate hundreds of trillions of microscopic sea salt crystals that float into the sky to form a fog and bolster existing reflectivity. The sprayer is moved around, utilising atmospheric conditions at any given time and place.
Albedo modification also aims to reflect more sunlight back to space by enhancing earth albedo – that is, the reflectivity of its surface. Proposals and experiments span a wide range, from growing crops that reflect more light, to the clearing of forest in snow-covered areas, to covering large desert or ice areas with reflective materials, and even to whitening mountaintops and roofs with white paint. The California-based Arctic Ice Project (formerly Ice911) began experimenting with reflective silica glass as cover material more than a decade ago, conducting trials on frozen lakes in Canada and the US, the largest of which is North Meadow Lake near Utqiagvik, Alaska.
Both are promoted and justified as temporary protective measures to buy time while ‘global action is taken to stabilise temperature’, although Wired warns of an innate conflict here for environmentalists concerned that ‘such plans could prolong our addiction to fossil fuels’. Both technologies have a common goal: to increase the earth’s albedo. Yet like SRM, this makes a complete mockery of that other highly subsidised ‘green’ investment – solar power. What is the sense in covering farmland with solar panels and the pylons to transmit their alleged power output while the sunlight that will activate them is being blocked?
We may think such projects are too far away to affect our own weather, but can we assume that no such experimentation has begun here? This is the final concern of this series. What our government has been risking and is involved with, which if not actively concealing, is not bringing to public attention.
How many people were aware for example that British researchers launched a solar geo-engineering test flight back in September 2021. This experiment, the MIT Technology Review revealed last year, was largely designed to test equipment in which a high-altitude weather balloon would release ‘a few hundred grams of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere’. The Review described it ‘as a potential scientific first in the solar geo-engineering field’ which ‘took place in spite of deep concerns about the nature of the technology’.
Andrew Lockley, the independent researcher previously affiliated to University College London, ResearchGate named in the article as leading the effort, was said to have been furious that word of his project got out.
‘Leakers be damned!’ he wrote in an email to MIT Technology Review. ‘There’s a special place in hell for those who leak their colleagues’ work, tormented by ever burning sulfur,’ he went on, ‘but I have taken a vow of silence, and can only confirm that our craft ascended to the heavens, as intended. I only hope that this test plays a small part in offering mankind salvation from the hellish inferno of climate change.’
No question, then, as to where this ‘scientist’ is coming from. Elsewhere he has advocated the privatisation of such projects and for what he calls ‘philanthropic geo-engineering’.
Yet nothing is known about the real-world effect of such deliberate interventions at large scale, nor their dangerous side effects for food production and indeed for all life. Complacency ignores this and is encouraged to do so by the last Tory government’s endorsement, with the enthusiastic backing of the all-powerful Lord (Patrick) Vallance, of geo-engineering technology as a necessary ‘final’ means of mitigating (the myth of) man-made global warming.
As yet, we do not know on whose authority the Lockley experiment took place, nor whether there have been others since, nor how many. What we do know however is that the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), a secretive government agency (modelled on the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA) instigated by Dominic Cummings in 2021, has been given £800 million to play with projects ‘that lie on the edge of the possible’. One of the first will be to look for ways to ‘responsibly manage our climate and weather.’ As though that were either possible or responsible.
Dr Mark Symes, overseeing this programme, has no such worries: ‘We’re going to focus on weather – so short-term, local effects. For example, you might think about seeding clouds so that there was rain over the Atlantic and not over the land to prevent flooding in the UK. Or you might think about generating a fog over a local area to, say, shield a city during a heatwave.’ Significantly, he added ‘We have people in the UK working on weather management technologies. In some cases, they have small working devices. They are waiting for someone to take them seriously.’
So the technologies are there. What we do not know is which are already in use or how many experiments have already taken place over our skies. That some have is a certainty, and I will discuss this in the final part of this series, next week.
This article (What are they doing to our skies? Part Three) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Jonathon Riley
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What are they doing to our skies? Part Four
JONATHON RILEY
The Telegraph’s bland report last week that ‘Experiments to dim the Sun will be approved within weeks’ seems finally to have woken the public up to the biggest modern insanity and human hubris of all. Until last week’s headline, the topic has not generated the alarm it should. Although ongoing for more than ten years, the public have stayed asleep as to the history, government backing, ubiquity and potential devastating impact of these reckless and unregulated projects. Last year I asked Lt Gen Jonathon Riley to investigate the subject for TCW and we are repeating his ‘What are they doing to our skies’ series of four articles this week to prompt more awareness of the full picture of and investment in this unprecedented interference with nature. Today’s final article, first published on August 6, 2024, discusses what we already know is happening. You can read the first three parts of this report here.
WITH trust in government at an all-time low it is not surprising that concern is growing that geo-engineering may already be affecting us. Is it so unreasonable to question, as did Ian Andrew Patrick at the start of June, that the last months of exceptional floods and extreme weather across Northern Europe earlier this year were not engineered storms, whether to initiate cooling, or indeed, perversely, to ‘prove’ the climate hoax? Unless the new government here starts being open about what is going on, what it is investing in or sanctioning, questions are bound to be asked.
The international affairs think tank Chatham House is already asking them. It has called for the various weather modification projects they cite here to be reined in. They have reason. An independent geo-engineering site which monitors projects from Carbon Removal and Capture through to Solar Radiation Management and other geo-engineering approaches to weather modification and ‘cooling’ had, by 2021, identified more than 1,700 such projects around the world. Worryingly it points out that since there is no complete official record of weather and climate control projects their map is necessarily partial.
The range of just one private weather modification company’s projects worldwide – presumably acting with governmental authority as well as public and private funding – is revealed in its list of country contracts and interactive map here. Stretching from the USA to Thailand via the United Arab Emirates, the extent of its undertakings is indicative of the problem. The nearest projects to us appear to be in Spain and Turkey. This separate source indicates Spain has a history of cloud seeding which comes under the authority of the Spanish Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge. A recent Daily Mail article reports that France and Switzerland have also conducted cloud seeding. Predictably this year’s unprecedented rainfall and cloud cover over the UK is blamed by the Guardian on ‘climate change’. But how do we know it is not the result of active intervention? Can we trust our government to tell us what might be going on in our skies here – and whether deliberate engineered interventions to change the weather or climate are not the cause? How, after the covid lie, can we have any confidence on them to open this up for critical debate – let alone to call for a moratorium on all such projects, experimental or routine?
In spite of the BBC’s dismissal of such concerns, increasing numbers of people are asking if clear blue skies are a thing of the past and what the criss-cross patterns they see signify. Is there activity going on and at what height? What in fact is the relationship between what we see and experience in our weather and geo-engineering interventions? Does anyone know? And before BBC Verify turns on me I would like to remind Marianna Spring that the Chatham House article referred to above reports that Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself has observed that cloud brightening risks depleting the planet’s ozone layer and affects regional weather patterns, ‘while doing nothing to reduce ocean acidification; moreover that, in the case of cloud-seeding, there is uncertainty about adverse impacts on neighbouring countries, some of which are already coping with food or water security’.
The problems associated with geo-engineering are not hypothetical.
Journalist Lewis Brackpool recently submitted seven comprehensive Freedom of Information requests to various governmental departments, seeking details about a number of geo-engineering projects he has identified in the UK, including research initiatives, publications, funding sources, public awareness and consent, involvement of airliners, stakeholder engagement, and more. He has yet to receive satisfactory answers.
Of particular interest is an investigation being funded by a group of 18 West Country farmers and landowners who used an independent company to investigate levels and types of pollution in the soil, water, plant life, animals and human hair. The results of this I understand, may well form the basis of a prosecution against named companies carrying out ‘market leading aerial dispersant services’, which the group funding the investigation believes includes the spraying of sulphates, aluminium, barium and other toxic metals with the object of producing solar reflective cloud masses. A prosecution would likely expose government involvement and the misuse of taxpayers’ money to fund this attack on life and livelihood. Publicity about the case which appeared in open sources has – of course – been taken down: but it will not be covered up for ever.
The problem with any attempt at weather modification or climate change is that there are are always two sorts of effects from experiments like these – those that the experimenters intend, and those that they do not intend. Turning to the unintended – unless of course the destruction of our planet and all life on it is an intended consequence – the first effects will be those on food production. Plants need sunlight to photosynthesize and ripen and will not grow if the soil is waterlogged. Without plants there are no vegetable foods nor fodder for animals, therefore no meat either. So, put simply, starvation. The second set of effects will be those brought about by the chemicals being sprayed into the air such as sulphur dioxide, many extremely toxic to humans and animals and of course to plants, crops, soil and waterways. Once sprayed into the atmosphere they will inevitably drift down to earth and contaminate plants, water, people and animals. The result could be serious illnesses and probably deaths, along with the poisoning of the food chain and starvation. The final and most dangerous set of effects will occur if sustained spraying, tropospheric as well as stratospheric, succeeded in obliterating the sun. The initiation of a new glaciation would then be inevitable, would build very quickly and would obliterate life everywhere in its path.
The usual suspects, led by Bill Gates, are pouring money into these deadly campaigns.The UN has also pressed for further such globalist interventions to cool the climate.
Where do our elected politicians, whose duty is to secure the health, wealth and happiness of their citizens.stand on this? Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson bear ultimate responsibility in the last administration for ARIA and for Lockley’s secret project discussed in Part 3. Justin Tomlinson, who was Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, needs to come clean too. If their experiments continue, whether they be state funded or state sanctioned, their counterparts in the current administration will also be in the dock. I do not remember voting for any of this. Questions from the public are met with either silence or lies in the face of the published policy of the government telling us what a good thing this all is and that SRM is a last resort (to solve a non-existent problem). Lies that follow the line that comprehensive cloud formations are natural, that observers are looking at normal aircraft exhaust emissions and that people like me are conspiracy theorists, disregarding the incontrovertible prevalence of weather modification interventions around the globe that could leave us with no farms, no food and no future.
This article (What are they doing to our skies? Part Four) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Jonathon Riley
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