Originally proposed by Bill Gates’ company Intellectual Ventures, the StratoShield has been renamed the StratoCruiser and a team funded by Bill Gates’ FICER, Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Program Research Program, the Hewlett Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and other philanthropists are planning on the world’s largest experiment in dimming the sun.

This experiment is designed to mimic volcanic eruptions by spraying sulfur into the stratosphere to cool the planet, a geoengineering solar radiation managment (SRM) technique known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). David Keith and Frank Keutsch plan to test the equipment by spraing water, then move on to spraying calcium and eventually sulfur.

Stratospheric sulfur injections is the most often talked about way of mimicing the Mt. Pinatubo eruption which sent massive amounts of sulfur into the stratosphere and cooled the planet. When this happened, the Amazon basin almost dried up, and therein lies the largest problem with geoengineering schemes like this: they will change global rainfall patterns and create winners and losers…. losers being dead people.

The Integrated Assessment of Geoengineering Proposals (IAGP) and the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) computer models agree, the southern hemisphere will get dryer and the northern hemisphere will get wetter. This endangers the entire globe as it will lead to increased flooding and storm severity in the north and drought and famine in the south.

This is why 110 civic societies have proposed a permanent ban on geoengineering: The Hands Off Mother Earth manifesto. This manifesto is being presented at COP24 and also proposes putting a halt to Keith’s Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Exeperiment (SCoPEx. StratoCruiser).

In addition the the drawbacks mentioned above, please also check our Professor Alan Robock’s 27 reasons not to geoengineer. The concerns far outweigh the benefits and coating our skies in sunscreen should be banned and all research halted.

Please see the video above and the details below:

Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx)

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/keutschgroup/scopex

http://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/2017/11/scopex/

https://www.arp.harvard.edu/research/stratocruiser-flight-system

“David Keith Announces Geo-Engineers Plans for 2018 at 80,000 ft” • Watch this Video on YouTube

“Frank Keutsch: Solar Radiation Management & the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment” • Watch this Video on YouTube

“Dr Bill Hare (Climate Analytics) on the SCoPEx solar radiation geoengineering experiment” • Watch this Video on YouTube

Helping Hand or Hubris? American Physical Society

Their funding will come from Harvard internal funds and likely Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Program, which has raised money from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the Hewlett Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and other philanthropists. SCoPEx follows in the wake of several other solar geoengineering collaborations that have failed to pick up momentum, such as at the 2011 E-PEACE experiment out of the University of California, San Diego, and the SPICE collaboration in the U.K., which stalled in 2012.

https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201710/hand-hubris.cfm

Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment

We review the capabilities and costs of various lofting methods intended to deliver sulfates into the lower stratosphere. We lay out a future solar geoengineering deployment scenario of halving the increase in anthropogenic radiative forcing beginning 15 years hence, by deploying material to altitudes as high as ~20 km. After surveying an exhaustive list of potential deployment techniques, we settle upon an aircraft-based delivery system. Unlike the one prior comprehensive study on the topic (McClellan et al 2012 Environ. Res. Lett. 7 034019), we conclude that no existing aircraft design—even with extensive modifications—can reasonably fulfill this mission. However, we also conclude that developing a new, purpose-built high-altitude tanker with substantial payload capabilities would neither be technologically difficult nor prohibitively expensive. We calculate early-year costs of ~$1500 ton⁻¹ of material deployed, resulting in average costs of ~$2.25 billion yr⁻¹ over the first 15 years of deployment. We further calculate the number of flights at ~4000 in year one, linearly increasing by ~4000 yr⁻¹. We conclude by arguing that, while cheap, such an aircraft-based program would unlikely be a secret, given the need for thousands of flights annually by airliner-sized aircraft operating from an international array of bases.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d

Stratospheric Sulfur Geoengineering - Benefits and Risks, Alan Robock

27 REASONS STRATOSPHERIC GEOENGINEERING IS A BAD IDEA

Recorded Wednesday, 10 January 2018: 8:45 AM Room 16AB (ACC) (Austin, Texas) Alan Robock, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJ robock@envsci.rutgers.edu http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock

Geoengineering, also called climate engineering, has been proposed to address global warming, involving “solar radiation management (SRM)” by injecting particles into the stratosphere, brightening clouds, or blocking sunlight with satellites between the Sun and Earth. (“Geoengineering” also refers to carbon dioxide reduction, a completely different proposed technology, with different costs and governance. It is not addressed here.) While volcanic eruptions have been suggested as innocuous examples of stratospheric aerosols cooling the planet, the volcano analog actually argues against stratospheric geoengineering because of ozone depletion and regional hydrologic responses. No such systems to conduct stratospheric geoengineering now exist, but a comparison of different proposed stratospheric injection schemes, using airplanes, balloons, and artillery, shows that using airplanes to put sulfur gases into the stratosphere would not be expensive. Nevertheless, it would be very difficult to create stratospheric sulfate particles with a desirable size distribution.

Our Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP), conducting climate model experiments with standard stratospheric aerosol injection scenarios, is ongoing. We have found that if we could counteract increasing greenhouse gases with global insolation reduction we could keep the global average temperature constant, but global average precipitation would reduce, particularly in summer monsoon regions around the world. Temperature changes would also not be uniform. The tropics would cool, but high latitudes would warm, with continuing, but reduced sea ice and ice sheet melting. New experiments with time- and space-varying sulfate injections, or that combine stratospheric SRM with surface brightening, show that it may be possible to control to some extent these regional differences. Temperature extremes would still increase, but not as much as without SRM.

If SRM were halted all at once, there would be rapid temperature and precipitation increases at 5-10 times the rates from gradual global warming. Sudden geoengineering termination would more than double temperature velocities for the land and ocean, and would more than triple temperature velocities in multiple global biodiversity hotspots. These geoengineering-associated velocities exceed even the most optimistic dispersal rate estimates for many species, increasing local extinction risks. Rapid geoengineering implementation and termination would significantly increase the threats to global biodiversity and ecosystems from climate change.

SRM combined with CO2 fertilization would have small impacts on rice production in China, but would increase maize production. New experiments with the Community Earth System Model from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which includes comprehensive tropospheric and stratospheric chemistry, show that SRM using stratospheric aerosols would reduce stratospheric ozone and enhance surface UV-B radiation. The enhanced downward diffuse radiation would increase the surface CO2sink. Surface ozone and tropospheric chemistry would likely be affected by SRM, but the overall effect is strongly dependent on the SRM scheme.

If there were a way to continuously inject SO2 into the lower stratosphere, it would produce global cooling, stopping melting of the ice caps, and increasing the uptake of CO2 by plants. But there are at least 27 reasons why stratospheric geoengineering may be a bad idea. These include disruption of the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing precipitation to the food supply for billions of people; ozone depletion; no more blue skies; reduction of solar power; and rapid global warming if it stops. Furthermore, there are concerns about commercial or military control, and it may seriously degrade terrestrial astronomy and satellite remote sensing. Global efforts to reduce anthropogenic emissions (mitigation) and to adapt to climate change are a much better way to channel our resources to address anthropogenic global warming.

https://ams.confex.com/ams/98Annual/webprogram/Paper332066.html

Climate Engineering and Inadvertent Weather Modification

https://ams.confex.com/ams/98Annual/webprogram/Session43097.html

21st Conference on Planned and Inadvertent Weather Modification

https://ams.confex.com/ams/98Annual/webprogram/21WXMOD.html

“Stratospheric Sulfur Geoengineering - Benefits and Risks, Alan Robock” • Watch this Video on YouTube

Telescopes ‘worthless’ by 2050

Ground-based astronomy could be impossible in 40 years because of pollution from aircraft exhaust trails and climate change (and GEOENGINEERING), an expert says.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4755996.stm

Double catastrophe: Intermittent stratospheric geoengineering induced by societal collapse

A global catastrophe scenario involving climate change, geoengineering, and a separate catastrophe.

https://sethbaum.com/ac/2013_DoubleCatastrophe.html

Geoengineering Will Kill People

SRM geoengineering: how to deal with the losers? Ken Caldeira’s Geoengineering Group

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/geoengineering/ipdLpbnXHeU/tAXDtadrNR0J

David Keith admits geoengineering SRM will kill many tens of thousands of people

https://youtu.be/fSCHLwJHwVM?t=4217

“Geoengineering Debate - August.07.2013 (1:10:17)” • Watch this Video on YouTube

Convention on Biological Diversity Geoengineering Ban (with loopholes)

that no climate-related geo-engineering activities** that may affect biodiversity take place, until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities and appropriate consideration of the associated risks for the environment and biodiversity and associated social, economic and cultural impacts, with the exception of small scale scientific research studies that would be conducted in a controlled setting in accordance with Article 3 of the Convention, and only if they are justified by the need to gather specific scientific data and are subject to a thorough prior assessment of the potential impacts on the environment;

https://www.cbd.int/climate/geoengineering/