Talk about a Messiah complex. Bill Gates wants to dim the sun. You read that right. Un-scientist William Gates, who was widely thought of as the imperious and greed-addled subject of a federal anti-trust lawsuit before his reincarnation as the brilliant and generous sage who established history's largest charitable foundation, apparently sees himself as God.
Since 2010, Gates has been funding a highly controversial project intended to combat climate change. The project is called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment or SCoPEx for short. Its overarching stratagem? To manifest the diabolical, Earth-threatening plans of a James Bond villain as closely as possible in real life. OK, that's not actually in the mission directive. What SCoPEx is really trying to do is far more ambitious and frightening than anything Ian Fleming could dream up.
The $4.5 million in pocket change Gates has invested in the project is funding a plan to release a kilogram or more of calcium carbonate (chalk dust) from a balloon-propelled gondola, 12 miles up in the atmosphere, for starters. This test is intended to create a screen through which sunlight will not easily penetrate and from which it will be refracted away from Earth.
The goal is apparently to gauge the substance's ability to block solar radiation and combat carbon dioxide's ability to trap heat. If the test succeeds in Bill Gates' estimation, the chalk-dust gambit would be deployed worldwide to save us from the existential threat of varying weather patterns. Another possibility for deploying the chalk dust gambit is via jet contrail - in fulfillment of every chem-trails conspiracy theorist's wildest fantasies.
Some years ago, Gates moved the project to Harvard and abandoned his initial pledge not to fund any field experiments. The plan was to conduct the test in New Mexico and Arizona last year. But because of the pandemic, it was moved to Sweden to be undertaken at the Swedish Space Corporation's launch center in the Arctic Circle.
Stockholm, We Have a Problem
Not only were very few Swedish officials notified, but no one bothered to check with the Saami people, over whose homeland, replete with reindeer, the test was to be conducted. The Saami Council, which advocates for the Saami people, released a self-evidently true statement that the geoengineering experiment could have "catastrophic consequences." It went on to unpack the effects of the dangerously hare-brained scheme by stating the project "essentially attempts to mimic volcanic eruptions by continuously spewing the sky with sun-dimming particles."
Sweden shut Gates down. He's now returning to the United States with the project where skepticism is muted by a media in thrall to his money, prestige, and power. He should be able to kickstart Project DIMSUN here before too long.
In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Apocalypse Never author Michael Shellenberger called Gates' notion of creating a kind of deliberate nuclear winter “grossly irresponsible," "a terrible idea," and "bonkers." He asserted that the effect on crops would be wholly unknown and that there would be "no way to figure what the large-scale effects of this kind of thing would be."
One effect might be to encourage a mini-ice age. This was dramatized in the science fiction movie Snowpiercer, which posits our entire planet frozen except for a few survivors who live on a train that perpetually circumnavigates the globe, unable to slow down for fear of being immediately encased in ice. Only in a world where a V-neck-sweater-wearing elite who wants us all to eat synthetic meat, who now owns more farmland than anyone in America, and who plans to imitate Mr. Burns and dim the sun would comparisons to a science fiction movie seem reasonable.
Gates is arguably the most powerful and influential person in the world. He dictates global health initiatives and has effectively privatized global health infrastructures through endowments from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He's not a doctor, has no background in medicine whatsoever, and likely never wondered why chalkboards were phased out in favor of whiteboards in school classrooms over the last 25 years.
The reason? Inhalation of chalk dust unsurprisingly causes highly deleterious respiratory problems. And yet, Bill Gates wants to ring the planet with chalk dust to play God with the sun.
What could go wrong?
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