Bill Gates-backed plan to block the sun and reverse global warming

Silicon Valley elites are throwing their financial weight behind a controversial scheme to fight climate change — worldwide weather modification. 

One of the new VC-funded start-ups, Make Sunsets, has already launched balloons over Baja, Mexico releasing sunlight-reflecting aerosols into Earth’s stratosphere.

The firm’s concept, cooling Earth by bouncing sunlight back into space via sulfate aerosols, is not new. In fact, it’s one of many exotic ideas now actively funded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others in Big Tech.

And yet, Make Sunsets’ solar geoengineering, which they hope to fund by selling ‘cooling credits’ to eco-friendly companies, has drawn strong criticism from experts. 

Researchers across academia, government and even global insurance agencies have warned of unintended consequences, like regional droughts, crop failures and shifts to the Atlantic jet stream, which could drag hurricanes and tropical diseases north.

Mexico’s environmental ministry blasted Make Sunsets last year for conducting their rogue experiments within their nation’s borders ‘without prior notice and without the consent of the Mexican government and the surrounding communities.’

But many of these concerns are premised on the idea that such small independent companies like Make Sunsets can manage to work in concert or be effective at all.   

As Adrian Hindes, a PhD candidate at Australian National University, explained it to DailyMail.com: ‘Make Sunsets efforts, at least at present, are nowhere near at a scale necessary for actually causing global temperatures to decline meaningfully.’ 

‘Stratospheric aerosol injection’ (above) – of the kind that Make Sunsets is testing on a very small scale – is just one of the methods being considered for ‘solar radiation management’

Climate tech researcher Dr Shuchi Talati at American University similarly called the firm’s business plan ‘a speculative form of “junk credit” that is unlikely to have value.’

And yet, the start-up has already raised over $1 million from billionaire technocrats looking for market-based, quick fixes to the climate crisis.

Similar firms are also racing to profit off VC interest, including Israel‘s Stardust Solutions, which has raised $15 million. 

‘At some point down the road, they’re going to do this at a big enough scale to trigger some sort of climate impact,’ according to Talati, who is also the founder of the nonprofit Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering. 

Talati, like many public policy researchers and climate scientists, has expressed real fear that local effects of geoengineering could cancel out the benefits.

‘It can be done in an effective, globally governed way,’ as she told NPR, ‘or it can be done by two crazy people in California, and it can look horrible for a lot of people.’

Hindes told DailyMail.com that there is potential for plans like Make Sunsets’ sulfur balloons, a type of ‘stratospheric aerosol injection’ (SAI), to harm local farming. 

‘[But] this is one of the areas which has the highest uncertainty and least agreement across published research at present,’ the Australian researcher noted.

Making Sunsets co-founders Andrew Song (left) and Luke Iseman (right) release one of their balloons. Climate tech researcher Dr Shuchi Talati at American University has called their business plan ‘a speculative form of “junk credit” that is unlikely to have value’

Nevertheless, Make Sunsets hopes to fund their solar geoengineering by selling ‘cooling credits’ to eco-friendly companies. The firm claims it has already sold tens of thousands

There are a number of geo-engineering theories being proposed, including ‘shinier crops and buildings to reflect more sunlight’, microbubbles in the ocean and removing cirrus clouds. 

‘Global warming from excess greenhouse gases accelerates the hydrological cycle,’ Hindes said. More heat means more water evaporation and thus more wet weather. 

But Hindes added: ‘Cooling the planet by SAI or [other geoengineering like marine cloud brightening] would slow it down, but not perfectly since neither is “anti-CO2.”‘

In other words, even though such vast aerial seeding techniques might succeed in cooling Earth, the process would still leave ever-growing volumes of carbon dioxide (CO2) gas in Earth’s atmosphere.  

‘Plants close their stomata [tiny pores critical for photosynthesis] to retain more moisture with higher CO2 levels,’ as Hindes told DailyMail.com.

Thus, man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have been shown to have a direct impact on how much water plants retain, rather than release as vapor. 

The result, he said, means a reduction in ‘total moisture available in the atmosphere’ which could lead to droughts and lower crop yields in a geoengineered world. 

A magnified view of many 80-micron plant stomata on the leaf of a Begonia rex cultorum plant. ‘Plants close their stomata [tiny pores critical for photosynthesis] to retain more moisture with higher CO2 levels,’ as geoengineering researcher Adrian Hindes said

The result means a reduction in ‘total moisture available in the atmosphere’ which could lead to droughts and lower crop yields in a geoengineered world. But, Hindes noted: ‘This is one of the areas which has the highest uncertainty and least agreement across published research’

The Australian geoengineering researcher noted that these trade-offs might one day be found to be appropriate, but questioned the notion of impetuous, billionaire-funded start-ups like Making Sunsets leading the charge.  

‘They’ve had far too much lackadaisical and softball media reporting,’ Hindes said.

He suggested that even ‘moderately critical/skeptical’ has led mostly to raised publicity and name recognition for the company.

Making Sunsets co-founder, Luke Iseman, is relishing the criticism which he thinks is good for business. 

‘Making me look like the Bond villain is going to be helpful to certain groups,’ as Iseman, who had previously served as director of hardware for tech incubator Y Combinator, told MIT Technology Review.

While open minded about the need to develop and test geoengineering, geologist Dr David Kitchen told DailyMail.com that its benefits would be only temporary. 

‘These are not solutions,’ said Dr Kitchen who has written about the issue for The Conversation. ‘These are our stop gaps.’

‘They’re a representative of our failure to manage the carbon economy effectively,’ Dr Kitchen explained, ‘and our failure to transition [away from carbon] effectively and economically. But they may become essential tools in the toolkit.’ 

None of the proposals, he noted, would stop acidification of Earth’s oceans due to increased CO2, which is already dissolving the shells and skeletons of marine life and threatening entire ecosystems and fisheries.

Due to the opaque world of privately funded Big Tech ventures, it is currently unclear how much money is actually being spent on private weather modification ideas.

The aim of one $3 million mission in 2021 – backed by billionaire Bill Gates – was to have chalk deflect a portion of the sun’s radiation, stop it from hitting the surface, and cool the planet

The test would use a high-altitude scientific balloon (pictured) to raise around 2kg of calcium carbonate dust – the size of a bag of flour – into the atmosphere 12 miles above the surface. This past April, after fielding years-worth of such criticism, Harvard shut down the project

SilverLining, a nonprofit dedicated to ‘near-term climate risk,’ told Bloomberg that it was ‘unable to share a full list of SilverLining’s donors at this time,’ though it lists major funders on its site.

But Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, former Facebook execs now funding their own start-ups, and billionaire hotel heiress Rachel Pritzker are all known to be making big bets on such projects.

One 2020 study by a Yale lecturer, however, suggested that it would not take much to temporarily cut the Earth’s warming in half via SAI aerosol methods, suggesting that just $18 billion a year (half of NASA’s annual budget), would be enough.

In 2021, a roughly $3 million mission backed by Bill Gates, tested a similar system sending a large balloon 12 miles above the Swedish town of Kiruna with a payload of 2 kilograms of chalk dust bound for the stratosphere.

Like Iseman’s sulfate aerosols, the idea is for this chalk to deflect a portion of the sun’s radiation, stopping it from hitting the surface, and thus cooling the planet.

Chemist Frank Keutsch, whose Harvard lab led the project, says the strategy would only be deployed in desperation to stop parts of the planet becoming uninhabitable.

Keutsch called the very fact that such geoengineering projects are being considered at all ‘terrifying,’ but the projects critics have been even more unsparing.

Above, Making Sunsets co-founder Andrew Song with a test balloon 

Earlier this year, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA published a paper investigating the idea of using high-altitude planes to inject two tons of ice particles each week, which would freeze the water that would fall back to Earth 

University of Edinburgh professor, Stuart Haszeldine, noted at the time that blocking the sun would do nothing to remove the main cause of global warming. 

‘It would cool the planet by reflecting solar radiation but once you’re on to that, it’s like taking heroin — you’ve got to carry on doing the drug to keep on having the effect,’ Haszeldine said.

This past April, after fielding years-worth of such criticism, Harvard shut down the project despite continued interest by Keutsch and his collaborator, Harvard Applied Physics professor David Keith.

‘I think it’s worth doing these experiments as the world considers whether or not to actually potentially use these technologies to reduce climate risks,’ Keith said. 

‘This experiment just became the focus of that conversation and got blown out of proportion,’ as he explained it to the Harvard Crimson.

A statement from two of Harvard’s provosts noted that similar ‘solar geoengineering research will continue at Harvard under the auspices of the Solar Geoengineering Research Program.’