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 . One of the new VC-funded start-ups, Make Sunsets, has already launched balloons over Baja, 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 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.' Climate tech researcher Dr Shuchi Talati at American University similarly called the firm's '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 '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 . 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 , '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. '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 ] 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. 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 . While open minded about the need to develop and test geoengineering, geologist told DailyMail.com that its benefits would be only temporary. 'These are not solutions,' said Dr Kitchen who has written about the issue for . '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 and . 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. One , 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 ' ,' but the projects critics have been even more unsparing. 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 . 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.'