Heaven save us from billionaires who have a God complex.
In an interview with Axios last month at Caltech, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who frequently masquerades as a doctor or scientist, admitted that he has funded geoengineering research and that someday the world might need to deploy sun-dimming technology.
Gates said that this deployment should occur only when the planet reaches what Axios called “climate tipping points.”
In that event, Earth’s inhabitants “would then need to reach for some other type of intervention,” he said.
Gates has funded Harvard’s solar geoengineering program, though much of his overall funding in that area remains undisclosed.
“Yes, I’ve been a funder of trying to understand geoengineering,” he told Axios.
Mercifully, the multi-billionaire conceded that he does not envision the hypothetical deployment of sun-dimming technology as imminent.
“No way am I pushing the world in that direction,” Gates said, though he regards the research as potentially “quite valuable.”
Of course, Axios added the obligatory caveat about how “[r]esearchers need a clear understanding” of the technology’s potential effects.
In truth, however, we already have that understanding.
Sun-dimming would likely involve “injecting sulfuric-acid particles into the upper atmosphere, mimicking the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions,” per Axios.
Set aside for a moment the fact that climate change, at least as a planet-threatening phenomenon, amounts to a scam. Set aside, too, the fact that those who believe most fervently in climate change as an existential crisis already have authoritarian inclinations.
Arrogance aside, what would compel scientists to try and mimic the effects of a volcanic eruption? After all, we already know how that works and what happens afterward.
In April 1815, the violent eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia — the largest in recorded history — killed nearly 100,000 people.
Volcanic ash lingered in the atmosphere for so long that contemporaries called 1816 the “Year Without a Summer.”
1 comment:
Create acid rain to save the planet. Makes sense. Throw in a little aluminum. Why not. Drop some fentanyl as chaser.
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