DAVID BLACKMON: Geoengineering Is Real, And It’s Spectacular

Republican firebrand congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) attracted ridicule from the climate alarm community and its media supporters this week for holding a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency on the topic of climate geoengineering.

It is a subject of some controversy, and Green no doubt attracted some of the ridicule herself by giving the hearing a controversial title, “Playing God With The Weather — A Disastrous Forecast.”

Greene’s remarks to open the hearing, in which she laid out a centuries-long history of human attempts to control the weather or engage in geoengineering projects attracted ridicule from MSNBC writer Ja’han Jones, who said Greene’s hearing “provided a platform for her to peddle unfounded claims about nefarious government-backed efforts “to help these people play God with the weather” and discredit their oh-so-scary climate change agenda.” (RELATED: Once Considered Conspiracy Theory, Weather Control Latest MAHA Battleground) 

Just one problem, though: Pretty much all of what Greene said is demonstrably true. It is a simple fact, for example, that the U.S. government and many state and local governments have funded a wide range of weather control and geoengineering projects since at least 1947, just as she said.

Indeed, in his own testimony at the hearing, Chris Martz, a meteorologist and policy analyst for the Washington, D.C.-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), detailed a long list of examples of government-sponsored geoengineering and weather control projects, complete with copious links and footnotes.

Martz went on to point out that, according to the EPA, “nine U.S. states currently facilitate active cloud seeding programs: California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming, although most of these are funded by the state or local-level governments.” In the midst of July’s catastrophic flooding in the Kerrville area, the Texas media was filled with speculation – proven false – that sought to blame the Texas cloud seeding program as a cause of the deadly disaster.

These experiments and projects are happening: This is not the claim of crackpots, and governments are far from the only sponsors of them.

In April of last year, for example, the New York Times – not known to be big fans of Greene – ran a major story filled with climate alarmist talking points detailing a project sponsored by the University of Washington that blows “[a] fine mist of tiny aerosol particles” into the atmosphere. The goal is to “brighten clouds and bounce some of the sun’s rays back into space, a way of temporarily cooling a planet that is now dangerously overheating,” according to the Times authors.

Ask Google’s AI tool to summarize current geoengineering efforts being funded around the world currently, and it returns about 300 words detailing experiments in things with exotic names like “Stratospheric aerosol injection,” “Marine cloud brightening,” “Surface albedo enhancement,” and “Space-based methods.”

After all, what could possibly go wrong with plans such as these?

At least one prominent billionaire is also getting in on the act. Indeed, that same New York Times story details how Bill Gates began funding one geoengineering project almost 20 years ago: “In 2006, the Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, got a briefing from David Keith, one of the leading researchers in solar geoengineering, which is the idea of trying to reflect more of the sun’s rays. Mr. Gates began funding Dr. Keith and Ken Caldeira, another climate scientist and a former software developer, to further their research.”

A January, 2021 story at Forbes details Mr. Gates’s funding of another geoengineering project called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx). This program involves “spraying non-toxic calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) dust into the atmosphere — a sun-reflecting aerosol that may offset the effects of global warming.”

Oh.

Mr. Gates is one of the more prominent funders of such experimental climate control technologies, a myriad of which are being tested right now all over the world. This is not fantasy. It is not a figment of Greene’s imagination: It is reality that has become a mainstream topic of discussion at annual climate conferences.

You don’t have to believe me: Just read this article which was published by the World Economic Forum In October of last year headlined, “Geoengineering: Building ethics, transparency and inclusion into climate intervention research.”

Oh. It seems as if MSNBC and others in the media owe Greene an apology.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

 The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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