Solar Geoengineering & Santa Susana
Time to buy your sunblock and Boeing stock (The Heights of Weird Part 1)
Spring is in full swing, and you know what that means. . .
Bill Gates wants to spray the stratosphere with millions of tons of toxic chemicals to artificially cool the planet. “It’s called solar geoengineering and it’s highly controversial!” Every week, someone with an outsized following will post on the topic, garnering thousands of clicks and shares, their gullible audience expressing grief and shock at the stupidity, the arrogance, the evil, until the next conspiracy plasters the feed and the atrocity is forgotten.
I hardly pay attention to the topic anymore—not because it’s fake, but because I wrote a book about it and it’s not a new idea. None other than Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 1997, “The Planet Needs a Sunscreen.” According to Teller, “This”—the idea of intentionally polluting the stratosphere to lower global average tempterature—“is not a new concept, and certainly not a complex one.”
Indeed, the first official government acknowledgement of climate change occurred in a 1965 report written by the President’s Science Advisory Committee entitled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. Lyndon B. Johnson, president of the United States, summarized the report’s findings before congress in February of that same year: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through. . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”
The report stated that the burning of fossil fuels had increased the level of atmospheric CO2 to a degree that may potentially endanger the global climate:
Throughout his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulate in the earth over the past 500 million years. . . By the year 2000 the increase in atmospheric CO2. . . may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate, and will almost certainly cause significant changes in the temperature and other properties of the stratosphere. . . The climatic changes that may be produced by the increase CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.
The report’s conclusion states:
“The possibility of deliberately bringing about countervailing climatic changes therefore need to be thoroughly explored.”
Nowhere does the 1965 report acknowledge the possibility of limiting the burning of fossil fuels.
Cooked into the warming conversation since moment one was not the idea of Restoring so much as counteracting. But how, practically speaking, could one ever really hope to offset against a cloud of nine hundred forty-one trillion, three hundred seventy-three billion, eight hundred fifty-nine million, five hundred twenty-nine thousand, and four hundred twenty-seven pounds of carbon pollution?1
#sunscreen
When you hear Edward Teller assert that the erection of a planetary sunscreen is “not complex,” you aren’t just detecting the near-demonic hubris of the genius behind the hydrogen bomb, but also the rightful condescension of any fair to middling scientist faced with the prospect of such supremely smutty2 physics. In fact, the material mechanism under question is only slightly more advanced than a meth head taking aim with a Bic flame at the dumpsters in my back alley.
To his credit, Harvard’s David Keith, a contender for the most death-threatened scientist on earth, doesn’t really sex up his research.
“Deliberately adding one pollutant to temporarily counter another is a brutally ugly technical fix…
“Yet that is the essence of the suggestion that sulfur be injected into the stratosphere to limit the damage caused by the carbon we’ve pumped into the air.”
Throughout the 2010s Harvard’s David Keith became, alongside Stanford’s Ken Caldeira, the global face of solar geoengineering, also known as solar radiation management (SRM), the idea that we might continuously inject unfathomable tons of sulfur aerosol particles into the stratosphere—essentially mimicking a largescale volcanic eruption—to reflect incoming sunlight back out to space and artificially cool the planet. The cheapest way to deliver around the clock sulfur dioxide for decades, according to one Bill Gates’s funded study, would be from a fleet of 14 retrofitted Boeing 747s circling a series of naval bases stationed along the equator.
“Solar radiation management has three essential characteristics,” Keith told Congress in 2010, “it is cheap, fast and imperfect.”
Of course, millions of people around the planet believe this process is already ongoing. The white lines you see stitched across any sunny, blue sky? Chemtrails, bro.
“They're spraying us again!”
The paranoia of such people isn’t helped by the fact that such “brutally ugly” physics cannot be meaningfully tested. As the University of Rutgers climatologist Alan Robock told Yale’s E360, “You can’t see a climate response unless an experiment is so large as to actually be geoengineering.” Hence, any truly elucidating field experiment would probably be indistinguishable from global deployment.
The crucial term to consider when picturing any solar geoengineering experiment is geo, i.e. earth—no trivial system to try and “engineer.” And here we confront the essential insanity of the entire proposal. . .
Could one really refer to the continuous, multidecade, worldwide dumping of atmospheric pollutants designed to mimic a major volcanic eruption—or a hydrogen bomb-sized dumpster fire—as engineering, assuming all the precision, thought, and control the term implies? Edward Teller was correct to call the sunscreen uncomplex. It is an efficient, and fantastically ugly proposal that would no doubt guarantee global cooling, at least initially. But what is more complex and hardly guaranteed are the known & unknown side effects of that sunscreen, and it is in pondering these wild, apocalyptic potentials that my book China Lake really heats up.
As Ken Caldeira told me when I met him at his Stanford lab in 2014: “More small-scale research is necessary, but basically. . . field tests won’t tell us much. . . we won’t know what will happen until we’re full scale.”
I was surprised that Caldeira had agreed to meet me. Then as now, I was nobody, had little money, and he many death threats. I sought him out because he worked in California, requiring no costly Boeing flight to Boston or New York. Further, there seemed something special about the man. Outside a few depressive suicidal black metal bands (DSBM), I’d never actually heard anyone, especially not a renowned scientist, summarize their work as an expression of despair.
“For most, researching ‘geoengineering’ is an expression of despair at the fact that others are unwilling to do the hard work of reducing emissions.”
I wanted to ask Caldeira, mainly, if I should despair as well, and while there wasn’t much more to learn about solar geoengineering short of a full-scale deployment, I did want to ask him if he thought there might be something to learn from the bit of monumental weirdness I had unearthed in the Mojave Desert at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. It was a coincidence so compelling and weird it launched me well beyond the scope of any essay or article and far along the path of an ambitious first book.
“Is there more to it than irony?” Caldeira asked me.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
But why am I telling you any of this? Is this post just a pathetic attempt to plug my old book?? To pump the pages of its still relevant corpse back into the hopelessly polluted troposphere of atrophied public attention??
Probably.
But there is more to it, something nobody really knows. . .
My failed book project about the nuclear meltdown at Santa Susana was a sequel to China Lake.
The two were, and are, fatefully, fundamentally, and ferociously tied. But how?
It isn’t Boeing the bridges the two books (Although, if the survival of the humanity is soon tied to a fleet of fourteen sulfur spraying 747s indefinitely circling the earth’s equator, as outlined above, a newly omnipotent Boeing might just finally be able to afford to clean up the carcinogenic nightmare of the Santa Susana Field Lab). It isn’t Nazi scientists. Nor aliens, Erewhon, the environment, NBC, or my personal misery.
Hint: It’s really weird.
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
—Mark Twain, “Following the Equator3,” 1897.
That is why I have not abandoned my failed book project about Santa Susana.
Because it is impossible, and true.
China Lake was only the first act in an expanding ‘apocalypse of the wyrd.’
This obscene unwieldy number is the weight of the United States’ historical CO₂ emissions from 1800-2022, representing a 941,373,859,529,427-pound cloud (427 billion metric tons) of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, twice that of the next closest historical polluter, China. See Ian Tiseo, “Cumulative carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions produced in the United States from 1800 to 2022,” online at Statista. This value does not include methane, a more much potent greenhouse gas.
smutty, from smut, “to make black as with soot” from a chimney, or dumpster fire.
Weird to find this famous quote, whose source I never looked up until today, comes from “Following the Equator” . . .just as those Boeing 747s might.
Anybody who watched the Animatrix knows blocking out the sky is a terrible idea. The machines will ultimately win the war and turn us into batteries. A fitting fate for the foolish.
I agree we cannot let the likes of Bill Gates and his fellow WEF oligarchs fix the non-crisis they've created, using fools like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. They're positioned to profit through windmills, solar panels, lithium mining, a fleet of Boeing 747's spreading So2 into the atmosphere, or by pushing the price of gasoline to $50 per gallon. Climate change is a slow-motion problem, there are better ways to reduce our individual average output of fifteen tons of Co2 each. Don't let those fuckers continue to push us into accepting their solutions.