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.”
Meanwhile, 73-year-old Founding Father Thomas Jefferson made his usual assortment of scientific recordings — daily temperatures, rainfall amounts, etc.
“[T]he great prices given for tobacco have produced great preparations for the present year, which however will be baffled by the weather,” Jefferson wrote in May 1816. “[T]he spring has been unusually dry and cold. [O]ur average morning cold for the month of May in other years has been 63° of Farenheit. [I]n the present month it has been to this day an average of 53° and one morning as low as 43°. [R]epeated frosts have killed the early fruits and the crops of tobacco and wheat will be poor. [A]bout the middle of April they had at Quebec snow a foot deep.”
Four months later, Jefferson compared Virginia’s summer to a “moderate winter.”
“We have had the most extraordinary year of drought & cold ever known in the history of America,” he wrote. “[I]n June, instead of 3¾ I. our average of rain for that month, we had only ⅓ of an inch, in Aug. instead of 9⅙ I. our average, we had only 8⁄10 of an inch. [A]nd it still continues. [T]he summer too has been as cold as a moderate winter.” [graf 3]
Then, he noted that Americans faced the prospect of starvation.
“[I]n every state North of this there has been frost in every month of the year; in this state we had none in June & July,” he continued. “[B]ut those of Aug. killed much corn over the mountains. [T]he crop of corn thro’ the Atlantic states will probably be less than ⅓ of an ordinary one, that of tobo still less, and of mean quality. [T]he crop of wheat was midling in quantity, but excellent in quality. [B]ut every species of bread grain taken together will not be sufficient for the subsistence of the inhabitants.”
In other words, Gates and his ilk want to play with forces that, 200 years ago, resulted in food shortages.
Will the elites actually deploy sun-dimming technology?
Without a shred of humility, they think they can set the planet’s thermostat to an optimal temperature.
Those of us who lived through the COVID nightmare must resolve never again to hand public policy over to the scientific establishment and its deep-pocketed enablers such as Gates.
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