When the Army Owns the Weather
Evidence of the Pentagon's interest in manipulating mother nature abounds. How come the public knows nothing about it?
February 5, 2002   

The world's richest man has been funding geoengineering research, it emerged last week. According to a report posted online by Science, Bill Gates has committed $4.5 million of his own money to funding a number of climate scientists interested in geoengineering.

I'm not bashing chemmies. I just want to talk about something more interesting: money. Not surprisingly, the question of what role private capital might play in developing and deploying the hardware to cool off the planet came up at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference in southern California I attended earlier this week.

It is 2025. An enemy unknown to 20th-century Americans has massed its army at the border of a friendly country in a remote part of the world. High above them flies a single, unmanned stealth aircraft. A faint wisp of black dust sprays from its tail, spurring the creation of the only weapon capable of stopping the threatening horde.

These schemes have varied from the simple, such as painting every rooftop and roadway white to increase planetary albedo, to the creation of space-based solar reflectors. The use of rockets, airplanes, and giant guns to deliver reflecting material to the stratosphere has been debated, and there is even a body of conspiracy theory on “chemtrails” where the gullible believe that experiments are already underway.

Indeed, scientists say there is little doubt that we could bring about an artificial planetary cooling by, say, seeding the Earth's stratosphere with reflective particles, called sulfate aerosols, that would act as an artificial global parasol and cool us down. Such an act would amount to mimicking the climatic effects of a large volcanic eruption, such as the explosion of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 -- whose 22 mile high stream of ash, subsequently dispersed across the globe, resulted in half a degree Celsius of global cooling over the course of the following year.