CA Test To Dim Sunlight Planned Quietly To Avoid Public Panic: Report

Last year, a group of California researchers made headlines after they scrapped a secretive plan to test a cloud-making machine on a retired aircraft carrier on the San Francisco Bay. It was the nation’s first outdoor experiment to limit global warming by altering cloud behavior.

However, they were actually plotting something much bigger — a multi-million-dollar effort to spray saltwater into the sky and cool the planet by creating clouds over an area larger than Puerto Rico, Politico reported.

Politico uncovered details about the Marine Cloud Brightening Program in funding requests, emails, texts and other records. The details of the billionaire-backed solar geoengineering experiment were largely kept under wraps by researchers at the University of Washington.

The experiment was intended to run for months aboard the decommissioned USS Hornet in the Alameda area before city officials effectively shut it down, arguing that no one had told them about it beforehand.

The goal of the test was to limit global warming by spraying salt into the air to brighten clouds so that they reflect the sun's rays away from Earth as they enter the atmosphere.

According to Politico, that scrapped test was just the beginning.

Internal documents show the researchers were already in talks with donors and consultants about a much larger 3,900-square-mile cloud-making experiment off the coasts of North America, Chile or southern Africa — well before the initial trial even began. The details come from more than 400 internal records obtained by E&E News through a public records request to the University of Washington.

Many of these plans were drawn up quietly, Politico reported.

The team behind the program relied on museum staff at the USS Hornet to manage relations with Alameda leaders and carefully controlled the information it provided to the public, according to the documents obtained by Politico.

“We think it’s safest to get air quality review help and are pursuing that in advance of engaging, but I’d avoid scaring them overly,” according to an Aug. 23, 2023, text message before a meeting with Hornet staff. “We want them to work largely on the assumption that things are a go.”

The strategy backfired.

When word got out about secretive experiment, locals were so rattled that the Alameda City Council voted to cancel it two months after it began.

Interest in this kind of climate intervention is growing — especially as efforts to cut fossil fuel emissions stall in the U.S. and Europe. But the idea of humans manipulating the weather has sparked political pushback and fueled conspiracy theories, making even small-scale experiments tough to pull off.

Read more from Politico: Researchers quietly planned a test to dim sunlight. They wanted to ‘avoid scaring’ the public.