Why Do Skeptics Abandon Skepticism When Faced With Claims the Government Could Block Out the Sun?

It's no more scientific than the claim CO2 can super-heat the planet

According to the Telegraph, the Government is now taking seriously the possibility that Britain’s ever-growing list of mortal enemies might be considering denying our island the sunlight given to us by God himself. “Third-party actors could include countries taking drastic action to lower their carbon emissions,” explains the newspaper. Or worse, experts warn that latter-day Bond villains and “hostile nations such as Russia” might be planning to use “solar geoengineering to orchestrate an environmental disaster against their enemies”. Climate change mitigation, then, could be a pretext for interventions that destroy our food and plunge us into a cold and dark future. That being the same premise as the humans' strike against the machines in The Matrix is not this story’s only resonance with daft sci-fi plots.

“We don’t know who struck first – us or them,” Morpheus tells Neo in the Desert of the Real. “But we know that it was us that scorched the sky.” This was humanity’s strike against the machine world, which (having no need for agriculture) depended on solar power. The “Desert of the Real” is French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s description of a society in which reality (the “real”) is obscured by simulation – a state of “hyperreality”, thus inspiring the Wachowski brothers’ (now sisters) plot. Baudrillard’s hypothesis has leant itself to critiques of war, the violent reality (the “real”) from which most of the populations of Western nations have been protected, their understanding mediated by TV screens and the agendas of TV executives and their masters in turn.

A similar criticism can be made of climate change alarmism. Even through the fog of war we can at least hear the explosions or see the body bags, whereas only computer simulations can detect the putative ‘impacts’ of climate change. Great efforts have been made by green activists to try to link climate change and security. According to these claims, climate change will drive hundreds of millions of 'climate refugees', increase competition for resources such as water, and drive civil conflict as society collapses due to very slightly different weather, maybe.

So there is something of an inevitability to the linking of deliberate weather modification to unconventional warfare. The Telegraph quotes one Matt Ince, Associate Director at Dragonfly Intelligence: “In a context where we’ve had, for example, Russia increasingly expanding its use of hybrid warfare activities, it’s possible – not immediately, but down the line – that they may look to broaden and diversify the types of activities that they’re conducting.” And that includes, claims Ince, “more novel types of activity of which solar geoengineering may be one”.

If the story doesn’t already strike you as silly to the point of utter absurdity, consider this: Ince goes on to claim that “we’ve seen migration patterns being intentionally influenced by the Russian state as a way of trying to push more pressure on to European countries”.

I have enough on my plate with climate nonsense to get into the weeds of the immigration debate. But the idea that Europe’s or Britain’s immigration problems are owed to Moscow is as manifestly nutso as the idea that the immigration was driven by climate change. And it is this ‘expert's’ making of such claims that are accessible to our faculties (on the drivers of immigration) that should calibrate our estimate of his claims that are beyond the realm of fact, and as such untestable.

A Russian ship might be making its way up the coast, according to the defence wonk’s fantasy, all the while spewing out cloud-seeding particles. Well, yes, it could. But at wind speeds at cloud height, such emissions would have passed over Penzance and made their way over Norwich within a couple of hours. They would more likely afflict Moscow (1,500 miles away) than the Midlands. You cannot paint the sky, because it has no surface.

It's a very, very silly story. Yet it has apparently drawn the attention of Ed Miliband’s minion, Climate Minister Kerry McCarthy, who “recognises the need to understand the risks and impacts of [solar radiation modification] approaches that could be deployed by an independent or third-party actor”. I remain sceptical that this fully justifies the Telegraph’s claim that “Ministers are preparing for a scenario in which a hostile foreign power could weaponise sun-dimming technology”. It looks like a somewhat bland statement to me, rather than the mobilisation of government agencies to defeat a threat. Clickbait and intrigue might be better explanations for the paper’s interest in a story that it has been toying with in recent months, but which it cannot lean into as fully as anonymous social media accounts.

But that’s not to let the Government off the hook. Back in April, the paper reported that “Experiments to dim the Sun will be approved within weeks”, and that the Government had made £50 million in funding available for projects. This inevitably generated much online commentary, which has been provoked again.

The possibility that spraying chemical agents into the atmosphere might affect the development of storms is attributed to the General Electric Research Laboratory (GERL) in Schenectady. In the years following WWII, the company experimented with dumping dry ice (frozen CO₂) from planes into hurricanes as they formed in the hope of mitigating their impact. Controversy emerged when it was revealed that following one such experiment, a hurricane had deviated from its expected course and increased its power, rather than weakened, as the researchers had hoped.

But the idea that dumping as much dry ice as a single person can carry could produce effects as vast as a radical shift in wind direction across an entire continent, despite scientists’ hubris about the sheer power of CO₂, was fanciful indeed. It turned out that the natural variability of storm systems was (and still is) far greater than any signal of change that could be detected from such weather-altering experiments.

More modest than nipping destructive storms in-the-bud, but slightly more effective, attempts to seed clouds and to encourage rainfall in arid regions using agents such as silver iodide followed, building on hypotheses developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to research from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), (a Congressional precursor to DOGE) more than 70 years later, however, considerable uncertainties remain. “Cloud seeding operations can only enhance precipitation when the right kind of clouds are present,” explains the GAO.

One of the scientists involved in GERL’s experiments with dry ice and silver iodide was Bernard Vonnegut, brother of the acclaimed science fiction author, Kurt. On hearing of his brother’s work, Kurt saw the potential for plots, if not for the world, in the weaponisation of weather modification. Since at least Shelly in 1818, cautions about scientific hubris has driven many such plots. And a war-weary Vonnegut satirised the ambitious project in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle – not as Frankenweather, but an eco-weapon called Ice-nine that raises the freezing temperature of water it comes into contact with, with predictable planet-killing consequences.

Despite his doomsaying, I’ll not hear anything against Kurt Vonnegut. He saw humanity at its most depraved. As a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany, he witnessed both the acts of slaughter instigated by ideology supposedly emerging from 'science' and the industrialised killing of women and children in Dresden, where he had taken refuge in an underground abattoir – a trauma that inspired Slaughterhouse Five. Following the bombing, he was tasked with pulling human remains out of the ash and rubble. And barely out of childhood, his early adult years were further marked by reflection on the war having been terminated by the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such events are going to leave a disorienting mark on one’s soul that forces anarchistic questions about humanity – it would be unhuman not to ask questions about inhumanity. Vonnegut’s answer is to find a very particular form of humour in the deep bleakness, which one can take or leave on the bookshelf.

But we cannot take or leave science fiction that escapes books to find its way into newspapers, online commentary and government departments. Despite the very obvious limitations of using chemical agents to modify weather – i.e., despite the facts – the story, much like climate change alarmism, takes on its own power. It grows roots in both the green camp and the one-time sceptic camp – with climate advocates and Net Zero critics now seemingly united by a synthesis of their positions. The catastrophic agent is neither CO₂ nor silver iodide. It is sheer weirdness – a contagious departure from reality.

The threat of real war is real. Real bombs fall on real people and tear them to bits. And real antagonisms develop between real peoples. Real points of conflict have developed in Ukraine and in the Middle East, with potential to far exceed these theatres as their players seek to further draw the rest of the world into their crises. Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world seeks to find advantage in the chaos.

Yet the reality of bombs and wars does not seem to be sufficient for the classes that seem to be most protected from reality. Rather than mitigating the antagonisms, they seem bent on further fuelling them – now with lurid fantasies about Russian interference in clouds. And if they aren’t bent on that (and even if they are), then they are bent on the idea that we have already inadvertently modified clouds, which are supposedly driving the wars themselves, among other things, leading to our inevitable doom. A better idea, I suggest, would be to not allow governments to lower our expectations to mere survival of whichever crises they are trying to legitimise themselves with today.

Yet even critics of governments believe that clouds have been doctored by governments apparently indifferent to the risks – much as the humans tried to destroy the machines in The Matrix, though in the real-world case with no sense of irony in also pushing the solar power policy agenda – the 'rooftop revolution'.

And that is why I won't fall for any part of the weather modification story. The plot has too many parents to have been authored. But it might just as well have been designed to unsettle, with the consequent anxiety deployed to marshal people towards their slavery. The wild and weird sci-fi plot, implausible, counterfactual, daft, is an opportunity that might be grabbed by those in service to other narratives to sow chaos. This chaos is not liberating. It reflects paranoid delusions, and delusions of grandeur, afflicting Whitehall, the news media and social media alike – an incapacity to make sense of the world so as to address its problems. Perhaps the Russians did it then, after all.