Secretive government unit

Planning to dim the sun

Petition Make all forms of 'geo-engineering' affecting the environment illegal

We want all forms of geo-engineering to be illegal in the UK. Earth's natural systems.

More people now aware of the Government’s opaque research arm.

The Advanced Research and Invention Agency

Set up in 2021 by Kwasi Kwarteng, the brainchild of Dominic Cummings

Few people on the street know what it is, what it does, or how well financed it is by us mear tax payers

Sure, it has a shiny website stocked with techno-waffle promising to help scientists

“reach for the edge of the possible” and foster “opportunity spaces”

but there has been little clarity on its day-to-day operations.

This week, we learnt it will spend £56.8 million on 21 “climate cooling” projects,

including looking into the logistics of building a “sun shade” in space,

and injecting plumes of salt water into the sky to reflect sunlight away from Earth.

Representatives from Advanced Research and Invention Agency said rather disingenuously at a press briefing

“We’re not trying to dim the sun,”

I would have thought, that is the experiments succeed that is exactly the intended outcome?????

Prof Mike Hulme, Cambridge University

experiments were setting Britain on a “slippery slope”

towards mass deployment of technologies that will be impossible to prove are safe, effective and reversible until they are actually in the sky.

Professor Hulme warned

“£57 million is a huge amount of taxpayers’ money,

to be spent on this assortment of speculative technologies intended to manipulate the Earth’s climate.”

Advanced Research and Invention Agency has been given an £800 million budget to play with, with little to show for it so far, except some off-the-wall ideas, and astronomically high wage bills.

The chief executive, paid around £450,000 annually

(x3 the PM)

chief finance officer, around £215,000

Chief product officer, around £175,000.

Overall, 37 staff being paid £4.1 million a year on wages

Essentially Aria is operating like a private company, but doing so on public finances.

Playing poker with public money

In January, it announced it would be giving £69 million to research on neural robots for epilepsy treatment, genetic engineering of brain cells and lab-grown brain organoids.

Also funding an NHS trial to use a brain computer interface that alters brain activity using ultrasound,

in the hopes it will treat depression and addiction, as well as investing in synthetic plants and chromosomes.

It is operating like a speculative venture capital fund, essentially playing poker with the public purse.

When sun-dimming experiments were first mooted last month, one Telegraph reader liked it to “what Hanna-Barbera might have dreamed up to foil Dick Dastardly in Wacky Races”.

“Are these people insane?” asked another.

Aria, sits in a shady no-man’s land, in charge of eye-watering amounts of public cash, but with little genuine accountability to the public, for all its talk of transparency and consultation.

It is exempt from freedom of information requests,

Many people may be thinking perhaps now is not the time for such blue sky thinking.

BBC

What are the concerns?

Studies have shown that SRM could cause strong warming high above the tropics,

changing large-scale weather patterns,

warming the polar regions and altering rainfall patterns around the world.

Brightening cloud off the coast of Namibia in south-west Africa could induce drought over South America,

affecting the Amazon rainforest.

For Stratospheric Aerosol Injection techniques, new aircraft, flying at an altitude of 12 miles, aerosols such as sulphur.

To inject at 8 miles, using existing aircraft, three times more aerosol would be needed

This would strongly increase side-affects such as acid rain.

No international legislation of geo-engineering

so private companies or governments are essentially able to do what they like.

Talk of high altitude balloons in the US releasing at hydrogen and sulphur dioxide 12 miles