Cloud seeding and the UK government

What ARIA are going to be funding and why we should object.

ARIA is the Advanced Research and Innovation Agency, a British government agency that attempts to drive new research in order to help technology start ups and support (by so doing), what they call, “social and economic change both here and across the world.” The targets set by this organisation state climate amongst their areas of interest, (first in the list in fact) followed by health, AI, Manufacturing and other things.

You will see how the company is made up in the picture above, (taken from their own annual report), and according to that document, it is entirely funded from the public purse. I would think that this entitles the people of this country to have some view about what they propose and decide to fund, hence this small missive.

Amongst a plethora of other things, the department has a high focus on DEI and espouses its equalitarian dogma wherever it can. I mention this owing to the fact that ARIA spend a good deal of time in their accounts talking about this and also to my experience of such things. You see, an increased focus on equity (the equality of outcome and the ‘E’ in DEI) inevitably leads to a reduced focus on employing the best people for the job as far as I can make out. The fact that large organisations around the world are divesting themselves of DEI and particularly ESG ideologies in favour of an equality of opportunity based system would tend to suggest many are finally beginning to see through this sort of ideological cant.

For the avoidance of doubt, this organisation is a creature of the government and nothing else. It will do what the cabinet asks it to do and it will both follow and reflect government policy. If the cabinet is committed to “preventing climate change” (which it is, at all costs it would appear), then those are the solutions it will seek.

In its statement, ARIA has annotated its approach to risk management- and stated that it takes a position of “high risk, high reward.” The ARIA definition of “high risk- high reward,” is not that clear and therefore one is forced to guess what exactly they might mean. This is clumsy.

Do ARIA mean that the research they wish to fund is high risk? What do they mean in terms of reward? Is the risk they perceive to the public? How will that be defined? They go some way towards a definition in terms of risk by indicating that they won’t fund research that would be unlawful and this should be obvious, but I find all this odd when, paradoxically, ARIA views risk to the environment to be very important and has placed this in its “low risk” category which means that it has committed not to undertake anything that would potentially damage the environment. This is important later on.

What are the heads of this business paid?

For anyone who hasn’t done the “back of a fag packet” calculation, the table above shows that only four people out the organisation are paid a total of £1,160,000 of your money. What are they up to then?

It turns out that one of the projects that ARIA is now looking to fund, (to the tune of approximately £50,000,000 I might add) is a project to experiment with three things- cloud brightening, space based solar reflectors and cirrus cloud thinning. Essentially, the target of the program is to lower the apparent warming of the planet by masking the heating effect of the sun, or to accelerate the rate at which heat from the planet is lost to space.

The published thesis that underpins this set of potential experiments is littered with problem areas and these start at on the very first page. The first sentences state:

Let us examine this statement. The first sentence talks about AGW being the large cause of global temperature increase. Not even the IPCC concur completely with that. They state that there is a medium possibility of this being the case which, according to their own definitions, means that they are not certain that the statement is true. The wording in the second sentence indicates that ARIA consider that there is no other cause to global temperature increase but human activity. This is preposterous.

ARIA go on to suggest that “excess greenhouse gases should be eliminated from the atmosphere.” Quite apart from the eye-watering cost of so doing, nowhere in the entire document do they suggest what the “correct” level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere might be. This is vague, simplistic and incomplete thinking on the part of ARIA.

The document goes on to discuss so called “tipping points” that is to say points at which some undefined but catastrophic change might occur on this planet. An example given is the melting of the Arctic winter sea ice which, by the way, was recorded recently as being thicker than for more than twenty years. The piece goes on to state:

What they are saying (essentially) is, “we don’t know when the tipping points are coming, or what they might be, or indeed how serious they might be, but we are certain that we need to do something because of the small amount (comparatively speaking) of CO2 released into the atmosphere by humans.” Such a position takes no account of the proxy evidence suggesting that atmospheric CO2 levels were much higher in the past than they are now and yet there were no catastrophic tipping points then. If there were, we might very well not be here now.

If one was to consider large scale interventions to cool the planet by some means or another, I would have thought that it would first be sensible to be a good deal more certain about the matter of what is causing the observed planetary heating which currently stands at about 1.3 degrees celsius since 1850. ARIA do not establish this, but merely rely on an “a priori” conclusion that humans cause the heating such as it is. As the first premise is clearly unsafe, we might conclude that so are all the subsequent ones.

The wording of the statements above (and the rest of the thesis) is vague at best. The piece is littered with words like, “might,” “could,” “may,” or “may not,” and so the list goes on. There is no certainty in the forecasts regarding temperature increases in the future and this is something upon which the thesis relies quite heavily. This is particularly the case where predictors use computer models, (I have discussed model based science elsewhere), yet this document gives every indication that the position with relation to model based predictions is unassailable. It is not.

I would suggest that when computer models predict into the future they are, by definition imprecise. In fact, they are a guess. The further such models peer into the future, the wider the margin of error turns out to be. I would also suggest that a model which cannot replicate with any accuracy what has happened in the past should not be relied upon too heavily as a good indicator of the future. Furthermore, it is not possible to prove a hypothesis using a model, only real world experiments can do that. It is notable that a number of the citations in the appendix to the thesis are for model based studies or even “thought experiments.” The justification for this set of experiments is being built on sand.

Let us now look at the suggested mitigations for temperature rise. The first, which is cloud brightening appears to involve seeding clouds with salt crystals in the hope that this whitening will reflect more heat away from the planet. It is posited that such work would be done at sea. The scale on which this would need to be done, even to create a suitable experiment would probably boggle most minds. Quite what the long term effects of this action might be is not really understood, but the likelihood of highly saline rain falling on good quality farmland would need to be carefully considered.

The second- space based reflectors is self explanatory and can be effectively dismissed as a viable contender owing to the potential expense, but is very likely to be replaced by “stratospheric aerosol injection” whereby materials are added to the atmosphere in a similar way that powerful volcanoes do when they emit dust and sulphur materials into the upper atmosphere. One may look at what happened when Mt Tambora erupted around two hundred years ago. The ensuing year was darker and colder and in some areas was called “the year with no summer.” It is clear that the effects of such eruptions last for many years and cannot be controlled easily.

The third- Cirrus Cloud thinning would, in all likelihood, involve some chemical interaction with the upper cloud layers in order to dissipate them and allow heat in the atmosphere to be conducted away to space. It might be added that if one thins clouds to accelerate heat loss, one also allows more solar radiation to reach the planet. This factor ought to be balanced against the “thinning” argument and doesn’t appear to be. Once again, we find ourselves in the arena of supposition. The science of the formation and propagation of clouds is still not fully understood and I would like to point out here that no climate model can accurately forecast cloud formation over a long period. The best one can do is to forecast weather five to seven days ahead. Ask the Met office.

If I may, I would reflect points two and three above and suggest that the only aerosols that could usefully be injected into the upper atmosphere are those that have agreed to fund this research.

Perhaps I could further point out that the idea of lowering the level of incoming sunshine to keep the planet cool, (we might call it the “Chinese restaurant problem”- they’re calling for a “dim sun”), would have knock on effects in other areas. The first and most obvious from the perspective of the UK might be the madcap idea to run the energy grid on sunshine and sea breezes. Lower sunlight equals less power from your panels. This might knock on to increased use of heating to stay warm, leading to higher demand on the grid. At some point, lower incoming sunshine will translate into less electricity. What would happen to Ed’s glorious rooftop solar revolution then?

In a recent exchange in parliament, the Millipede had no answer to questions from across the aisle aside apart from ad hominem and obfuscation. My own view is that this speaks for itself.

In any event, England is amongst the lowest recipients of solar radiation in the world. No one ever said to me, (or you I will warrant), “look here, there’s just too much sun in this country these days!” A much more common refrain regards the amount of water falling from the sky.

To conclude, I have just touched the edge of this subject and shown what I consider to be the briefest view of the uncertainty that appears to be underpinning the whole venture of attempting to meddle with the solar radiation reaching the surface of the planet. It is not acceptable to rely on guesswork and a flawed chain of logic when one is thinking of undertaking experiments on a system that is not completely understood. It is absolutely clear that the Earth’s climate system is a chaotic one and yet people are thinking about tinkering with it in a way that cannot be predicted and that may affect millions of people.

What is being suggested here is to embark upon the cooling of the planet. I note that in six major ice ages conditions got really quite hostile for life. Expansion was not uppermost on the list of priorities during such times. Survival was. It is the case without question that cold kills more than heat does. By the way, we are still living through the latest ice age (the Pleistocene) and we are rather fortunate to be living in a relatively warm period in it.

You may also like to know that, from a perspective of geological time, this is a considerably cooler period than the Earth has experienced for many millions of years. Earth has not often possessed ice caps and yet we have them now. It would also be remiss of me to not point out also that CO2 levels are much lower now than they have been for many millions of years and that no linear link has been established between atmospheric CO2 concentration and global temperature. You are being invited by ARIA and others to think that there is no other cause to global temperature rise than AGW, (ie- human CO2 emissions). This should cause you to wonder as the climate system in which you live is much more complex than that.

What is most egregious about this whole matter is the degree to which ideology is taking hold in groups like ARIA. It is so often the case that vaguely worded statements, experimental data and model based predictions are presented as fact and that these organisations seem to have no capability to think and reason in a critical way. Those who have a different point of view are often derided and insulted. This often happens owing to bad actors who like to operate character destruction of those who think differently to them. Very often we can witness a “herd reaction” to commonly held beliefs and these reactions, whilst natural from an evolutionary perspective, are very hard to shake loose from, especially when a balanced view can be harder to find.

This is where we find ourselves right now. We appear to be in thrall to a small and noisy cabal of religiously motivated people, (like Ed Millipede) who are convinced of the correctness of their position and are totally unable to alter their thinking. These people cannot accept that there may be other reasons why global temperatures have risen in the last two hundred years or so. Human activity may only be a tangential (possibly inconsequential) aspect of this temperature rise, especially when one considers that the AGW content of CO2 output is estimated to amount to around 5% of the total of all CO2 emissions. That is to say 5% of 0.04%. Do you believe that AGW CO2 emissions could be the sole driver of global temperature rise at that level? This is what you are being asked to accept.

In case anyone is wondering, this is not a treatise condemning research per se, but an argument to consider the underlying reasons for money being spent on this particular research. The thesis fails to make a strong enough case as far as I can see.

I ask myself: Is this research a useful thing to do? Is there actually a problem to be solved? Is it safe to research? What chance is there that much more damage could be done than the research seeks to mitigate? Could the government spend this money more wisely elsewhere, particularly right now?

If you think that dimming the sun is the right path to pursue, I would paraphrase Cromwell when I say to you, “think it possible in the bowels of Christ that you may be wrong?”

I believe that these schemes should be challenged robustly and a proper scientific basis formed before any experimentation is undertaken. From what I can see right now this is not being done and organisations like ARIA are jumping the gun by even suggesting research to geo-engineer the planet. Right now there are too many unknowns.

You may refer to the following links if you wish to look at ARIA in more depth:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66a388fa0808eaf43b50d7eb/aria-annual-report-and-accounts-2023-24.pdf

https://www.aria.org.uk