Playing God: Bill Gates Pushes Use of Sun-Dimming Technology at ‘Climate Tipping Point’
In an interview with Axios last month at Caltech, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — who often presents himself as an authority on medicine and climate science — acknowledged that he has funded multiple geoengineering research efforts, including work that explores the possibility of dimming the sun to cool the planet.
Gates said such drastic action should only be considered if the world reaches what Axios described as “climate tipping points.” At that stage, he suggested, humanity “would then need to reach for some other type of intervention.” Gates has previously funded Harvard’s solar geoengineering program, though the full extent of his support in this field remains unclear.
“Yes, I’ve been a funder of trying to understand geoengineering,” Gates told Axios.
Fortunately, he also emphasized that he doesn’t expect sun-dimming deployment anytime soon. “No way am I pushing the world in that direction,” he said, though he believes the research itself could prove “quite valuable.”
As usual, Axios added the standard disclaimer that researchers must fully understand the potential consequences before anything is attempted.
But we already know the basic mechanics. Sun-dimming proposals often involve releasing sulfuric-acid particles into the upper atmosphere to imitate the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions.
Putting aside ongoing debates over climate change and the political tendencies of its most zealous advocates, it raises a simple question: why attempt to replicate something nature has already shown can be catastrophic?
History offers a vivid warning. In April 1815, Indonesia’s Mount Tambora erupted in the most powerful volcanic event ever recorded, killing nearly 100,000 people. The ash cloud lingered so long that 1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer.”
Even then-elderly Founding Father Thomas Jefferson kept meticulous notes. In May 1816, he recorded unusually cold temperatures, repeated frosts, and severe declines in early crops. He noted that the weather destroyed fruit, tobacco, and wheat harvests, and that snow still covered Quebec in mid-April.
By September, Jefferson described Virginia’s summer as resembling a “moderate winter.” Rainfall was a fraction of normal levels. Frosts hit states up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Corn was devastated. Bread-grain production fell to the point where he feared Americans might not have enough food to survive the coming year.
In short, attempts to artificially dim the sun would mean deliberately invoking forces that, just 200 years ago, led to widespread crop failures and the real threat of starvation.
Yet Gates and other geoengineering enthusiasts continue to flirt with these ideas — ideas proven by history to be anything but harmless.
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