- Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a form of geoengineering that aims to cool off the Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space
- The controversial strategy comes with significant risks, but that didn’t stop The White House from moving forward with a research plan for “solar and other rapid climate interventions”
- The congressionally mandated research plan is focused on atmospheric-based approaches, such as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and marine cloud brightening (MCB)
- SRM can have unintended consequences, including lower average precipitation, loss of biodiversity and impacts to food production, along with heightening geopolitical tensions
- There’s also a risk that climate modification technologies could be weaponized against the global population by controlling rainfall and drought
Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a form of geoengineering that aims to cool off the Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space.1 The controversial strategy comes with significant risks, but that didn’t stop the White House from moving forward with a research plan for “solar and other rapid climate interventions.”2
The congressionally mandated research plan is focused on atmospheric-based approaches, such as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and marine cloud brightening (MCB), as opposed to space-based approaches, which include mirrors in space, or white roofs and other local-scale measures to increase surface reflectance.3
The research “would help to prepare the United States for possible deployment of SRM by other public and private actors,” the report notes,4 suggesting the government is seriously considering use of this extremely risky technology — if it hasn’t already decided to move forward.
What Is Stratospheric Aerosol Injection?
SAI involves injecting reflective aerosol particles into the stratosphere, where they reflect sunlight away from the Earth.5 Volcanic eruptions are natural versions of SAI, but technological constraints surround man-made SAI, as “dispersing aerosols in sufficiently high altitudes is challenging,” according to a Climate Analytics report.6 The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) explained:7
“In effect, SAI simulates what happens during large volcanic eruptions, when volcanoes emit small particles into the upper atmosphere (called the stratosphere). These particles reflect sunlight and lead to cooling for as long as they remain in the stratosphere, which may be up to a few years after injection.
By injecting sulfate or other aerosol particles into the stratosphere, SAI would mimic the cooling effect of a large volcanic eruption’s effect of lower global temperatures. If ever deployed, SAI would have global impacts, reducing temperatures and altering precipitation patterns across the planet.”
By reflecting more solar radiation back into space, the aerosols lower global temperatures but also have a serious “side effect” — they lower average precipitation. As a result, additional geoengineering techniques — such as thinning out cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere — would be necessary to counteract the decrease in precipitation.8 The White House report also highlighted potential issues with SAI, noting:9
“SAI approaches could worsen soil acidity, with impacts to food production, compared to warming at Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) levels without SAI in some regions due to acidic deposition (e.g., the Pacific Northwest, southern Greenland, the Himalayas, and polar regions).
The impacts of sunlight scattering could have negative effects on crop growth that harm nutrition and negate the benefits of limiting temperature increases using SAI. SRM would not address ocean acidification or its implications for ocean ecosystems.”
Other problems include the potential that SAI could result in increased exposure to particulate matter from the injected aerosols and “changes in radiative forcing,” which could offset any potential health benefits from SAI, such as reduced ozone formation. There’s also concern that SAI could increase wildfires and smoke exposures in some areas, as well as increase health impacts due to waterborne disease in others.10
What Is Marine Cloud Brightening?
MCB involves spraying salt or other chemicals into marine clouds in order to increase their reflectiveness.11 “Ship tracks over the ocean demonstrate the mechanism underpinning MCB,” according to the White House report.12 UCS explained, “MCB would involve spraying sea salt into low-lying marine clouds to enhance their brightness and reflectivity in order to increase regional-scale cooling.”13
Little research into MCB has been conducted, but field trials have already begun in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Using a seawater sprayer attached to a barge, seawater is sprayed into the air, creating sea salt crystals. “These crystals float into the sky to form a fog and bolster the existing clouds’ reflectivity,” according to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.14
The “brightened” clouds may also stay above the reef longer than ordinary clouds, reflecting even more sunlight.15 The problem, however, is that this untested strategy could have unintended consequences.
“Potential negative effects could include influencing local weather patterns, potentially mildly suppressing rainfall over the reef and adjacent land,” the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program explained.16 David Keith, Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics with Harvard University, added that several “key risks” exist for marine cloud brightening, which is why his research team does not focus on it:17
“Even if marine cloud brightening could work, it could affect large scale climate and weather patterns if it were used on a large enough scale, say to achieve a level of “radiative forcing” that would be big enough to offset some of the greatest impacts of climate change.
(This is because marine cloud brightening could only be implemented in limited areas, where the right kinds of clouds exist, which is perhaps only 10 percent of the planet’s surface.) There are several key risks that need to be better understood.”
Increasing Geopolitical Tensions
Adding to the controversy, the use of SRM carries “significant geopolitical risks,” the White House report noted.18 An example of this occurred in 2023, when a startup team — Make Sunsets — said it had launched weather balloons containing helium and sulfur dioxide (SO2) into Mexican skies in order to alter the stratosphere.19
The company was selling “cooling credits” via its website for $10, in exchange for releasing 1 gram of SO2. The Mexican government fought back, however, announcing plans to “prohibit and, where appropriate, stop experimentation practices with solar geoengineering,” causing the team to suspend its operations.20 However, Make Sunsets is still reportedly planning to conduct further weather modification experiments in the U.S.
But the fact remains, if and when SRM becomes widely used, it will have global effects that transcend borders. Supercomputers have run models to predict how solar radiation management may affect different parts of the Earth, not only in terms of temperature but also rainfall and snowfall. Govindasamy Bala, from the Indian Institute of Science and author of a U.N. climate report, said “the science is there,”21 but it’s far from an exact one.
“I think the next big question is,” Bala told Reuters, “do you want to do it? … That involves uncertainty, moral issues, ethical issues and governance.” As Reuters reported, “That’s because every region would be affected differently. While some regions could gain in an artificially cooler world, others could suffer by, for example, no longer having conditions to grow crops.”22 Paulo Artaxo, environmental physicist at University of Sao Paulo and another report author, added:23
“Basically the message is more or less the same as (the previous report): The science is not mature enough. The side effects of any of the known geoengineering techniques can be very significant … Society has to consider if these side effects are too big to try any strategy.”
Will Biodiversity Suffer?
Among the risks outlined by the White House were those related to biodiversity. Again, it’s impossible to know what ramifications alterations to the stratosphere, clouds and sunlight reaching the Earth could have.
“SRM would likely also affect ecosystem functioning like net primary productivity and more integrative aspects of ecosystems like biodiversity, for example, because SRM may increase the proportion of diffuse rather than direct incoming solar radiation,” the White House noted,24 adding:25
“Implementing SRM is expected to limit the risks to biodiversity associated with higher temperatures but is also expected to affect the characteristics of solar radiation and potentially cloud cover (associated with changing precipitation patterns) without impacting higher CO2 levels.
These changes could have significant effects on vegetation and ecosystem health broadly, leading to unknown impacts to biodiversity, particularly when combined with other anthropogenic stressors (deforestation, urbanization, chemical use, etc.).”
What’s more, if geoengineering were started and then abruptly stopped, it would “significantly increase the threats to biodiversity from climate change,” according to researchers in Nature Ecology & Evolution.26
This means geoengineering could cause significant damage. In a news release from Springer Nature, it’s explained that, once started geoengineering is too dangerous to stop — but given the politicized nature of the technology, such rapid starts and stops are likely:27
“Abrupt termination causes changes in local climates that are 2-4 times more rapid than those caused by climate change itself … in many cases, rapid geoengineering threatens ecosystems by forcing species to move in one direction to maintain similar temperature conditions and a different direction for similar precipitation conditions.
Biodiversity-rich areas, such as tropical oceans and the Amazon basin, are particularly likely to be affected negatively. These results indicate that geoengineering, and, in particular, its rapid termination, could cause irreversible loss of biodiversity.”
Could Geoengineering Backfire, Lead to Agricultural Control?
There are other concerns about geoengineering’s nefarious side, particularly since Bill Gates remains heavily invested in climate modification technologies that not only will destabilize the Earth’s climate systems more, but also can be weaponized against the global population by controlling rainfall and drought. In a previous interview I conducted with Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., she explained:28
“The company that collects patents on gene-edited organisms, both in health and agriculture, is Editas, founded by a main financial investor for the Gates Foundation. Gates is also a big investor in Editas.
So, here’s a company called Editas to edit the world as if it is a Word program. The two scientists who got the Nobel Prize this year have both been funded in their research by Gates. My mind went back to how Rockefeller financed the research, got the Nobel Prize, and then made the money.
So, you finance the research. Then you finance the public institutions, whether they be national or international. You invest and force them down the path where they can only use what is your patented intellectual property. And, as he has said in an interview, his smartest investment was vaccines, because it is a 1-to-20 return. Put $1 in and make $20. How many billions of dollars have been put in? You can imagine how many trillions will be made.
At the end of it, where does food come from? It comes from seed. He wants to control it. It comes from land. He’s controlling that. He’s became the biggest farmland owner [in the U.S.]. But you need weather [control]. You need a stable climate.
So, what could be a weapon of control of agriculture? Weather modification. He calls it geoengineering. This is engineering of the climate. Again, making it look like he’s going to solve global warming by creating global cooling.”
You can follow the rapid expansion of geoengineering research and experimentation via an interactive online geoengineering map created by ETC Group and the Heinrich Boell Foundation. More than 1,700 such projects have already been identified.29
- 1, 7, 13 Union of Concerned Scientists October 29, 2020
- 2, 3 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, About This Report
- 4 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Executive Summary
- 5, 11 ODI October 21, 2022
- 6 Climate Analytics March 2023
- 8, 21, 22, 23 Reuters August 10, 2021
- 9 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Page 32
- 10 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Page 30
- 12 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Page 13
- 14 Great Barrier Reef Foundation February 21, 2023
- 15, 16 Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program
- 17 Harvard University, David Keith’s Research Group, Marine Cloud Brightening
- 18 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Page 7
- 19, 20 Time January 19, 2023
- 24 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Page 11
- 25 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Page 33
- 26 Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 2, pages 475–482 (2018)
- 27 Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, Scimex January 23, 2018
- 28 Mercola Transcript Vandana Shiva
- 29 Geoengineering Map
Article cross-posted from Dr. Mercola’s site.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.




