CIA Funds Study to Control Climate: More Fodder for Conspiracy Theorists

Conspiracy theorists will have a fun time with this one: The Central Intelligence Agency wants to fund a scientific study to investigate whether they can control the weather. Well, technically, it's to look for viable options to stop climate change.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is running its first ever geoengineering study to assess technological options for altering climate change, along with the risks involved - including dangers to national security. The NAS is splitting the $630,000 cost of the project with the CIA, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to Mother Jones.

Though the term "geoengineering" refers to deliberate large-scale human manipulation of the Earth and its atmosphere, the CIA isn't researching how to secretly send tornados and earthquakes to devastate its enemies. The project is aimed at studying only a few geoengineering projects, including solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal techniques, and then, only to "comment generally on the potential impacts of deploying these technologies, including possible environmental, economic, and national security concerns," according to the NAS website.

Still, the CIA is being coy about its involvement in the study. When asked about the NAS climate-alteration study, a spokesperson for the CIA told Mother Jones, "It's natural that on a subject like climate change the Agency would work with scientists to better understand the phenomenon and its implications on national security," but refused to confirm the CIA's role in the project.

Conspiracy!

Some conspiracy theorists have long believed that the U.S. Government has had some level of control over the atmosphere, up to and including the ability to cause natural disasters, such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes. One major target of conspiracy belief is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), a research program funded by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, the University of Alaska, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

DARPA is the Pentagon's high-tech research wing that has brought you such things as ATLAS, the humanoid robot, laser weapons for jet fighters, and the "BigDog" all-terrain robot.

HAARP is an ionospheric research program that conducts tests on high frequency radio waves in the ionsphere, hoping to improve communication technology, navigational systems, and gain a better knowledge of how the atmosphere works and interacts with technology that transmits radio waves in various forms. However, the main research facility, called the Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), is located in a remote part of Alaska, and includes a huge antennae array, which looks quite menacing.

Conspiracy theorists, including former Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura, have said the HAARP antennae array can manipulate weather, flip the Earth's magnetic poles at will, bombard people with mind-controlling radio waves, secretly take down airplanes, and cause power outages.

Reality

The geoengineering projects being studied by the NAS and CIA are much tamer and less mysterious. Solar radiation management is the idea of putting something in the sky to reflect sunlight back into space, before it reaches the Earth and causes the atmosphere to heat up; essentially a deliberate attempt to strengthen a partly human-caused phenomenon called "global dimming," which has mitigated some of global warming's effects. The phenomenon was measured during the almost complete shutdown of civilian air traffic in the days following 9/11 (another conspiracy favorite), when vapor from aircraft exhaust, called contrails (yet another conspiracy favorite), was all but absent from the sky.

Just the global dimming from contrails cooled the average temperature by about 1 degree Celsius. Solar radiation management includes several proposed techniques to augment that cooling, like putting reflective aerosols in the atmosphere, brightening clouds, and even putting reflective balloons in the air. It's one of the first things geoengineers have thought about, since it would be relatively cheap and technologically achievable, compared to more complicated ways to mitigate global warming.

The other technique, carbon dioxide removal, is an even less mysterious climate change-fighting tool. Since carbon dioxide is a prime greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, the idea is to remove it either from the atmosphere, or to develop technologies to "scrub" it out of the emissions of power plants and other carbon dioxide-producing technologies.

Of course, the NAS and CIA-funded study is not the first (or the last) time geoengineering has been studied. In fact, according to the ETC group, geoengineering projects and experiments, like cloud seeding (most notably by China for the Beijing Olympics), ocean fertilization, and solar radiation management, have already been happening across the globe.