The race in NC for US Senate heats up too
We were in Raleigh for a fundraiser dinner Saturday night, the hottest day of the year. It’s 80 F at 7 a.m. this Sunday morning here with 82 precent humidity. (Feels like 87 F, says the Weather Channel.) Tha temperature is on its way up to 97 F.
With that as backdrop, Politico reports on failed efforts last year to dim the sun and create clouds:
A team of researchers in California drew notoriety last year with an aborted experiment on a retired aircraft carrier that sought to test a machine for creating clouds.
But behind the scenes, they were planning a much larger and potentially riskier study of salt water-spraying equipment that could eventually be used to dim the sun’s rays — a multimillion-dollar project aimed at producing clouds over a stretch of ocean larger than Puerto Rico.
Politico obtained documents and other records on the billionaire-backed geoengineering effort otherwise out of public view in San Francisco Bay.
Last year’s experiment, led by the University of Washington and intended to run for months, lasted about 20 minutes before being shut down by Alameda city officials who objected that nobody had told them about it beforehand.
Oops.
The university and its partners — a solar geoengineering research advocacy group called SilverLining and the scientific nonprofit SRI International — didn’t respond to detailed questions about the status of the larger cloud experiment. But SilverLining’s executive director, Kelly Wanser, said in an email that the Marine Cloud Brightening Program aimed to “fill gaps in the information” needed to determine if the technologies are safe and effective.
What technologies?
Solar geoengineering encompasses a suite of hypothetical technologies and processes for reducing global warming by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth that are largely unregulated at the federal level. The two most researched approaches include releasing sulfate particles in the stratosphere or spraying saltwater aerosols over the ocean.
But critics of the technologies warn that they could also disrupt weather patterns — potentially affecting farm yields, wildlife and people. Even if they succeed in cooling the climate, temperatures could spike upward if the processes are abruptly shut down before countries have transitioned away from burning planet-warming fossil fuels, an outcome described by experts as “termination shock.”
One of those critics would be Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) who blamed the July 4 Texas flooding on geoengineering. She’s introduced a bill in Congress to criminalize such efforts. Naturally, former retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, a former national security adviser to President Donald Trump is all up in that.
Meanwhile, more than 575 scientists have called for a ban on geoengineering development because it “cannot be governed globally in a fair, inclusive, and effective manner.” And in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law last month that bans the injection or release of chemicals into the atmosphere “for the express purpose of affecting the temperature, weather, climate, or intensity of sunlight.”
Frankly, we might have welcomed some manmade cooling last night in Raleigh where Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), rumored to be a 2028 candidate for president, spoke to Tar Heel Democrats:
“Folks, 2026 can be our year, but we’re going to have to fight for it,” the second-term Democratic governor from the Midwest told a packed room Saturday night at the Talley House on the campus of N.C. State University. “And the values at our rallies need to be front and center.”
Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper introduced Pritzker. Axios reported last week that Cooper will enter the 2026 U.S. Senate race to fill the seat of retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis. As part of his greeting to the crowd, Cooper asked anyone in the room planning on running for office to stand. As applause began to die, Cooper winked, “I’m not sitting down, am I?”
And the crowd went wild. But there was no formal announcement, although Pritzker dropped a couple of undisguised comments about the next phase of Cooper’s career.
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