23 April 2025 - UK Launches £50m Outdoor Geoengineering Trials to Tackle Climate Change
UK scientists to launch outdoor geoengineering experiments
Damian Carrington (The Guardian, 22/04/2025)
UK scientists are to launch outdoor geoengineering experiments as part of a £50m government-funded programme. The experiments will be small-scale and rigorously assessed, according to Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), the UK government agency backing the plan, and will provide “critical” data needed to assess the potential of the technology. The programme, along with another £11m project, will make the UK one of the biggest funders of geoengineering research in the world.
Geoengineering trials defended as ‘missing part’ of climate science
Frances Jones (Research Professional News, 22/05/2025)
Small-scale geoengineering trials are a “critical missing part” of how climate scientists understand the ways that Earth could be cooled, according to the leader of a £57 million UK research programme which has ignited controversy. Mark Symes, a professor of electrochemistry at the University of Glasgow, is the programme director for “exploring climate cooling” at the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria).
Get your tinfoil hats out: Labour is officially funding chemtrails experiments
Steve Topple (The Canary, 22/04/2025)
In a revelation that will surely delight conspiracy theorists everywhere, the long-ridiculed notion of “chemtrails” has been given a new lease of life — and it’s happening right over our heads in the UK. Yes, those alleged trails in the sky, once dismissed as the wild fantasies of internet forums and late-night radio hosts, have graduated to official, government-sanctioned scientific experiments aimed at geoengineering the climate. Call it “chemtrail reality,” coming soon to a cloud near you.
The UK’s gamble on solar geoengineering is like using aspirin for cancer
Raymond Pierrehumbert and Michael Mann (The Guardian, 12/03/2025)
Some years ago in the pages of the Guardian, we sounded the alarm about the increasing attention being paid to solar geoengineering – a barking mad scheme to cancel global heating by putting pollutants in the atmosphere that dim the sun by reflecting some sunlight back to space. In one widely touted proposition, fleets of aircraft would continually inject sulphur compounds into the upper atmosphere, simulating the effects of a massive array of volcanoes erupting continuously. In essence, we have broken the climate by releasing gigatonnes of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide, and solar geoengineering proposes to “fix” it by breaking a very different part of the climate system.
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