How are you enjoying the weather?
Britain is having an absolutely glorious summer. As I sit writing this, I am lounging in my garden; my clematis is already beginning to flower and my dog is sunbathing, his head rising only occasionally to contemplate the raucous adulation of the birds, who exalt in the majesty of the season and sing that we may enjoy Deep England without words.
England in the divine languor of May! Who could possibly find fault with her, as Wordsworth wrote, “whose sway tempers the year’s extremes”? Who would seek to change the idle stillness of our sun-drenched days?
But there is always someone who objects. And I regret to inform you that the WOKE MOB wants to transition your sun.
ARIA, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, has pledged over £50 million to 21 geoengineering projects, including five real-world trials. Funded experiments include spraying seawater into the sky to brighten low-lying clouds, using drones to release electric charges that enhance cloud reflectivity and a study into the logistics of deploying a solar “sun shade” in space. Though they have officially denied that the intention of any of these experiments is to actually dim the sun, they are experiments that have little other purpose.
Aria was first set up in 2021 by Kwasi Kwarteng, then business secretary, and was originally the brainchild of Dominic Cummings. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Durham Svengali has been the most vociferous defender of the announcements. Responding to a Toby Young tweet detailing more information about the “quango”, he responded by saying:
It’s not a quango you dickhead – it’s a research agency and it pays people properly because it’s almost the only thing in Britain not daily vandalised by the Treasury, so it can hire great people in ways No10 and Cabinet Office can’t and it can *just do things* with great people instead of spending years looking at charlatan PPE powerpoints and wasting billions like the rest of Whitehall does.
Personally, I am less concerned about the exact institutional structure the boffins being paid by the government to try and dim the sun are working in, and more that the government is paying boffins to try and dim the sun. It may be marvellous that Aria can “just do things”, but what if the things it can just do are absolutely mental?
Geoengineering carries huge potential risks. A major one is the alteration of weather patterns. A study published in Nature Climate Change found that climate engineering efforts aimed at cooling California could inadvertently intensify heatwaves in Europe by mid-century. Similarly, it could disrupt precipitation patterns — modelling studies have shown that while dimming the sun might reduce temperatures in certain areas, it could also cause significant shifts in rainfall distribution, leading to droughts or floods.
Climate systems are extraordinarily complex, and many of these technologies cannot be definitively proven safe, effective, or reversible until they are already deployed. By that point, they could trigger a cascade of unforeseen higher-order effects, causing long-term or even irreversible harm to the planet’s climate.
But trying to dim the sun also has short term, as well as long term, consequences. Britain, for better or worse, is in the midst of a generational change to renewable energy, of which solar will be a huge part. Trying to pursue both these goals at the same time says much about the sheer idiocy that lies behind climate catastrophe mentalism. Blocking sunlight while expanding solar generation is dynamiting coal power stations whilst refusing to build new nuclear power plants. We’re told the grid must be decarbonised at all costs, yet the only proven, scalable, low-carbon baseload power — nuclear — is bogged down in bureaucracy, political cowardice, and decades of green anti-nuclear scaremongering. Meanwhile, gas stays online as the fallback we pretend we’re not relying on.
Like many climate “solutions”, dimming the sun is a massive overreaction that will deliver little
Then there’s the push for electric vehicles, which, we’re assured, are greener, cleaner, and the future of transport. Yet these same advocates would be certain to oppose the mining of the rare earth metals necessary to build EV batteries, and block the infrastructure upgrades — expanded grid capacity, charging stations — that would actually make mass adoption viable. Then, of course, there is the myopic focus on fighting climate change within the borders of Britain, which leads to many problems simply being outsourced to nations with lower environmental standards and reimported, causing vastly more ecological damage.
Like many climate “solutions”, dimming the sun is a massive overreaction that will deliver little beyond lowering living standards. If we really wanted to live in a nation that could “just do things”, there is a truly ambitious alternative that would both lessen the strength of the sun and harness it to generate power. It’s time Aria started funding research into building a Great British Dyson Sphere. Ed Miliband, please respond.
