African official urges nations to unite against ‘environmental manipulation techniques’ funded by leftist billionaires

A Nigerian climate scientist is out with a column for The New York Times in which he demands that leftist billionaires like Bill Gates and George Soros stop trying to use the continent of Africa as their laboratory.

“My Continent Is Not Your Giant Climate Laboratory,” the column’s blunt headline reads.

In the piece, Dr. Chukwumerije Okereke specifically complains about Western climate zealots and billionaires trying to convince Asian countries to adopt extremely experimental, high-risk proposed climate change solutions like solar geoengineering.

“As a climate expert, I consider these environmental manipulation techniques extremely risky. And as an African climate expert, I strongly object to the idea that Africa should be turned into a testing ground for their use,” he writes.

“Even if solar geoengineering can help deflect heat and improve weather conditions on the ground — a prospect that is unproven on any relevant scale — it’s not a long-term solution to climate change,” he adds.

Plus, he continues, given how experimental these proposed solutions happen to be, it’s possible they may worsen things in Africa.

“Africa is already suffering the effects of climate change, such as drought, floods and erratic weather. And while geoengineering advocates see these technologies as a solution to such problems, the technologies run the danger of upsetting local and regional weather patterns — intensifying drought or flooding, for example, or disrupting monsoon cycles,” Okereke writes.

“And the long-term impact on regional climate and seasons is still largely unknown. Millions, perhaps billions, of people’s livelihoods could be undermined,” he adds.

Either directly or indirectly. For example, one possible risk he cites is investments in solar geoengineering taking money away from other climate change solutions that actually work like renewable energy.

And, he continues, there’s the time factor: “These technologies would also theoretically need to be deployed essentially forever to keep warming at bay.”

“Stopping would unleash the suppressed warming of the carbon dioxide still accumulating in the atmosphere in a temperature spike known as ‘termination shock.’ One study found that the temperature change after ending solar radiation management could be up to four times as large as what’s being caused by climate change itself,” he explains.

This brings him to Soros and Gates.

(Source: Government works)

Okereke notes in his column that Western researchers, particularly those in the United States, who are interested in solar geoengineering are having no difficulty drumming up the funds needed to conduct their research.

Why? Because of Soros and Gates.

The Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program has been expanding rapidly, supported by Bill Gates and philanthropists from Silicon Valley, while George Soros recently announced his intention to back solar geoengineering projects in the Arctic,” he writes.

According to Okereke, all this raises the question of whether researchers should even be messing around with solar geoengineering.

Indeed, he notes that over 400 senior climate change scientists and scholars from across the globe have called for a ban on this emerging technology, in part because of rogue solar geoengineering projects like the one recently pursued by Make Sunsets, an American startup, without proper approval.

“Mexico says it will prohibit experiments with solar geoengineering, a strategy that purports to reverse global warming by reflecting sunlight but is still fraught with concern over other potential consequences that could come with altering Earth’s atmosphere. The move follows controversial attempts by a geoengineering startup to deploy reflective particles into the stratosphere,” The Verge reported in January.

“The company, called Make Sunsets, conducted the field tests without prior notice or consent from the Mexican government, according to the ban announced late last week by the country’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources. The ban is meant to protect communities and the environment in the absence of any international agreements for how to regulate this kind of experimentation that could have consequences on a planetary scale, the announcement says.”

Okereke says that the way the company chose to run to Mexico to test out its experimental technology reeks of colonialism.

“The decision to test the technology without permission or notice was reckless, and the decision to do it in Latin America echoed some of the worst aspects of colonialism,” he writes.

Okereke concludes his column by urging all African countries to not let climate zealots and billionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates run roughshod over them like Make Sunsets tried to do to Mexico.

“African nations should strongly resist letting their territories be used for experimental exercises like this. And they must join efforts to strengthen the de facto moratorium (under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity) on the development and deployment of these technologies,” he writes.

“The technologies are potentially dangerous, and a major distraction from the real change that we all know wealthier nations need to make if we have a hope of outrunning climate devastation,” he concludes.

Vivek Saxena

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