The Human Offensive | Oct. 10, 2024
By Daniel Taylor
“Do we mean that because we have learned to navigate the tides we shall also control them? … We have already begun the attempts to regulate local weather. Where do we think we shall stop — with the control of the speed of rotation of the earth, of its revolution around the sun? … Pride goeth before a fall.” – Chester Bernard, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, as quoted in the Foundation’s 1948 Annual Report
A 2023 study published with the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation lamented that “conspiracy theories” on social media have ignited widespread opposition to geoengineering projects, specifically solar radiation management (SRM). The “contagion” is admittedly making it more difficult to promote “public acceptance of more sustainable lifestyles“.
One of the main authors of the study, Dr. Ramit Debnath, works at the university of Cambridge where he uses “...justice theory, NLP, machine learning and AI to reduce misinformation, recover trust and remove skepticism. His broader goal is to improve public understanding of climate change.”
The authors write in the 2023 study titled “Conspiracy spillovers and geoengineering“:
“…there is public opposition to research and deployment of SRM technologies. We use 814,924 English-language tweets containing #geoengineering globally over 13 years (2009–2021) to explore public emotions, perceptions, and attitudes toward SRM using natural language processing, deep learning, and network analysis. We find that specific conspiracy theories influence public reactions toward geoengineering, especially regarding ‘‘chemtrails’’”
The tone of the paper reflects the elitist disdain of the general public, stating:
“The concerns and criticisms of SG discussed above largely reflect expert opinion rather than public perceptions and attitudes toward SG.”
The authors write that “fake news” organizations reporting on geoengineering is a “contagion” of negative emotion that has a “long-lasting negative impact on beliefs about climate change and on public acceptance of more sustainable lifestyles.”
The paper admits that Bill Gates SCoPEx project was met with wide spread resistance on social media:
“A significant rise in Twitter activity was also observed following reporting about the SCoPEx (Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment) project, led by David Keith and colleagues at Harvard University and supported by a consortium of funders that also included Bill Gates, a long-standing favorite target of conspiracy theorists.”
The study features a chart that lists tweets based on their “toxicity score”:
Dr Debranth “gratefully acknowledges support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” in publishing the study.
The true history of weather modification, rather than being a conspiracy theory, is rooted in proven facts. Chester Bernard, who served as president of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1948-1952, was unquestionably a member of the establishment. He saw what the Rockefeller Foundation and much of the scientific community was attempting to do and spoke out against it, but couched his criticism with the assumption of pure motives. Bernard writes in the Rockefeller Foundation’s 1948 Annual Report,
“Inherent in our systematic efforts to promote the welfare of mankind there may be an assumption that… by reason and science we may govern the future of unborn generations in ways that we know are right… Do we mean that because we have learned to navigate the tides we shall also control them? … We have already begun the attempts to regulate local weather. Where do we think we shall stop — with the control of the speed of rotation of the earth, of its revolution around the sun? … Pride goeth before a fall.“