— Man can dim the sun by policy, just as volcanoes dim it by eruptive excitement and towers of ash.
— The material that would give the most bang for the black-budget buck is a light metal, such as aluminum.
— Science is able to make aluminum particles stay aloft by a dot of barium for each nanodisk sent aloft.
— Dr. Sacci’s theoretical solar shield is one of three possible ways to make the sun less powerful.
— Others include reflective colors on the ground and the green agenda.
— Putting aluminum nanoparticulate into fuel as a lubricant would work to create artificial clouds.
— The industrial creation of a bright atmospheric mist such as the kind that often blankets Chattanooga has a downside: It might not let heat escape.
More people have taken notice of the modern sky. They are observing what appears to be a program of horizon-to-horizon plumes that spread into a drifting haze and blot the sun. If Dr. Sacci’s observation about the danger of a “feedback loop” is right, we might surmise that federal intervention over the skies is worsening the purported current trend toward warmer temps.
Here's our July 29, 2014, conversation at Chattanooga station Hot News Talk Radio 1240 and 910
David J. Tulis: I have been going out on a limb writing about stratospheric aerosol geo-engineering, which is the mouthful commonly called — disparagingly called — chemtrailing.
Chemtrailing is a word used by people who insist no such thing is taking place and is used as kind of a term of art which is intended to suggest that the people who talk about this are somehow kooky or they’ve read one too many books on the Knights Templar or Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati group.
To get my feet back on the ground, we’re going to talk to Robert Sacci. He has a doctorate of chemistry from the University of Victoria in British Columbia in Canada and a father of two children and lives in Ringgold, Ga.
Dr. Sacci is a research scientist in energy storage technology.
I’ve asked Robert about my theories regarding the crisscrossing trails over Chattanooga and made observations to him about my perceptions of the weather and our continuously milky white sky, what I call a perpetual haze over Chattanooga.
I’m theorizing some. I’m making observations. I’m using my eyes, which are, by the way, a powerful scientific instrument. Observation is a primary basis upon which you could say science begins.
Sacci skeptic on chemtrailing
[Robert,] you’re not convinced by my arguments and I think that will helpful for my listener to understand. You’re kind of a stratospheric aerosol geoengineering skeptic. You’re kind of neutral. You view this issue from a neutral position?
Robert Sacci: Yes, I mean, there’s no, as far as my understanding — no formal precedent or program to purposefully put elements into the air. But as far as could it actually happen and would it work in some capacity? That I’m not a skeptic of. There’s good research on being able to do this, how one may conduct these sorts of tests. But as far as is it taking place currently, that I would be more of a skeptic or reserve judgment.
Tulis: Well, that’s helpful for my listener to realize that you’re not buying my argument or even my reporting and my analysis, which are to a degree speculative.
So that means you’ll be more objective than perhaps I might be since I greatly admire “the good people” of our government and I’m very confident they have tremendous power and authority and technology by which they can have a program.
So what we’ll be talking about then is geo-engineering and some of the details in theory and we’re going to be asking you what you know as a chemist about how it would work.
So tell me Robert Sacci, how would a geoengineering project work? What are some of the things that are possible in that field?
Robert Sacci: Yes, so there’s many types of geo-engineering and it seems it would be more interesting to talk about climate engineering or engineering that we do with regards to solar radiation and temperature fluctuation.
But in a larger picture, we do geo-engineering all the time: making a path through the woods is geo-engineering.
Sky striping 1 of 3 options
But climate engineering — there’s more or less three things we can do — things in space, we can do things in the stratosphere and we can do things on the surface itself. And so the idea is, given those three areas, you know, kinda of what’s a tenable way to either, if we want to cool the earth, block radiation, if we want to take CO2 out, how do we gather that? So there are many different strategies that are proposed to do this and some of them are being used now, especially the surface based techniques.
Tulis: What’s happening on the surface? Or what is proposed on the surface?
Mirrors and white roofs
Robert Sacci: In California there are bills or incentives if you build a building or something like that to have it be more quote unquote green and that means having actual plants on your roof would help that or painting your roof white instead of having a black tarp top or roofing shingles that we have on almost every roof here in Southeast Tennessee. You can paint it white or use metal to increase reflectivity. This is just getting the sunlight instead of to absorb on the surface to get it to reflect back out into space. So there’s incentives there. You can get some tax deductions and things like that. That people in California or at least the governments in California are instituting. And those are typically your surface based techniques. Having a nice open field with crops, helps putting mirrors or reflective surfaces on your roof or the desert would help a lot of the sunlight to bounced back off the surface and be directed into space rather to be absorbed into our air.
So those are kind of more mild ways that we are doing some sort of climate engineering.
Tulis: So what is it in your analysis prospective in the second nearest form of geo-engineering which would be in the stratosphere — what does the scientific literature suggest is possible there?
Cloud creating nanoparticulates
Robert Sacci: In that case, there’s really two main things we can do. We can seed clouds or we can increase the overall reflectivity of clouds that are already present. And so with the former (the seeding of clouds) you would, either in an aerosol form, you would spray out a concentrated mist so water vapor which would then escalate and cascade and form clouds. You can also do this with very small ice crystals. Clouds would form off of those. Or even some salts. So silver salts, actually, are known to be able to seed clouds.
And one of the things laboratory study is silver iodide that you could seed clouds with that kind of chemical. As far as making clouds brighter or increasing their reflectivity, that you’re going there for is basically getting the light that’s traveling from the sun to the earth, getting it to increase the amount of light that’s bounced off so it doesn’t reach the earth’s surface.
Reflectivity of new clouds
In that case you would use more or less metal particles. So aluminum nanoparticles, barium particles in the stratosphere to hopefully increase the cloud’s reflectivity to where you minimize the amount of light that actually reaches the surface. It’s more like you put a dimmer, a piece of paper in front of a light bulb and it dims the light traveling through.
Tulis: Now over Chattanooga and Hamilton County, Robert Sacci, *** we have frequent overflights of jets that create clouds. It is a program which Paul Barys, the weather forecaster at a local TV station, says are just contrails, just emissions from jet fuel, The cold, damp air running through the engines and making crystals that form clouds. That’s how he describes and explains what’s happening.
My theory is much more ambitious — that this in fact is a program. And my theory seems to be borne out because on heavy chemtrail days, as we can call it, and about half the days we receive the treatment, by my record — clouds are formed by plane overflights. Their trails create giant, wispy cirruslike clouds and other types which seem to be very strange and kind of shapeless. And so my thinking is that we have this power. So what do you suppose is happening over Chattanooga? That we have (A) frequent flyovers of cloud-creating jets and (B) this milky white haze on the horizon which never seems to go away — it did yesterday though, but generally it doesn’t.
Robert Sacci: Yes, so we are in a very humid part of the country and as such the saturation level of water to precipitate out of the air is real close to that level. So when you burn fuel, any fuel, whether it be from your car or from a jet plane, you are producing more or less two compounds — and that is CO2 [carbon dioxide] and water. And it’s almost a one-to-one ratio sometimes two to one, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is you are producing a lot of water when jet fuel is burned and you are producing it in the higher elevation, which means the air is generally a little bit cooler and it is primed for heating up clouds.
So by itself, the burning of plane fuel or jet fuel can in fact seed the clouds. Now, whether those clouds are able to seed and then gather together, I agree, there is some kind of oddness to the trails in that they don’t bulk up and become a major cloud as one would think would happen if that is in fact what’s going on. You’re just seeding clouds, you know, a cloud is a cloud.
Aluminum — for jet engines? For cloudmaking?
But there are additives in the fuel itself. So sometimes they will add some type of aluminum salt or barium salt that’s there to stabilize the fuel.
Jet fuel has to be really combustive. It’s got to be almost inherently unstable for you to get all the energy out of it as you can. You don’t want any energy loss. And so because of that, you’ll have these small metallic particles. And we add it in car fuel as well. We add iron-containing compounds to help in stabilizing the fuel and —
Tulis: Is that lead?
Robert Sacci: — and also help prolong engine life. And so there are these additives in fuel that can seed clouds. But once again it’s different if that’s the purpose of these additives is to seed clouds or to increase reflectivity other than just making the engines run more smoothly.
Tulis: If aluminum particles are used as a lubricant in jet fuel, how small do these pieces have to be to work and not deprive the jet fuel of its explosive character? You’re suggesting the additives in fuel help create cloud patterns behind jets. Am I understanding that correctly?
Nanoparticulates as fuel ingredient
Robert Sacci: They can, yes. So any metallic additive will or has the possibility to add and help facilitate cloud seeding. So the particles as far as their size in the fuel would be very small.
They would be around nanometer type of size, which is extremely small. It’s about the size of a hundred atoms linked together, so they would be a very, very small particle that would be mixed in with the fuel.
Tulis: Explain a little to my listener, Robert Sacci, how nanotechnology works and you’re suggesting that the fuel has additives to help the plane fly and also incidentally to possibly create cloud cover. How are nanoparticles made and how do they get into the fuel?
How nanoparticles are made
Robert Sacci: Well, there’s different ways to make and control the formation of nanoparticles. One of the largest industrial way is to actually start with a solution of the metal dissolved into some *** organic solvent, so you’re basically trying to separate all the metallic particles out to individual atoms or charged atoms, which we call ions. They are all floating around not interacting with each other. And then you add something and that brings them together. So it will reduce the ions and form these nanoclusters.
And we can do this on a large scale. It can be, depending on what additives you add to this magic mix, you will get particles of different sizes, you will get particles of different something or shapes, either spherical or cubic and we don’t totally understand how this works, but we’re very good engineers in that we can get more or less target shapes in a relatively large scale of certain elements to do more or less what we want to do.
Tulis: How is it that nanoparticles, maybe of aluminum, will not come down but stay suspended [in the sky]? How would it work for nanoparticulates to create effectively a shield over the earth, or over large parts of the earth, a kind of a nanoshield to deflect the sun? How would that work?
How an iron dome would stay aloft
Robert Sacci: OK, so you have essentially two forces that are competing with one another to allow an object to levitate or maintain altitude. One is gravity, which of course wants to take the object and bring it down to the center of gravity, which would be the Earth’s surface.
So if you create an asymmetric particle, say a [disk] where one dimension is much larger than another dimension — what can happen is it can kind of get trapped at a certain altitude. And of course gravity is dependent upon the object’s mass or how large an object is or its weight.
So what you can do that if you have and it’s been speculated in peer reviewed publications – and if you had a disc, a very small disc that’s about 15 nanometers in diameter, you have this really small disc made of aluminum, it would get trapped in the stratosphere and more or less when it comes down, every time it would try to come down it would heat up, create thermal fluctuations about it and it would rise again and it would heat the gas underneath it which would hit it back up to the upper levels of the stratosphere. This could be a way to kind of blanket the higher portions of the stratosphere ****.
Tulis: Maybe it’s just a could be, part of stratospheric aerosol geo-engineering, which is the scientific name for the laying of particulate matter by policy into the stratosphere to cool the planet. In other words, part of Global Warming is, as Dr. Robert Sacci has explained, if fighting it on the ground by reducing emissions and having plants grow on your roof. But there’s also the second level, which is in the stratosphere, where men propose — or may be actually doing this — to have a reflective shield over the planet. Somehow the sun has just become kind of an evil force.
Deflecting villainous sunlight
Tulis: You were in the middle of explaining how before we had those urgent notices from the commercial side, how it is that a piece of aluminum down to the size of atoms just about, 100 atoms across maybe, in the form of a disc, could theoretically stay perhaps permanently in the higher atmosphere given its density and its shape. Now what would be the benefit if trillions and trillions of these nanoparticles were sprayed into space? What are the perceived benefits, Robert Sacci, and what are perhaps the dangers of that if we have a reflective nanoshield, as some writers have called it?
Robert Sacci: Well, the benefits would be that you will decrease the amount of radiation coming from the sun onto the earth’s surface and the radiation, if it’s metallic in nature, kind of like say, our aluminum nanodiscs — if that were metallic in nature — then you would not only block infrared rays so those would be the forms of radiation that are more prone to making objects hotter. You would also take care of UV light, so a lot of the ultraviolet rays that could harm plants and cause melanoma and other cancers, you would also decrease the amount of those rays onto the surface.
Unintended feedback loops
However, since aluminum is a light element, which means it doesn’t have that many electrons around each atom, it won’t be very good at blocking some of the harder or more energetic or destructive forms of radiation that the sun emits – say cosmic rays, gamma rays, kind of some harder ultraviolet rays I think are commonly referred as UV-Cs and X-rays. So those forms of radiation would still pass but other forms would be hampered. And so there’s a proposition that underneath these aluminum discs you would need something heavier, kind of like barium element or calcium element that’s there to reflect your X-rays and some of your harder forms of radiation.
So that would just work to make the sun dimmer. You would relegate a lot of heat from the sun that [unintelligible] from the surface. As far as things that could be bad, you have this thing called internal reflection that could happen.
This basically happens if you have some reflective medium on something else that would reflect light. Let’s say the surface. And you would have this layer that reflects light, but some light gets through and you would have the surface that also reflects light. Now, that top layer, so our stratosphere, if that reflects too much light, you can have this problem where the light that gets through gets trapped.
So it basically bounces from the surface to the stratosphere and bounces back *** or it has to go through a lot more bouncing or reflections before it can escape.
Would nanoshield worsen warming trend?
Tulis: What’s wrong with that if you have light ricocheting back and forth many times between the nanoshield and the surface of the earth? Is there a problem with that?
Robert Sacci: You can actually help cause that which you are trying to deviate from the reflective shield.
You would just trap heat. Any light that gets through gets trapped and it stays there so it can continually bounce and interact with all forms of matter there at a higher frequency than it would otherwise be. So, if you had no coating, then the light could come, bounce off the surface and then leave. Nothing’s really going to reflect it or the reflections would be minimized and so there’s kind of that tradeoff. If you make the sky too reflective you would actually, can, a feedback loop would occur and you can make the surface hotter because you’ve increased the amount of light that’s bouncing and kind of staying there at the surface — rather than allowing it just to pass on through. So there’s these humps and troughs and whole equation — or fine art — of making surfaces reflective, but not too reflective, or transparent, but not too transparent that you have to play with.
And that would be true for kind of a global or geoengineering point of view. You would want this [shield] to reflect sunlight but not too much in that you get sunlight trapped.
Tulis: There’s a climate change denier, as he’s called with some aspersion, John Christi, who lives in Huntsville. And I was noting a story today about him, he says the science is not settled and he says that the models that are claiming global warming in the future and seeing it now are not accurate. In your understanding of world climate, is there global warming taking effect from whatever cause?
Robert Sacci: It’s still accumulative. And you have to look at exactly what the model is saying is the cause of the heat. So we’re at this weird stage in climate science. *** The problem is depending on which model we pick or we choose is more accurate, we get different results. But if we use a model that is more CO2, so heating is due to CO2, it turns out that model predicts that heating is due to CO2. So you’re kind of using a model to predict something that the model is actually already based on.
Tulis: I want to get back to the whole question of geo-engineering as a theoretical subject. You’re kind of a skeptic as to whether there is an actual geo-engineering program in progress today. We’re talking in theory about science and science laws that would control a program if it were to be enacted. Well, two points: We have in Chattanooga, in Hamilton County, regular readings of aluminum, barium, strontium in the air. Question A is where would they come from if not from an actual geo-engineering program? And then B, is there any kind of problem with nano-particles, whether aluminum or other, if you inhale or ingest them? My thinking is they are coming down from “the good people” in their program here and we are ingesting and inhaling them now. So the question is, explain if you can, the readings I got from the government of aluminum, strontium, barium in Chattanooga and Hamilton County and then B, what’s the problem with inhaling aluminum?
Ubiquitous aluminum
Robert Sacci: OK, so I mean, I guess in our modern society, we use aluminum a lot, coke cans — and everything. There’s a lot of aluminum and those types of minerals in our river water and kind of natural supply that we already have. And of course when water evaporates and it does take some of those minerals up. Now like I said, there are additives to fuels that could include barium-containing compounds and aluminum-containing compounds.
So, as you combust those, those would make tiny aluminum or barium salt nanoparticles and they would go up into the air. So you would have that and it seems like from what I’ve read that one other major city — just cities in general — have these relatively high and quite disconcerting readings of metals in the air. So we have a lot of sulfur and all sorts of stuff in the air that will probably *** and it’s hard to say was that leftover. I know a number of decades ago Chattanooga had a really bad smog problem from the DuPont plant and some other plants. So could those just be legendary pollutants in the air? It’s hard to say. Like I said, these things actually come from without during experiments.
Tulis: So what is dangerous about inhaling or ingesting the particles that are being reported in Hamilton County of strontium, aluminum and barium? Is there a danger to that? Is there any connection with jet overflights of the city?
In lung and on plate
Robert Sacci: Well, as far as the latter, I’m not sure about that. I’ve not seen any conclusive evidence of what stuff you can expect to come off of a jet and normal fuels, whether the elements are there and in what amount they are there. But as far as toxicity of these particles, as you know, there are two different things you need to separate separate: One is the food supply and one is kind of in the air or inhaling.
In the food supply, it turns out that organic life forms, humans and plants, can withstand a lot more toxic material and potentially toxic materials than one might expect. Especially in humans, our body is very good at discerning what’s good for it and what’s not and it tries to get rid of what’s not. If it looks foreign it shoves it aside *** .
As far as breathing, lungs are not as robust, though they are pretty robust. Nanoparticles can have problems with them so you have things with coal miners who would breathe soot in from the coal. That would be nanosize things that would get into the lungs and stay there and accumulate over time and could potentially cause lung cancer and [problems] of the lungs.
Same thing is true with asbestos. We know the dangers of asbestos and it’s not the really lone fibers that are the problem, it’s the nano component of it, these really, really nanofibers that are produced with the production of the asbestos and then you breathe that in and it accumulates over time and will or could potentially lead to cancer.
And so any nanomaterial has that potential danger and working any labs through the U.S. and there’s a lot of regulatory hurdles that one has to jump through before they’ll qualify to work with nanomaterials. There are special labs and special fuel plugs and all these things that are set up to make work environment in nanoproduction or particle production safer for people.
Tulis: You’re saying that and it suggests to me that the government — the national government — would never, then, spray purposefully nanomaterials in the sky given its tight controls of all the nanomaterials elsewhere and on the ground.
Robert Sacci: That is my hope that it would be a true statement.
Tulis: Let me ask you this, if stratospheric geoengineering were not taking place — you kinda believe that it’s not — would it be a good policy to enact it?
Robert Sacci: Several things are possible. Probably I would, it would need to be tested because there are all those repercussions. I didn’t mention this, but communications between satellites and the Earth’s surface can be interrupted with this so some testing would have to be done at an obscure location. So either Arctic or desert environment before that would even be conceivable to be a good policy. But for stuff that’s taking place on the surface as far as roofing materials and things like that, that is good. I would say that is good policy.
Tulis: Thank you.
(Many thanks to Marla Stair-Wood of Knoxville, who runs the Tennessee Skywatch group on Facebook for the transcript.)
— David Tulis is host of Nooganomics.com, a show on Hot News Talk Radio 1240 and 910ne that covers local economy and free markets in Chattanooga and beyond.