US climate scientist left cold by CIA query

A leading American climate scientist has said he felt “scared” when a shadowy organisation claiming to represent the CIA asked him about the possibility of weaponised weather.

Professor Alan Robock received a call three years ago from two men wanting to know if experts would be able to spot a hostile force’s attempts to upset the US climate. But he suspected the real intention was to find out how feasible it might be to secretly interfere with the climate of another country.

Prof Robock, from the Department of Environmental Sciences at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, has investigated the potential risks and benefits of using strato-spheric particles to simulate the climate-changing effects of volcanic eruptions.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, California, Prof Robock said: “I got a phone call from two men who said ‘we work as consultants for the CIA and we’d like to know if some other country was controlling our climate, would we know about it’?

“I told them, after thinking a little bit, that we probably would because if you put enough material in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight we would be able to detect it and see the equipment that was putting it up there.

“At the same time I thought they were probably also interested in if we could control somebody else’s climate, could they detect it?”

Asked how he felt about the approach, he said: “Scared. I’d learned of lots of other things the CIA had done that haven’t followed the rules and I thought that wasn’t how I wanted my tax money spent. I think this research has to be in the open and international so there isn’t any question of it being used for hostile purposes.”

Geo-engineering to offset global warming effects could include scattering sulphur particles in the upper atmosphere to re-direct sunlight back into space, seeding the oceans with iron to encourage the spread of carbon-hungry algae, and creating reflective areas on the Earth’s surface. The long-term effects of such strategies are largely unknown and many experts fear they may pose grave risks.

A further twist in Prof Robock’s story concerns the CIA’s alleged co-funding of a major report on geo-engineering published this week by the US National Academy of Sciences.

The report mentions the “US intelligence community” in its list of sponsors, which also includes the American space agency Nasa, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the US Department of Energy.

Prof Robock said the CIA had told one of his colleagues it wanted to fund the report.

“The CIA is a major funder of the National Academies report so that makes me really worried who is going to be in control,” he added.

At a press conference on potential geo-engineering risks, Prof Robock was asked what the greatest hazard might be. He replied: “The answer is global nuclear war because if one country wants to control the climate in one way, and another doesn’t want it or if they try to shoot down the planes... if there is no agreement, it could result in terrible consequences.”