“Bill Gates & a team of scientists from Harvard thinking to combat global warming by reducing sun rays. Basically, they will scatter Calcium Carbonate in the atmosphere that may cool the planet by reflecting some of the Sun’s rays. This geoengineering method will prevent global warming.” titled information is being spread on the internet.
Archive versions of some viral Facebook posts can be accessed from here, here, here, here, and here.
Fact Check
From the investigation by the Rumor Scanner team, it has been discovered that Bill Gates is not planning to block the sun to combat global warming, rather he is funding academic research into solar geoengineering research, which in turn helps to fund the SCoPEx project.
By using the keyword search method, we found several fact checks on this subject including an article from Snopes.
Actually, Bill Gates has funded research and provided grants for solar radiation management experiments for about 14 years. One of the projects supported by Gates is a Harvard experiment named SCoPex. According to their reporting, the objective of SCoPEx isn’t to block the sun. This experiment will do is release about 4.4 pounds of calcium carbonate, nontoxic dust, 12 miles in the sky through the use of a weather balloon above the Arctic. The purpose is to collect data to investigate the impacts and potential risks of solar geoengineering.
According to the SCoPEx website, the test will pose no significant hazard to people or the environment. Instead, the experiment is to help inform computer models that look into the potential risks of actual geoengineering.
Contextually geoengineering is a deliberate intervention in the Earth’s climate system to counteract climate change. It’s sometimes called climate intervention.
Besides In a 2010 Ted Talk, “Gates argued that if society ends up in a position where global warming is bad enough that geoengineering needs to be taken seriously, it should already know and understand the process and its potential consequences.”
So, Bill Gates has provided undisclosed amounts of funding to academic research into solar geoengineering research, which in turn helps to fund the SCoPEx project but the claim that Gates is working on a way to block the sun’s rays to prevent global warming is FALSE.
[su_box title=”True or False” box_color=”#f30404″ radius=”0″]
- Claim Review: Bill Gates is working to block the sun to prevent global warming
- Claimed By: Facebook Posts
- Fact Check: False
[/su_box]
Fact-check sources:
- Snopes: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gates-block-sun/
- Geoengineering Monitor: What is geoengineering?
- Keutsch Group at Harvard: SCoPEx: Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment
- Ted Talks, Feb: Bill Gates TED2010 Innovating to zero!
- Poynter: Claims that Bill Gates is going to ‘block the sun’ lack context
- USA Today: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/04/23/fact-check-bill-gates-not-trying-block-suns-rays/7310134002/
LAST UPDATE: 12 September 2021
