Bill Gates has been falsely accused of many villainous plans, from depopulating the Earth to pushing microchips as part of all medical procedures. Now, a recycled claim says Gates’ aims go even higher — literally.
"Bill Gates hatches 'horribly stupid' plan to block out the sun," says the headline on a Feb. 21 article on the Daily Star website.
The article was shared on Facebook and was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
Gates did not personally hatch a plan, nor is he — or anyone — scheming to block out the sun. The claim first surfaced in 2021 and has been previously debunked by multiple fact checkers.
The falsehood centers on a small-scale experiment that Harvard researchers proposed — called SCoPEx, short for Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment — that would spray aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect some sunlight back into space, a technology aimed at minimizing global warming.
It’s called solar radiation management, or solar geoengineering.
"Geoengineering is a blanket term for technologies that try to alter Earth’s physical qualities on the largest scale possible," Popular Mechanics reported. "One example is cloud seeding, where airplanes flush clouds with particulate matter in order to coalesce into rain."
Solar geoengineering involves using technology to try to reflect solar radiation back into space before it can interact with greenhouse...
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