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Originally proposed by Bill Gates’ company Intellectual Ventures, the StratoShield has been renamed the StratoCruiser and a team funded by Bill Gates’ FICER, Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Program Research Program, the Hewlett Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and other philanthropists are planning on the world’s largest experiment in dimming the sun.

This experiment is designed to mimic volcanic eruptions by spraying sulfur into the stratosphere to cool the planet, a geoengineering solar radiation managment (SRM) technique known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). David Keith and Frank Keutsch plan to test the equipment by spraing water, then move on to spraying calcium and eventually sulfur.

Stratospheric sulfur injections is the most often talked about way of mimicing the Mt. Pinatubo eruption which sent massive amounts of sulfur into the stratosphere and cooled the planet. When this happened, the Amazon basin almost dried up, and therein lies the largest problem with geoengineering schemes like this: they will change global rainfall patterns and create winners and losers…. losers being dead people.

The Integrated Assessment of Geoengineering Proposals (IAGP) and the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) computer models agree, the southern hemisphere will get dryer and the northern hemisphere will get wetter. This endangers the entire globe as it will lead to increased flooding and storm severity in the north and drought and famine in the south.

This is why 110 civic societies have proposed a permanent ban on geoengineering: The Hands Off Mother Earth manifesto. This manifesto is being presented at COP24 and also proposes putting a halt to Keith’s Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Exeperiment (SCoPEx. StratoCruiser).

In addition the the drawbacks mentioned above, please also check our Professor Alan Robock’s 27 reasons not to geoengineer. The concerns far outweigh the benefits and coating our skies in sunscreen should be banned and all research halted.

Their funding will come from Harvard internal funds and likely Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Program, which has raised money from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the Hewlett Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and other philanthropists. SCoPEx follows in the wake of several other solar geoengineering collaborations that have failed to pick up momentum, such as at the 2011 E-PEACE experiment out of the University of California, San Diego, and the SPICE collaboration in the U.K., which stalled in 2012. - "Helping Hand or Hubris?" APS