Excerpt 2 From The Burning Years

While we had international environmental agreements, as the impending cataclysm approached, countries panicked. That’s how the “Weather Wars” started. In 2045, because we were all trying to save ourselves from the effects of climate change, treaties and agreements between countries became obsolete as conventional weapons were now useless. Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases had risen to such an extent into the atmosphere around the globe that they had formed a thick blanket holding in heat. As these heat-trapping gas concentrations increased, the blanket’s thickness also increased and trapped even more heat in our lower atmosphere. Heat that had been designed by nature to escape through the stratosphere was now no longer able to do so, and resulted in it being much cooler than it should have been. This abnormal coolness then contributed to ozone loss, which effectively cancelled out any progress we had made in the past, by reducing CFC’s.

Like us, most developed countries around the globe didn’t care what happened in other parts of the world, and were using any number of untested methods to reduce the effects of regional climate change. These methods included blocking a portion of the sun’s rays; fertilizing nearby oceans with iron to pull carbon out of the atmosphere; covering their land with vast sheets of white plastic, making them look like snowfields, in order to reflect sunlight back into space; and building machines that could suck carbon out of the air.

We, in the United States, led the pack and after I joined DARPA, my job was to control the giant space mirrors in place in the ionosphere. We were brightening clouds above the Earth, and spraying seawater into the sky with cannons to make more clouds. We’d also stolen Tesla’s resonance theories and were sending sonic pulsars up into the atmosphere. The pulsars caused volcanoes to spew out sulphur dioxide, which would supposedly increase our cloud cover, but ended up on top of everything else causing earthquakes and tidal waves, inadvertently wiping out large parts of our land, including the West Coast and its populations.

In my heart, I knew what we were really doing, all of us together, was causing our ‘mother,’ Gaia, to go crazy, as we played out the final scenario of the Industrial Revolution, during which we had somehow believed we could tame nature and make it our own.

‘Solar Radiation Management,’ as we called it euphemistically in our department, would fail in the long term to cool our continental landmass. And, as we engineered what we called ‘global dimming,’ we drove away our blue skies and all we saw now was white above us, like an unremitting autumnal fog so that at night we could no longer see the moon or the stars.

The ‘ones in the know,’ the elite in all the countries, understood the tiny particles of sulphur we had been putting into the atmosphere for years, would eventually deplete the radiation shield from our planet. Because they knew what others didn’t, these elite were preparing their underground cities where they, their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren would live until two or three hundred years in the future, when their descendants could re-emerge, like mole-people, onto an Earth’s surface that was perhaps beginning to heal.

And here it starts

Watch the promotional video from Harvard here.