No, the UK Isn’t Secretly Trying to Dim the Sun (Part 1)

A full fact-check of the “dimming the sun” scare story — and how pervasive media bias can be in the way they portray science.

A Telegraph article this week claimed the UK government was secretly trying to ‘dim the sun’. In reality, it’s funding early-stage research through a well-documented agency, so I wanted to break down why this kind of scaremongering does more harm than good.

When I came across the headline: “The secretive government unit planning to dim the sun”, I had to take a look.

As a general rule of thumb, the more absurd the headline, the more important it is to look at the reality behind it!

Photo by Andrey Grinkevich on Unsplash

This week, I’m going to attempt a call-and-response type debunk of the article, as this is the process I go through when I read these kinds of stories.

I’ll highlight the Telegraph paragraph, followed by my explainer/debunk

I will cover the “dimming the sun” projects specifically in a second article, so you get 2 for the price of one this weekend!

Let’s begin….

Plans to block sunlight to fight global warming have inadvertently shone a light on Aria, the Government’s opaque research arm.

ARIA - Advanced Research and Invention Agency - is indeed the government’s research arm, with governance details available here, their accounts listed here, and a website featuring all their projects, calls for applications, and grant winners here. This is hardly opaque or secretive, as the headline suggests.

It is also not unique to the UK. The USA has DARPA, Japan has Moonshot R&D, Germany has SPRIN-D, to name a few - government-funded agencies designed to support the most ambitious cutting-edge research aimed at tackling some of our biggest issues.

The Advanced Research and Invention Agency was set up in 2021 by Kwasi Kwarteng, the ex-Tory business secretary, and was originally the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief aide.

While it was conceived in 2021, it was only fully functioning in January 2023 - a fact to bear in mind as we continue through the Telegraph article.

Yet few people on the street know what it is, what it does, or how much taxpayer cash is flowing into its well-financed coffers.

Yes, that’s probably true. It’s only been around for two years, and the vast majority of “people on the street” will have no reason to have heard of ARIA so far.

Sure, it has a shiny website stocked with techno-waffle promising to help scientists “reach for the edge of the possible” and foster “opportunity spaces” but there has been little clarity on its day-to-day operations.

So, the Telegraph admits there is a publicly available website, but for some reason doesn’t like that a website dedicated to the very cutting edge of scientific research might be a little technical sounding!

The opportunity spaces they put in quote marks are areas deemed underexplored but highly consequential. It funds scientists and engineers to pursue research that is “too speculative, too hard, or too interdisciplinary to pursue elsewhere”

These are research areas such as “What if we could programme plants to remove more CO₂, fight drought, and deliver medicines to those in need?” or “What if we could solve the mysteries of neurological disorders and mental health by interfacing with the brain in new ways?”

Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash

These are research areas that private companies aren’t going to fund initially, but could absolutely form the basis for British Start-up companies in the future.

As for day-to-day clarity? The website is actually full of detail on the areas they are exploring and why. It might be “techno-waffle” to those at the Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything suspicious about it!

This week, we learnt it will spend £56.8 million on 21 “climate cooling” projects, which include looking into the logistics of building a “sun shade” in space and injecting plumes of salt water into the sky to reflect sunlight away from Earth.

£57 million is obviously a lot of money to most of us. But to put it into context, it is roughly the production costs of the Joker film or Deadpool.

It is 0.000046% of the UK government’s annual budget and the money is to support projects over a 2-4 year timespan.

“We’re not trying to dim the sun,” representatives from Aria said rather disingenuously at a press briefing, knowing full well that should experiments prove successful, that is their ultimate aim.

As ARIA have said themselves following the multitude of clickbait headlines around their work, they’re not trying to dim the sun. They are funding research to help tackle a very specific issue:

As the Earth continues to heat up, there are certain “tipping points” that could cause a sudden acceleration in that heating, such as the melting of the permafrost, which would release vast volumes of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

At the moment, scientists and governments have no plans for how to avert or mitigate these events if they look like they’re happening.

So what ARIA are looking at is to “transparently explore – under rigorous oversight – whether any climate cooling approaches that have been proposed as potential options to delay or avert such tipping points could ever be feasible, scalable, and safe.”

These are potential ways of attempting to cool the areas where this tipping point might occur to try and prevent it.

Without the research, scientists can’t know what, if anything, could work and what the impacts of the approaches might be.

Prof Mike Hulme, of Cambridge University, pointed out that the experiments were setting Britain on a “slippery slope” towards mass deployment of technologies that will be impossible to prove are safe, effective and reversible until they are actually in the sky.

He warned: “[The sum of] £57 million is a huge amount of taxpayers’ money to be spent on this assortment of speculative technologies intended to manipulate the Earth’s climate.”

Now, for context, Prof Mike Hulme was a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration (which called for no lockdowns and mass infection in 2020), which was sponsored by a US climate change denial libertarian free-market think tank.

Putting that aside, his comments make no sense as this is the literal pre-testing of those technologies to see if they are safe, effective and reversible. This isn’t ‘mass deployment’.

They are speculative technologies. That’s the point. And they’re being tested so scientists can determine whether they work or are safe. That’s a good thing! If they don’t work or aren’t safe, then we know not to use them!

Aria has been given an eye-watering £800 million budget to play with, with little to show for it so far, except some off-the-wall ideas and astronomically high wage bills.

The government’s investment in Research and Development - to boost UK science and tech - is £20.4 billion this year. So ARIA’s budget is around 4% of that, covering 9 different areas of research, of which this ‘climate cooling’ is just one.

Of course they have little to show for it - they’ve only been going for 2 years! It takes time to research the potential areas, decide on the best ones, put out proposals, wait for scientists to put in bids, assess the bids, award the grants and THEN wait 2-4 years for the research to take place…..

Ilan Gur, the chief executive, is being paid around £450,000 annually – three times more than the Prime Minister, while Antonia Jenkinson, the chief finance officer, takes home around £215,000 and Pippy James, the chief product officer, around £175,000.

In fact, Aria is blowing £4.1 million a year on wages despite having just 37 staff, with the top four staff at the company pocketing nearly £1 million of taxpayers’ cash each year between them.

Wouldn’t you want to attract the best people in their industry to head up an organisation like this? After all, they’re in charge of deciding the best way to use taxpayers’ money at the cutting edge of science and innovation.

It’s worth noting that the CEOs of Newspapers such as the Telegraph and Financial Times earn around £1 million per year….

It means essentially Aria is operating like a private company, but doing so on public finances. And it is wading into areas where the private sector would normally dominate.

No, it is not operating like a private company. It is a government entity that has chosen to pay industry wages to ensure the best people are in charge of deciding what science should be funded.

The kinds of projects they’re working on are NOT the sorts of things the private sector will fund, as they are too high risk, with a low chance of success. They are very upfront about this on their homepage: “Many will fail to meet their target, but their efforts will inspire the next generation. Those that do succeed will generate massive social and economic returns.”

Government-funded research all across the world is the basis of scientific innovation and progress. Private companies often form out of this research, or private firms buy the new technology, but they rarely fund the brand-new, untested ideas.

In January, it announced it would be giving £69 million to research on neural robots for epilepsy treatment, genetic engineering of brain cells and lab-grown brain organoids.

It is also funding an NHS trial to use a brain computer interface that alters brain activity using ultrasound, in the hopes it will treat depression and addiction, as well as investing in synthetic plants and chromosomes.

For more of the types of projects they’re working on, take a look here. It’s really fascinating stuff if you’re a bit geeky like me!

Such sci-fi future-gazing is usually left to billionaire tech bros or big pharma, precisely because the cost is prohibitive and private companies have the resources to soak up the risk.

If only! Big Pharma are very rarely doing this kind of work - they buy up the start-ups once they’ve proven their idea is viable. As for billionaire tech bros, they’re certainly doing some innovation, but that is generally only on their own pet projects, such as moving to Mars!

But the Government has given Aria free rein to embark on scientific research that “carries a high risk of failure” – something that the public sector usually shies away from.

This is true. And it’s a good thing for British science and innovation.

The “high risk, high reward” strategy is reminiscent of Elon Musk’s “fail fast” approach that has undoubtedly brought success at Space X and Tesla.

But while Mr Musk had clear objectives, and put $100 million of his own money on the line, Aria’s approach feels far more scattergun, as if it doesn’t quite know what it is trying to achieve.

It is operating like a speculative venture capital fund, essentially playing poker with the public purse.

Musk did indeed have clear objectives - his lifelong personal dream of travelling to Mars. And that’s great, and hopefully his technology will be beneficial for humanity as a whole.

But he is not trying to solve the question of what happens when the polar ice caps melt, or how we can grow better drought-resistant crops, or look at innovative ways to treat dementia.

If Britain were booming, maybe this could be justified, but public sector debt is rising and now, more than ever, taxpayers are demanding their money be used wisely.

Again, this is 0.000046% of the UK government’s annual budget. Investment in British science and technology is one of the ways to get Britain booming again.

Certainly its latest foray into geoengineering has been met with public incredulity.

When sun-dimming experiments were first mooted last month, one Telegraph reader liked it to “what Hanna-Barbera might have dreamed up to foil Dick Dastardly in Wacky Races”.

“Are these people insane?” asked another.

The opinions of readers of a scaremongering article need no further comment, I hope you’ll agree.

Aria was set up to be Britain’s equivalent of Darpa, the US defence advanced research projects agency, which was founded in 1958 by Eisenhower in response to the Soviets launching the Sputnik satellite.

Darpa, dubbed “the agency that shaped the modern world”, undoubtedly sparked a wave of innovation, and can claim some of the credit for developments such as GPS, drones, personal computers, the internet and the RNA Covid jab.

Now that’s interesting…. 23 paragraphs in and we get a list of exactly how government agencies like ARIA have changed the world. GPS, drones, personal computers and the Covid-19 vaccine were all invented out of research taking place in DARPA.

And now we have a British version, which could lead the way in other new inventions. That’s a good thing, surely?

Photo by Dose Media on Unsplash

But unlike Aria, Darpa always stayed well within the purview of the US department of Defence.

That’s not strictly true. DARPA have projects in cancer, biotechnology (hence the mRNA vaccine research), agriculture, AI and media, alongside the military and space travel fields.

Aria, in contrast, sits in a shady no-man’s land, in charge of eye-watering amounts of public cash, but with little genuine accountability to the public, for all its talk of transparency and consultation.

It’s hardly shady when it’s all publicly available information - right down to the exact amounts granted for each project, the nature of the project, the location and even the names of the researchers. I’m not sure what more “public accountability” the Telegraph would like there to be.

DARPA is ~0.06% of the USA federal budget. ARIA is 0.000046% of the UK government’s annual budget. It is an eye-watering amount to us as individuals, but not in the context of what it’s doing.

No heads will roll if its costly speculations prove worthless and it is exempt from freedom of information requests, a fact that the Liberal Democrats warned is “nothing more than an attempt to save the Government’s blushes the next time they opt for a ‘high risk, no reward’ project”.

This was a comment made in early 2021 when Boris Johnson first suggested the idea of ARIA in the midst of the pandemic, where government contracts were completely opaque, going through VIP lanes, and cutting out regular suppliers. Of course people were suspicious at the time.

And while it’s true that ARIA itself will not be subject to Freedom of Information Requests, the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) will be able to respond to these requests if they concern ARIA.

Screenshot from the Aria Framework document

Aria was created in the denouement of the pandemic, when fast, agile science helped Britain create a vaccine and find crucial treatments for Covid.

Then the country was operating with a vast emergency war chest. Now it is struggling to empty its bins.

Many people may be thinking perhaps now is not the time for such blue sky thinking.

I guess this comes down to personal opinion. I believe that investing in UK science and innovation is a good thing, even if a local council is in dispute with their binmen!

Conclusions

So to sum up, there is nothing secretive or nefarious about ARIA, the government department involved in this research.

This week’s format has been a little different, but I felt it needed a point-by-point explainer. I didn’t want to cherry-pick which parts I covered, so I covered the whole article. Apologies if there was some repetition!

This is how I tackle these kinds of articles, and I hope it has given you some food for thought when you read something similar. It’s important to critically examine each point and ask yourself:

• Does that sound unreasonable?

• Are the ‘astronomically high’ or ‘eye-watering sums’ really that big in context?

• Is something really “secretive”, “shady”, and “opaque” if all the information can be found on government websites?

• Why are they undermining public trust in science?

• Why make important innovation sound like dystopian sci-fi?

To find out about the science behind “dimming the sun”, check out my next article.

I would love your feedback on whether this style of explainer worked for you and whether you found it useful, or not.

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