Californian startup Make Sunsets was started by wannabe bond villain "Greenfinger," AKA Luke Iseman, who has started launching weather balloons that release sulfur into the stratosphere.
Iseman believes the sulfur will act as a type of geoengineering and reflect more sunlight back into space, like what happens naturally when a volcano erupts.
Geoengineering is one theory floating about on how to address climate change, but no scientist has actually studied what happens if you inject tons of sulfur into the stratosphere. It could make things much worse.
How much worse?
In 1816, Mount Tambora erupted and flooded the stratosphere with sulfurous ash. 1816 is known as the "Year Without a Summer." The temperature globally dropped 3 degrees Celsius (Nearly 6 degrees Fahrenheit).
Crops in Europe and America failed. People were effectively quarantined by weather without food for an entire year.
To really get a feel for that nightmare scenario, remember that this was the summerless year Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein while on holiday in Switzerland with her husband Percy Shelley and the poet Lord Byron.
They spent the summer barricaded indoors for months because of unseasonal storms, which inspired the famous horror novel.
And this is the nightmare scenario we would face if the environmentalists are overblowing the environmental issue just to gain political power and push a neo-Marxist utopian vision, as some believe.
Polluting the stratosphere could cause real environmental problems we would have avoided if we'd just left well enough alone.
For his part, Iseman readily admits that what he's doing may not be scientifically sound.
"We joke slash not joke that this is partly a company and partly a cult," he says.
Iseman is looking to crowd fund his sinister plot, selling "cooling credits" for $10.
$10 will get you one gram of that sweet endless-winter sulfur released into the stratosphere. And Iseman asserts that's enough to offset the warming effect of one ton of carbon for the year.
"What I want to do is create as much cooling as quickly as I responsibly can, over the rest of my life, frankly," Iseman says, adding later that they will deploy as much sulfur in 2023 as "we can get customers to pay us" for.
As far as being called "Greenfinger" goes, Iseman says,
Making me look like the Bond villain is going to be helpful to certain groups.
However, he also sincerely believes he is doing the right thing.
"It's morally wrong, in my opinion, for us not to be doing this," he says. What's important is "to do this as quickly and safely as we can."
We all know a villain who believes he is holding the moral high ground is the most dangerous sort.
