In Discomfort, Rise and Shine
Truth from Souls of a Movement
In our 20 years together, they are the words I have heard him say most:
“Rigorous relationship with the truth.”
My human rock, a master Leadership and Relationship Coach who has supported my passionate existence and heart-led, no-dull-moments-life with his unparalleled skillfulness, repeats them again and again.
Rigorous relationship with the truth.
Not just honest. Past that. Telling the truth about the things we find toughest to tell the truth about — mostly to ourselves, the center of our universes, the source of our human souls’ screenplay from which all our projectors stream.
How honest are we willing to be?
Words get repeated, and even become cliché, when they need to. And as my coach knows, having a rigorous relationship with the truth is the touchstone of a deeply satisfying life.
In this spirit, today I am sharing a piece of writing that isn’t mine, and it’s a twist on my normal shares. You might like the twist; you might not. It is from a fellow humanitarian who is committed to truth in a brave and artful way.
I’m sharing it to be truthful:
Leaning into Light and Making Love to Fear ain’t all peaches ‘n cream.
The darkness inside of us (aka fear) can sometimes reach proportions that fiercely test our will to love. This darkness can also serve as an effervescent invitation to “rise & shine,” enlivening us as we greet the agony of the pain we’ve inflicted on our planetary body.
This piece is an exhibit of bold truth telling. It’s unedited, below. The special characters used to work around fear-based algorithms are left intact.
Prepare for productive discomfort.
This isn’t a comfortable read for anyone who wants to keep living on Earth.
Simply put, it’s stuff that is helpful to know, just like it’s helpful to know if our strawberries were grown with cancer causing chemicals or naturally, by farmers who care about our children’s bodies just as they care about their own. And it was helpful for me to see a massive tumor on the MRI that scanned my brain in January 2021. I would have gone into further paralysis had I not faced the truth about it.
The author is the creator of my favorite Instagram account — besides Mr. Rogers — @soulsofamovement, whose posts stand for unwavering conviction to telling the truth. Opposite of building a dam: busting down the dam so the river can flow.
Take it where you will. The Love inside you knows the way.
It won’t take a majority of humans to lead us to a healthy world where our children can breathe and jump on trampolines without fear of their yards being pummeled by hurricanes.
It only takes one of us at a time — you, now — choosing to greet fear and pain with Love — the only thing that can heal them.
With a pen full of Love for you~
Jess
Jessica Rios
Writer + Love Coach
Founder, Making Love to Fear + Leaning into Light
A brief history of weather modif*cation (or “GeoE”)
by the beloved @soulsofamovement (IG) twitter.com/soulsofamovemnt
1841 - American meteorologist J. Pollard Espy publishes The Philosophy of Storms, in which he lays out his thermal theory of storm formation and details a method through which “rain may be produced artificially in time of drought.”
1896 - Swedish chemist S. Arrhenius investigates the impact of rising carbon dioxide (C02) levels on global temperatures; he calculated how doubling the amount of C02 in the atmosphere would affect the climate and suggested that by increasing the amount of “carbonic acid” in the atmosphere, “we may hope to enjoy ages with more equitable and better climates.”
1932 - The USSR established the Institute of Rainmaking in Leningrad, setting the stage for decades of experimentation with cloud s**ding (“CloudS) as a means of altering the weather. The US followed suit in 1946, when researchers at the GE Research Laboratory in Schenectady, NY, discovered that dry ice stimulates ice-crystal formation. In the Cold W*r’s early years, both superpowers carry out hundreds of experiments using solid CO2, dioxide, silver iodide, and other particulate matter to trigger precipitation.
1958 – “If an unfriendly nation gets into a position to control the large-scale weather patterns before we can, the result could even be more disastrous than n*clear w*rfare.” — H. Orville, President Eisenhower’s weather advisor.
1965 - President L. B. Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee issues a landmark report, “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,” that raises the possibility of “deliberately bringing about countervailing climatic ch*nges,” including by “raising the albedo, or reflectivity, of the Earth.”
1967-1972 - The US Air Force flies more than 2,600 CloudS sorties over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as part of a covert effort to extend the monsoon season and inhibit North Vietnamese troop movements. Dubbed Operation Popeye, the program is the first known instance of hostile w*ather man*pulation in military history. When columnist J. Anderson reveals its existence in the WaPo in 1971, the public is outraged. The subsequent scandal soon becomes known as the “Watergate of w*ather w*rfare.”
1974 - Soviet climatologist M. Budyko floats the idea of reversing gl*bal w*rming by burning sulfur in the stratosphere, thereby creating a reflective haze he describes as “much like that which arises from volcanic eruptions.” Solar radiation management—or attempts to reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface—goes on to become one of two major branches of GeoE (the other being CO2 removal). In subsequent years, scientists propose everything from injecting particles into the stratosphere to lobbing great mirrors into space to reflect the sun’s rays.
1976 - Moved to act by the US’s cloud-seeding activities in Vietnam, the UN approves the Environmental Modification Convention, which bans w*ather w*rfare and other hostile uses of cl*mate manipulation “having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects.” The treaty goes into effect a little less than two years later and is eventually ratified by 76 countries.
1998-2004 – A CloudS project is conducted in Mendoza, Argentina, to suppress hail. The program used a contracted aircraft for seeding and monitoring activities. In 2005, the provincial government fired the contractor and started implementing the anti-hail program with its own means, using ground generators, aircraft, and rockets.
2004-2010 – Saudi Arabia implemented a CloudS program to increase rainfall with the help of the US company WM Inc.
2006 – P. Crutzen, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research on ozone, advocates for additional GeoE research, especially into the possibility of using reflective aerosols to decrease the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface. That same year, at a NASA conference in Silicon Valley, L. Wood, a former top w*apons designer at the P*ntagon, lays out an “instant climatic gratification” scheme. The plan involves using artillery to fire as much as 1 million tons of sulfate aerosols into the Arctic stratosphere in order to dull the sun’s rays and build up sea ice that could then cool the planet. Science historian J. Fleming likens Wood’s plan to “declaring w*r on the stratosphere.”
2008 - Four hours before the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing, Chinese authorities launch more than 1,000 rockets containing silver iodide into the sky outside the city to keep rain clouds away from the “Bird’s Nest” stadium. A storm that was forecast to hit on August 8 holds off until the 10th, keeping the crowd of 91,000 dry for the evening’s pageantry. That same year, Scientific American publishes an editorial titled “The Hidden Dangers of GeoE” that calls out the risks of trying to tinker with the weather. What used to be “fringe science,” the editors write, has “gained respectability,” but it could damage the ozone layer, reduce precipitation, or make rainfall more acidic. “And those are just the foreseeable effects.”
2009 - President Obama’s science advisor, J. Holdren, says the US doesn’t have the “luxury” of taking GeoE options “off the table.” “Deliberate efforts to counter gl*bal w*rming”, Holdren says, have “got to be looked at.” That same year, R. Jackson, director of Duke University’s Center on Global Change notes that “playing with the Earth’s climate is a dangerous game with unclear rules.”
2010 - The UN convention on Biological Diversity established a moratorium on GeoE in the absence of enough scientific data and regulations. That same year, The MCB Project, launched with seed funding from philanthrocapitalist BG, received a fierce backlash as media articles talked of “cloud-wrenching cronies” and warned of the potential for “unilateral action on GeoE.”
2011 - A British academic consortium called Stratospheric Particle Injection for Cl*mate Eng*neering attempts to carry out the world’s first large-scale GeoE field test aimed at reversing gl*bal w*rming. But the experiment, a smaller version of the group’s grand plan to pump reflective particles into the atmosphere through a 20-kilometer-long hose held aloft by a hot-air balloon, never gets off the ground for political reasons.
2012 - The National Natural Science Foundation of China, which distributes research funds on behalf of the Chinese government, lists GeoE as a scientific research priority. Already, China is spending at least $100 million per year on weather mod!fication schemes—mostly to induce rain and prevent hailstorms.
2013 - The US intelligence agency partners with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to fund a 21-month, $630,000 “technical evaluation” of various GeoE techniques, including proposed solar radiation management and CO2 removal schemes. It is the first NAS GeoE study funded by the intelligence community. That same year, the New Yorker‘s N. Thompson opined on the “dangerous, fraught, and potentially essential prospect of GeoE.” He wrote, “It’s dreadful but it may be the only way to prevent mass calamity.”
2014 - The IPCC’s working group for policy responses to cl*mate ch*nge evaluated GeoE options—including the use of aerosols, iron fertilization, and lighter-colored crops—, marking the first time that the UN actively considered invasive measures like these ones. That same year, Oceanos Marine Research Foundation (Canada) was founded in Chile to release up to 10tns of Iron off its coasts. A group of local scientists criticized the plan: “The iron fertilization experiment could seriously endanger national marine ecosystems and, furthermore, various fisheries.”
2019 – the BBC published an article titled “How artificially brightened clouds could stop cl*mate ch*nge.” At the end of the article, it notes that “The potential side-effects of solar GeoE on the scale needed to slow hurricanes or cool global temperatures are not well understood. According to various theories, it could prompt droughts, flooding, and catastrophic crop failures; some even fear that the technology could be w*aponized […]. To challenge the US National Academies report, a Manifesto Against GeoE was signed by over 100 civil society and indigenous people’s groups, calling for a ban on all GeoE experiments due to “risks that GeoE poses to biodiversity, the environment and livelihoods.”
2022 – CNN published an article titled “Scientists in the US are flying planes into clouds to make it snow more.”
2023 - Mexico announced the ban of solar GeoE experiments, after a US startup began releasing sulfur particles into the atmosphere in Baja California. The Mexican government said the experiment was carried out “without prior notice and without the consent of the Government and the surrounding communities.” J. Haywood, a professor of atmospheric science at Exeter University and co-writer of the recent UN report on stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), noted that “While many of the side-effects of SAI can be avoided if it is done properly, some are very difficult to avoid. For example, putting large amounts of Sulphur into the atmosphere is likely to increase winter rainfall over northern Europe and reduce it over southern Europe, particularly in Spain and Portugal.”
