NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Researchers quietly planned a test to dim sunlight. They wanted to ‘avoid scaring’ the public.

A team of researchers in California drew notoriety last year with an aborted experiment on a retired aircraft carrier that sought to test a machine for creating clouds.  

But behind the scenes, they were planning a much larger and potentially riskier study of salt-water-spraying equipment that could eventually be used to dim the sun’s rays — a multimillion-dollar project aimed at producing clouds over a stretch of ocean larger than Puerto Rico.

The details outlined in funding requests, emails, texts and other records obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News raise new questions about a secretive billionaire-backed initiative that oversaw last year’s brief solar geoengineering experiment on the San Francisco Bay.

They also offer a rare glimpse into the vast scope of research aimed at finding ways to counter the Earth’s warming, work that has often occurred outside public view.

Same people always blathering on about “saving our democracy” from Trump, right?