© Columbia University Press
Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control
Paper, 344 pages, 43 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14413-1
$19.95
/ £14.00
August, 2010
Cloth, 344 pages, 43 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14412-4
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Introduction
In facing unprecedented challenges, it is good to consider historical precedents.
As alarm over global warming spreads, some climate engineers are engaging in wild speculation and are advancing increasingly urgent proposals about how to “control” the Earth’s climate. They are stalking the hallways of power, hyping their proposals, and seeking support for their ideas about fixing the sky. The figures they scribble on the backs of envelopes and the results of their simple (yet somehow portrayed as complex) climate models have convinced them, but very few others, that they are planetary saviors, lifeboat builders on a sinking Titanic , visionaries who are taking action in the face of a looming crisis. They present themselves as insurance salesmen for the planet, with policies that may or may not pay benefits. In response to the question of what to do about climate change, they are prepared to take ultimate actions to intervene, even to do too much if others, in their estimation, are doing too little.
These climate engineers, some of whom are politically right of center or libertarian, share a growing concern that something is terribly wrong with the sky. They are convinced that the climate system is headed into uncharted territory, carbon mitigation will fail or at least move too slowly to avert an environmental disaster, and adaptation will be too little, too late. Some simply place more faith in engineering solutions than in human agreements. They have come to the conclusion that the twenty-first century will be “geotechnic”—that the atmosphere is humanity’s aerial sewer, sorely in need of treatment, and the Earth needs a thermostat or perhaps global air-conditioning. They seek a technological fix through geoengineering, which they loosely define as the intentional large-scale manipulation of the global environment. Some have called it the “ultimate technological fix”; critics say it has unlimited potential for planetary mischief. Shade the planet by launching a solar shield into orbit. Shoot sulfates or reflective nanoparticles into the upper atmosphere, turning the blue sky milky white. Make the clouds thicker and brighter. Fertilize the oceans to stimulate massive algae blooms that turn the blue seas soupy green. Suck carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air with hundreds of thousands of giant artificial trees. Flood the Sahara and the Australian outback to plant mega-forests of eucalyptus trees. Surround the Arctic sea ice with a white plastic flotilla. While all this may sound like science fiction, it is actually just the latest set of installments in the perennial story of weather and climate control. For more than a century, scientists, soldiers, and charlatans have hatched schemes to manipulate the weather and climate. Like them, today’s aspiring climate engineers wildly exaggerate what is possible, while scarcely considering the political, military, and ethical implications of attempting to manage the world’s climate. This is not, in essence, a heroic saga about new scientific discoveries that can save the planet, as many of the participants claim, but a tragicomedy of overreaching, hubris, and self-delusion. At a National Academy of Sciences meeting in June 2009 on geoengineering, planetary scientist Brian Toon told the audience that we do not have the technology to engineer the planet. We do not have the wisdom either. Global climate engineering is untested and untestable, and dangerous beyond belief.
The latest resurgence of interest in geoengineering dates to an editorial written in 2006 by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, “Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?” The question mark is well placed, for far from solving a policy dilemma, he actually opened a can of worms, albeit from a pantry filled with such cans. Crutzen’s basic message, that “research on the feasibility and environmental consequences of climate engineering . . . should not be tabooed,” was but the latest round in an ancient quest for ultimate control of the atmosphere—a quest with very deep roots in traditional cultures, practices, myth, fiction, and history.
Ever since Archimedes, engineers have been excited about technological leverage, but they have never had the “standing” or the ability to predict all or even most of the consequences of their actions. This is a perennial issue. Yet today’s geoengineers exude a false confidence when they proclaim that their tools and techniques have now matured to the extent that fixing the sky—cooling the planet, saving humanity, and avoiding unwanted side effects, whether physical or moral—is now both possible and desirable. How did we arrive at this situation?
This book examines historical and current ways of thinking about weather and climate control. It includes stories from a long and checkered history and a dizzying array of contemporary ideas—most of them wildly impractical. It examines—in the context of myth, tradition, fiction, and fantasy—the proposals and actual practices of a large number of dreamers, militarists, and outright charlatans, of rain kings and queens, of weather warriors and climate engineers, both ancient and modern. It provides scholars and the general public with new perspectives that are missing from the technically oriented or policy-oriented conversations about control. This book is based on research in original manuscript and document collections; it also contains fresh interpretations of existing work. It is an extended essay arguing for the relevance of history, the foolishness of quick fixes, and the need to follow a “middle path” of expedited moderation in aerial matters, seeking neither to control the sky nor to diminish its importance.
This history is located within a long tradition of imaginative and speculative literature involving the “control” of nature. Early efforts to exercise some form of control over the environment included seeking shelter from the elements, using fire for warmth, herding animals, cultivating plants, and moving and storing fresh water. Yet control of the heavens remains far beyond the ability of mortals. Our ancestors either bowed or cowered before the ancient sky gods, while the mythological figures of classical antiquity met with tragedy when they sought to exceed mortal limits. Many societies, seeking a measure of influence over the vagaries of the sky, invested their rulers or shamans with the title “rain king” and charged them with ceremonial duties of vast significance not only for upholding the physical well-being and prosperity of the tribe but also for maintaining the proper relationships between Heaven and Earth.
Since the seventeenth century, the Baconian expectation that increasing knowledge would lead to new technologies “for the common good” has been widely applied to all scientific fields, including, notably, meteorology and climatology. For several centuries now, planners, politicians, scientists, and soldiers have proposed schemes for the purposeful manipulation of weather and climate, usually for commercial or military purposes. Their stories have tragic, comedic, and heroic aspects. Control of weather and climate is a perennial issue rooted in hubris and tragedy; it is a pathological issue, illustrating what can go wrong in science; and it is a pressing public policy issue with widespread social implications.
Enlightenment philosophers supposed that the climate of Europe had moderated since Roman times in response to human activity. Thomas Jefferson thought that clearing the forests, draining the marshes, and cultivating the land would improve the American climate. In the 1840s, James Espy, the first meteorologist in U.S. government service, proposed rainmaking by lighting huge fires to stimulate convective updrafts. The following era in rainmaking was dominated by artillerists and widespread charlatanism—the “pluviculturalists.”
Nineteenth-century climatologists who could find no trends in the weather records beyond variability temporarily quashed the notion that humans can influence climate. Yet by mid-century, geologists had discovered great changes, ice ages and interglacial epochs, in the record of the rocks. The two timescales (the human historical and the geological) and the two agencies (anthropogenic forces and natural forces) were reunited in a new form at the dawn of the twentieth century by the Swedish meteorologist Nils Gustaf Ekholm, who wrote about “the influence of Man on climate.” Ekholm regarded variations in carbon dioxide concentration as the principal cause of climatic variations, citing the “elaborate inquiry on this complicated phenomenon” made by his colleague Svante Arrhenius. He explained that carbon dioxide is a key player in the greenhouse effect and that this conclusion is based on the earlier work of Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall, and others. By his estimates, an increase in carbon dioxide would heat high latitudes more than the tropics and would create a warmer, more uniform climate over the entire Earth; a tripling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would raise global temperatures 7 to 9 degrees Celsius (12 to 16 degrees Farhenheit).
According to Ekholm, the secular cooling of the originally hot Earth was the principal cause of variation in the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As the Earth cooled, the oceans sequestered great amounts of carbon into limestone and other calcium carbonate deposits, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. This caused temperatures to fall, triggering a chain reaction of feedback mechanisms that lowered carbon dioxide levels even further. Other processes added carbon dioxide to the air. Volcanic emissions, mountain uplift, and changes in sea level and plant cover produced the periodical variations evident in the geological record.
Ekholm pointed out that humanity was now playing a role in these geological processes. He held that over the course of a millennium the accumulation in the atmosphere of CO2 from the burning of pit coal would “undoubtedly cause a very obvious rise of the mean temperature of the Earth.” He also thought this effect could be accelerated by burning coal exposed in shallow seams or perhaps decreased “by protecting the weathering layers of silicates from the influence of the air and by ruling the growth of plants.” Ekholm pointed to the grand possibility that by such means it might someday be possible “to regulate the future climate of the Earth and consequently prevent the arrival of a new Ice Age.” In this scenario, climate warming by enhanced coal burning would be pitted against the natural changes in the Earth’s orbital elements, recently identified by James Croll, or the secular cooling of the Sun, as pointed out by Lord Kelvin. Ekholm concluded, “It is too early to judge of how far Man might be capable of thus regulating the future climate. But already the view of such a possibility seems to me so grand that I cannot help thinking that it will afford Mankind hitherto unforeseen means of evolution.”
Arrhenius popularized Ekholm’s observations in his book Worlds in the Making, noting that “the slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may by the advances of industry be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries.” Arrhenius considered it likely that in future geological ages, the Earth would be “visited by a new ice period that will drive us from our temperate countries into the hotter climates of Africa.” On the timescale of hundreds to thousands of years, however, Arrhenius agreed with Ekholm that a “virtuous circle” could be defined in which the burning of fossil fuels could help prevent a rapid return to the conditions of an ice age and could perhaps inaugurate a new carboniferous age of enormous plant growth.
Yet in the early decades of the twentieth century, the carbon dioxide theory of climate change, along with the human influence theory, fell out of favor with most scientists. The dominant opinion was that at current atmospheric concentrations, carbon dioxide already absorbed all the available long-wave radiation; thus any increases would not change the radiative heat balance of the planet but might stimulate plant growth. The person responsible for reviving the ideas of Arrhenius and Ekholm and placing them on a revised scientific basis was Guy Stewart Callendar (1898–1964), a British steam and defense engineer. In 1938 Callendar reformulated the carbon dioxide theory by arguing that rising global temperatures and increased fossil fuel burning were closely linked. He compiled weather data from stations around the world that clearly indicated a climate warming trend of 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Farenheit) in the early decades of the twentieth century. His estimate of 290 parts per million for the nineteenth-century background concentration of CO2 is still a valid estimate, and he documented an increase of 10 percent between 1900 and 1935, which closely matched the amount of fuel burned. On the basis of new understanding of the infrared spectrum and calculations of the absorption and emission of radiation by trace gases in the atmosphere, Callendar established the carbon dioxide theory of climate change in its recognizably modern form, reviving it from its earlier, physically unrealistic and moribund status. Today the theory that global climate change can be attributed to an enhanced greenhouse effect resulting from elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from anthropogenic sources and activities is called the Callendar effect.
The dawn of aviation brought new needs and challenges, with fog dispersal taking center stage. A number of ineffective efforts using chemical and electrical means concluded during World War II with the massive fog clearing project FIDO (Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation), which allowed British Royal Air Force and Allied planes to take off and land when the Germans were grounded. With national survival at stake, it did not matter that it required 6,000 gallons of gasoline to land one airplane.
After World War II, promising discoveries in “cloud seeding” at the General Electric Corporation rapidly devolved into questionable practices by military and commercial rainmakers seeking to control the weather, while hopeful developments in digital computing led to speculation that a perfect machine forecast could lead to perfect understanding and control. During the cold war, speculation about geoengineering by the Soviets promoted a chilling vision (to Westerners) of global climate control. Geoscientific speculators in the West returned the favor.
By 1962 the results of early computer simulations of the general circulation of the atmosphere and the first satellite estimates of the Earth’s heat budget led Harry Wexler, head of research at the U.S. Weather Bureau, to warn a United Nations symposium on the environment of the “inherent risk” in attempted climate control “of irremediable harm to our planet or side effects counterbalancing the possible short-term benefits.” Yet only three years later, the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) reported that scientists might soon need to increase the Earth’s albedo, or planetary brightness, deliberately in response to increased warming from carbon dioxide emissions.
During the hot summer of 1988, with Yellowstone National Park in flames and global warming in the headlines, an international scientific conference sponsored by the UN and the World Meteorological Organization recommended reductions of carbon dioxide emissions to 20 percent below 1988 levels, to be achieved by 2005. Today, we are nowhere near reaching that goal. Experts advise that reductions of greenhouse gas emissions of at least 60 percent worldwide and up to 90 percent in the United States and Europe are needed, while popular cries of “Stop global warming” and “Control climate change” are becoming more and more widespread. Invoking the unlikelihood that such reductions will be accomplished voluntarily and the fear of passing a climate “tipping point,” some modern-day climate engineers are suggesting that they can provide cheap, reliable technological “fixes” for the climate system through macro-engineering options that include “solar radiation management” and other invasive techniques of “planetary surgery.”
Weather and climate are intimately related: weather is the state of the atmosphere at a given place and time, while climate is the aggregate of weather conditions over time. A vast body of scientific literature addresses these interactions. In addition, historians are revisiting the ancient but elusive term Klima , seeking to recover its multiple social connotations. Weather, climate, and the climate of opinion matter in complex ways that invite—some might say require or demand—the attention of both scientists and historians.
Yet some may wonder how weather and climate are interrelated rather than distinct. Both, for example, are at the center of the debate over greenhouse warming and hurricane intensity. A few may claim that rainmaking, for example, has nothing to do with climate engineering, but any intervention in the Earth’s radiation or heat budget (such as managing solar radiation) would affect the general circulation and thus the location of upper-level patterns, including the jet stream and storm tracks. Thus the weather itself would be changed by such manipulation. Conversely, intervening in severe storms by changing their intensity or their tracks or modifying weather on a scale as large as a region, a continent, or the Pacific basin would obviously affect cloudiness, temperature, and precipitation patterns, with major consequences for monsoonal flows and ultimately the general circulation. If repeated systematically, such interventions would influence the overall heat budget and the climate.
In the 1950s, Irving Langmuir sought to cause changes in the seasons and the climate of large regions such as the North American continent and the Pacific Ocean by massive seeding of weather systems. Two decades earlier, L. Francis Warren tried to develop a system of universal weather control using electrified sand. In the 1840s, James Espy’s proposed large fires were intended to act as artificial volcanoes, triggering regular rains along the entire eastern seaboard to change the climate and improve the health of the region, while Thomas Jefferson speculated on climate engineering at the dawn of the nineteenth century and thought that the sum total of American agricultural practices would surely change local weather and warm the entire continent. Thus, both by definition and in historical practice, weather and climate occupy a continuous spectrum ranging from local to global scales and from short- to long-term temporal changes. As Harry Wexler liked to point out, if you change the weather repeatedly on a large spatial scale, you are changing the climate, and vice versa.
Attempted control of the environment may not be a good thing, especially when it is based on simplistic assumptions (for example, that hurricanes may be readily redirected or that basic radiation physics controls the Earth’s climate) or when it exceeds the knowledge base or verges on science fantasy. Like the pseudoscientific rainmakers of yore, today’s aspiring climate engineers wildly exaggerate what is possible and scarcely consider the political or ethical implications of attempting to manage the world’s climate—with potential consequences far greater than any of their predecessors were ever likely to face.
Who has the moral right to modify the weather or the global climate? Where will a global thermostat be located, and who gets to control it? Will climate engineering reduce incentives to mitigate carbon emissions? What about unknown side effects? Should it be commercialized? What if nations or companies do it unilaterally? Does it violate existing treaties? Why is the military so interested? Once it begins, can we ever stop it? How will weather and climate engineering alter fundamental human relationships to nature?
This book is grounded in the practices of the past and provides perspectives on the largely fantastic claims of the current batch of geoscientific speculators, collectively known as the climate engineers, who are proposing to “fix the sky” and cool the planet in response to fears of global warming. In facing the unprecedented challenges posed by humanity’s current confrontation with the elements—a situation exacerbated by world population, a host of aerial effluents, and generally rising affluence—it is good to seek historical precedents. The goal is the articulation of perspectives fully informed by history and the initiation of a dialogue that uncovers otherwise hidden values, ethical implications, social tensions, and public apprehensions surrounding our past and current environmental situations.
I have set down in writing my ideas about fixing the sky—primarily historical ideas about mending, repairing, or somehow improving perceived defects in the weather or in climate systems—but fixing the sky has many, many other possible meanings. In the Oxford English Dictionary , the “sky” is the apparent arch or vault of heaven, whether covered with clouds or clear and blue; it may be the climate or clime of a particular region, nowadays usually designated more globally than locally. The appearance of the sky is variously sunny, starry, hazy, overcast, azure, copper, even milky white. Fog or cloud modification involves fixing the sky. Sky gods and goddesses, sky-shades, and sky-fliers (the overly ambitious) have all played their roles in this seemingly limitless and often extravagantly fanciful history.
A “fix” is a predicament, difficulty, dilemma, or a “tight place.” It refers to a heroic intervention to help the hopeless and make things right again. It can also be a certified position at sea, in the air, or on the trading floor; a dose of narcotics for an addict; or an illegal bribe or illicit arrangement. A fix is a measure undertaken to resolve a problem, an easy remedy, sometimes known as a “quick fix,” which connotes an expedient but temporary solution that fails to address underlying problems. It can be a “tech fix” that emphasizes the engineering aspect rather than the social dimensions of an issue. Something “fixed” is not changing or vacillating; it possesses stability and consistency, even if it is a steady, concentrated, unwavering, or mesmerizing fixed gaze. When the chemist Joseph Black discovered what we now call carbon dioxide, he called it “fixed air” because of its stable properties—ironic now that this compound is the volatile core of all environmental discussion. Plants are good at fixing carbon into their tissues through photosynthesis, but we have yet to learn how to capture, fix, and sequester carbon dioxide underground or in ocean trenches. Sporting events and elections can be “fixed” by illegal means, bulls by legal means; the unattached can be “fixed up" with likely partners.
In 1966 physicist Alvin Weinberg coined the term “technological fix.” Since then, it has come to connote simplistic or stopgap remedies to complex problems, partial solutions that may generate more problems than they solve. Placing more faith in technology than in human nature, Weinberg offered engineering as an alternative to conservation or restraint. We face this dilemma with technological fixes for global warming, although those who propose such ideas are quick to say that they are only buying time until more reasonable forms of mitigation and adaptation can take effect.
In a practical way, humans have long practiced a form of climate control in their technologies of clothing and shelter. By controlling the heat and moisture budgets within a centimeter of the skin surface, humans can function in even the harshest weather conditions. Mountain climbers, polar explorers, even the French Foreign Legion represent extreme examples of what we all do—clothe ourselves according to expected environmental conditions.
Controlling the heat budget (and to some extent the moisture budget) within small, enclosed spaces allows humans to live, work, and play in relative comfort and safety in most weather conditions and climate zones. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Coal is a portable climate. . . . Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.” Just one century ago, industrial power was applied to cooling, drying, and purifying the air when Willis H. Carrier invented an industrial air-conditioning system. Carrier’s invention has now infiltrated all aspects of modern life. It is doubtful whether the American Sun Belt would be growing as it is today without the widespread use of home, auto, and industrial air-conditioning. As these brief examples indicate, controlling the weather and climate is something we all do (on a small scale), while some fantasize about it on a large scale. Clark Spence, in his entertaining book The Rainmakers , surveyed the sometimes fantastic and always quixotic history of scientific weather modification before World War II. Here those stories are expanded and continued after 1945.
While many works in the history of science and technology have been crafted in a heroic mode—great men with great ideas “standing on the shoulders of giants”—and environmental histories are often written as tragedies, the history of weather and climate control is best told by invoking a broader range of approaches, including a mixture of the tragic and comedic genres. Most of the rainmakers and climate engineers portray their activities as heroic and dramatic attempts to rescue humanity from a recalcitrant sky by exercising control over it; however, their efforts often have commercial or military dimensions and almost always fall far short of the stated goals. Here is where tragicomedy—or perhaps just comedy—best captures the flawed anti-heroics of those who would seek to fix the sky or control the weather and climate. In this book, I present a comedy of ideas extending from the mythological past to the present, with the common denominator being farce, and sometimes satire, especially when the hype becomes too great. Most of the stories emphasize the perennial nature of the claims, the hubris and ineptitude of the protagonists, the largely pathological science on which they are based, the opportunistic appeals to new technologies, the false sense that macro-engineering will solve more problems than it creates, and the ineptitude of the protagonists.
The trinity of understanding, prediction, and control undergirds the dominant fantasies of both science and science fiction. Understanding often involves reducing a complex phenomenon to a set of basic laws or mechanisms. This may even involve extreme “molecular reductionism”—for example, in the treatment of silver iodide (AgI) as a “trigger” mechanism for widespread weather modification or of carbon dioxide, today’s environmental molecule of choice, as an international symbol of human intervention in the climate system, signaling and codifying both affluence and apprehension.
Prediction introduces the time dimension in which the future state of a natural phenomenon is specified. If you understand a phenomenon, scientists say, you should be able to predict its behavior. But while rather precise prediction of the appearances of the sky was practiced in antiquity, weather prediction and basic climate modeling were not possible until the mid-1950s when digital computing became capable of handling the extreme complexity of this nonlinear system.
Control is the third member of the trinity, but understanding does not imply either predictability or control. If you know from observation that horses need pasture and fresh water, you may predict that a wild herd will gather in the grassy fields near the river. Capturing them, taming them, and bending them to your will, however, is a far more difficult undertaking. For some, in the age of digital computing, of Earth observations from space, and of extremely precise measurement of atmospheric chemical species, fixing the sky—controlling the weather and climate—is more desirable than merely observing or predicting it. Some think that this is now possible and that science and technology have given us an Archimedean set of levers with which to move the Earth. This book examines these ancient, perennial, and contemporary quests and questions by placing recent developments in the context of the deeper past.
Chapter 1, stories of control, highlights imaginative and speculative literature on the control of nature. It draws from the classical tradition, including Phaethon’s blunder, Milton’s Paradise Lost , and Dante’s Divine Comedy , among others. The examples indicate that myth, magic, religion, and legend are not relics of the past but constitute deep roots and living sparks of contemporary practices. An excursion into early geoscientific fiction follows, demonstrating the affinities between the genre of science fiction and the fantasies of the cloud and climate controllers. The works of famous authors such as Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and Kurt Vonnegut serve to anchor the analysis of a host of lesser-known but still important, enlightening, and entertaining early fiction. Tales of the rainmakers, including the well-known play The Rainmaker , by N. Richard Nash, appear alongside popularizations from the television series Sky King and comics from Warner Brothers and Walt Disney. Here, as in Twain, the comedic genre clearly trumps the heroic and the tragic. It is also clear that fiction writing has a moral core that is missing from the speculative proposals of scientists and engineers. Moreover, the writers tend to employ female voices to remind their predominantly male protagonists of their ethical excesses.
Scientific rainmakers take the historical stage in chapter 2. The story of control begins with the aspirations of Sir Francis Bacon and continues as a legacy of the historiographically contentious scientific revolution. Enlightened dreamers, enamored by the notion of progress, enthusiastically sought to understand, predict, and ultimately control the weather and climate. But did they reveal nature’s deepest secrets or abuse our deepest sensibilities? The distinguished American meteorologist James Espy wanted to control rainfall with great fires, a problematic goal that, if ever accomplished, would have raised immense ethical dilemmas. Another group wanted to cannonade the clouds to wring out their moisture, but succeeded mainly in entertaining onlookers with pyrotechnic displays. The notion of progress was such a heady surety that it seemed that anything was possible; not even the sky was the limit. Surely things are much different now. Or are they?
Chapter 3 examines the rain fakers, the charlatans or confidence men who lived by their wits and accepted payment from desperate and gullible farmers for their questionable services. Hail shooting falls into this category, as do the Kansas and Nebraska proprietary rainmakers of the 1880s and 1990s. Charles Hatfield, the “moisture accelerator,” was a charlatan’s charlatan who mixed his proprietary chemicals and dispensed them from high towers at considerable profit in the first three decades of the twentieth century. George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes, who scammed the Belmont Park racetrack in the 1930s; Wilhelm Reich, who scammed his followers in the 1950s; Irving Krick, who practiced commercial cloud seeding over most of the American West; and the Provaqua project, which just recently tried to scam the citizens of Laredo, Texas, serve to illustrate the perennial nature of these questionable but humorous (at least from a distance) practices. Ironically, the rainmakers and the rain fakers employed surprisingly similar techniques, although the former actually believed in what they were doing, while the latter clearly did not.
Chapter 4 focuses on fog removal in the era of early aviation. As the airplane provided a new platform for aerial experimentation, it also raised the stakes for aviation safety and military efficiency. Teams of experimenters, some working largely on their own and some with the full support of governments, tried electrical, chemical, and physical methods of fog removal. These included attacking clouds with electrified sand, spraying calcium chloride on airports, and burning hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline in a brute-force effort to keep the Royal Air Force aloft and return its pilots safely. The chapter ends with a look at the “airs of the future,” both indoors and out. The rising popularity of air-conditioning in the 1930s was an approach to weather and climate control that has since reached the level of domed stadiums and indoor shopping malls, falling just shy of totally air-conditioned cities. Also in the 1930s and early 1940s, meteorologists shared their visions of technological breakthroughs in the coming decades leading to perfect forecasts and the holy grail of weather control.
Chapter 5 examines the defining characteristics of “pathological science” established by Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir and then proceeds to indict him on his own criteria. Langmuir, and to some extent his associates at General Electric, was an overenthusiastic supporter of weather control by using dry ice and silver iodide as cloud-seeding agents. When the military took over the project, the stage was set for heavy-handed intervention in hurricanes, large-scale tests with few controls, and sweeping but unsupportable claims. As the technique spread around the world, a host of commercial cloud seeders, personified by Irving Krick, made their living at the expense of those in need of rainfall. The chapter concludes with stories of meteorological disasters in England and the former Soviet Union attributed to but not proved to have been caused by cloud seeding.
The mood darkens considerably in chapter 6 as military themes take center stage. What are the historical dimensions of military interest and involvement in the weather; how were the clouds weaponized, especially in the cold war era; and how did a race for weather control domination emerge between the United States and the Soviet Union? The sordid episode of rainmaking in Vietnam over the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the ban by the United Nations on environmental warfare quashed much of this enthusiasm in the 1970s. Yet the weather and climate warriors are with us still, preparing to “own” and manipulate the weather over the battlefields of the future and seeking to control the evolving nature of climate change in the interest of national security.
Chapter 7 examines climate fears, climate fantasies, and the possibility of global climate control between 1945 and 1962. It illuminates technical, scientific, social, and popular issues and moves us beyond the timeworn origin stories of numerical weather prediction into a new field of numerical climate control—a marketplace of wild ideas, a twentieth-century Hall of Fantasy, or even Twilight Zone, whose boundaries are those of imagination. It does so by examining some of the chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and, yes, meteorologists who tried to “interfere” with natural processes. They intervened not with dry ice or silver iodide, but with the new Promethean possibilities of climate tinkering using digital computing, satellite remote sensing, and nuclear power. Key players include Vladimir Zworykin, the inventor of television, and the noted mathematician John Von Neumann, both of whom were seeking a perfect forecasting machine, and Harry Wexler, head of research at the U.S. Weather Bureau, who imagined cutting a hole in the stratospheric ozone layer and issued a clear warning about the coming dangers of climate engineering.
Finally, chapter 8 examines recent and current ideas and proposals regarding geoengineering, loosely defined as the intentional manipulation of the global environment. Driven by the fear of global warming and their underlying certainty that mitigation and adaptation will not be sufficient to prevent a climate catastrophe, the climate engineers are pushing for the authority and the wherewithal to go beyond paper studies and computer models to implement field trials and full-scale systems and find a technological fix. But in their quest to create a “planetary thermostat,” they lack a widespread following and appear to most mainstream scientists, environmentalists, and policymakers as too aggressive in their vocal advocacy for untested, and perhaps untestable, practices. It is likely that humanity as a whole has done too little in response to the problem, but the climate engineers are seeking to do too much.
Attempted control of the environment may not be a good thing, especially when it is based on simplistic assumptions (for example, that hurricanes may be readily redirected or that basic radiation physics controls the Earth’s climate) or when it exceeds the knowledge base or verges on science fantasy. Like the pseudoscientific rainmakers of yore, today’s aspiring climate engineers wildly exaggerate what is possible and scarcely consider the political or ethical implications of attempting to manage the world’s climate—with potential consequences far greater than any of their predecessors were ever likely to face.
Who has the moral right to modify the weather or the global climate? Where will a global thermostat be located, and who gets to control it? Will climate engineering reduce incentives to mitigate carbon emissions? What about unknown side effects? Should it be commercialized? What if nations or companies do it unilaterally? Does it violate existing treaties? Why is the military so interested? once it begins, can we ever stop it? How will weather and climate engineering alter fundamental human relationships to nature?
This book is grounded in the practices of the past and provides perspectives on the largely fantastic claims of the current batch of geoscientific speculators, collectively known as the climate engineers, who are proposing to cool the planet in response to fears of global warming. In facing the unprecedented challenges posed by humanity’s current confrontation with the elements—a situation exacerbated by world population, a host of aerial effluents, and generally rising affluence—it is good to seek historical precedents.
The current generation of climate engineers is not the first to consider planetary-scale environmental manipulation. Indeed, they are heirs to a long and checkered history of weather and climate control populated by a colorful.
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