Fixing the Sky Read online

  Table of Contents

  COLUMBIA STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL AND GLOBAL HISTORY

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PREFACE

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - STORIES OF CONTROL

  Phaethon’s Blunder

  The Mandan Rainmakers

  Leavers and Takers

  Science Fiction

  Jules Verne and the Baltimore Gun Club

  Mark Twain: Controlling the Climate and Selling It

  A Comedic Western

  Rock the Earth

  Tales of the Rainmakers

  Sky King and the Indian Rainmaker

  Porky Pig and Donald Duck

  Chapter 2 - RAIN MAKERS

  Scientific Revolutions “de l’air”

  Great Fires and Artificial Volcanoes

  Eliza Leslie’s “Rain King”

  Cannon and Bells

  War and the Weather

  A Perfect Imitation of Battle

  Chapter 3 - RAIN FAKERS

  At War with the Clouds

  Hurricane Cannon

  Kansas and Nebraska Rainmakers

  “An Unfortunate Rain-maker”

  Charles Hatfield, the “Moisture Accelerator”

  Betting on the Weather

  Seeding the American West

  Deadly Orgone

  Provaqua

  Chapter 4 - FOGGY THINKING

  Electrical Methods

  Electrified Sand

  Round 1: Dayton, Ohio

  Round 2: Aberdeen and Bolling

  Round 3: Hartford, Connecticut

  The Business of “Rainmaking”

  Fog Research at MIT

  FIDO: A Brute-Force Method of Fog Dispersal

  First Successful Tests

  FIDO Becomes Operational

  The Aftermath of FIDO

  The Airs of the Future

  Chapter 5 - PATHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

  Blowing Smoke

  Liquid and Solid Carbon Dioxide

  The Rainmaker of Yore

  GE Tells the World

  Threat of Litigation

  Project Cirrus

  Hurricane King

  Silver Iodide

  The New Mexico Seedings

  A Pathological Passion

  Commercial Cloud Seeding

  Disasters

  Chapter 6 - WEATHER WARRIORS

  Weather in Wars and Battles

  Science and the Military

  Meteorology and the Military

  Cold War Cloud Seeding

  Military Research

  Public Perceptions

  Project Stormfury

  Cloud Seeding in Indochina

  ENMOD: Prohibiting Environmental Modification as a Weapon of War

  Chapter 7 - FEARS, FANTASIES, AND POSSIBILITIES OF CONTROL

  Fears

  Fantasies

  Popularizations

  Hurricane Control

  Soviet Fantasies

  Warming the Arctic

  Rehydrating and Powering Africa

  Space Mirrors and Dust

  Bombs Away

  Harry Wexler and the Possibilities of Climate Control

  Cutting a Hole in the Ozone Layer

  Chapter 8 - THE CLIMATE ENGINEERS

  What Is Geoengineering?

  Terraforming and Beyond

  Ethical Consequences

  Protection, Prevention, and Production

  Climate Leverage

  National Academy, 1992

  A Naval Rifle System

  Ocean Iron Fertilization

  Artificial Trees or Lackner Towers

  Recycling Ideas

  A Royal Society Smoke Screen

  Field Tests?

  The Middle Course

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  COLUMBIA STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL AND GLOBAL HISTORY

  The idea of “globalization” has become a commonplace, but we lack good histories that can explain the transnational and global processes that have shaped the contemporary world. Columbia Studies in International and Global History will encourage serious scholarship on international and global history with an eye to explaining the origins of the contemporary era. Grounded in empirical research, the titles in the series will also transcend the usual area boundaries and will address questions of how history can help us understand contemporary problems, including poverty, inequality, power, political violence, and accountability beyond the nation-state.

  Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia:

  Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought

  Adam M. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and

  the Globalization of Borders

  Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture

  “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world” (Archimedes), but where will it roll? (MECHANICS MAGAZINE, 1824, AND ORIGINAL ART)

  The middle course is safest and best.

  —HELIOS

  PREFACE

  THE possibility but not the desirability of weather and climate control entered my consciousness in the early 1970s. I was a graduate student in atmospheric science at Colorado State University and one of my air force colleagues proposed to zap clouds with laser beams to make them more energetic. I think he was wondering if a focused beam of radiation could destroy hailstones, perhaps like microwave medical treatment for kidney stones, although I suspect his patrons had other ideas. I also noted a widespread ambivalence among most of my professors toward cloud seeding, which was not part of the main curriculum. My own project involved putting cirrus clouds into a computerized tropical atmosphere and modeling their radiative effects. This was an early exercise in climate modeling. The way clouds interact with sunlight and heat radiation was very speculative then and is still an open question, even as some climate engineers propose to “manage” solar radiation.

  Colorado State University also supported my training as a high-altitude observer, which qualified me to work with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder in its instrumented glider project. This was an ideal job for someone who loved clouds, since we were able to slip quietly and unobtrusively into them, spend up to several hours spiraling in their growing updrafts and collecting data, and then exit the tops of budding thunderstorms for absolutely spectacular views. This project was conducted in 1973 over the Continental Divide near Leadville, Colorado. Its poignant but unintended link to weather control came one evening, unexpectedly, when the Colorado state police visited our lodgings and informed us that someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail into the hangar and had burned up one wing of the glider. Apparently, some of the locals mistakenly thought that we were engaged in cloud seeding, or, colloquially, “stealing their sky water.”

  In my next project, at the University of Washington, I flew in a World War II–era surplus bomber equipped with cloud physics equipment to investigate the claims of the weather modification community. The problem was, we usually flew only when the weather was bad, so we were buffeted quite frequently by Pacific storms. Early one morning, after a particularly harrowing night of flying, the airplane clipped off the top of a pine tree during our landing approach. I recall pulling a 2-inch-diameter branch out of the equipment slung below the plane and deciding, pretty much there and then, that I would be seeking other, safer modes of engagement with the atmosphere.

  The history of science and technology, including its relevance to public policy, became for me that mode of engagement. I received my doctorate in history at Princeton University with a dissertation on the history of meteorology in
America. Since then, I have had more than a passing interest in the history of weather and climate modification and have written several essays on the topic. I also remain deeply involved in issues involving climate change history and public policy. Today’s climate engineers are championing an approach to the problem of what to do about climate change that arouses my deepest suspicions regarding technological fixes. It is a seriously flawed and speculative undertaking that typically involves impractical or even dangerous schemes to “fix the sky.” Proposals include “solar radiation management” and other forms of planetary leverage, including thermodynamically impractical schemes for large-scale carbon capture and sequestration. The proposals are typically supported by scribbling back-of-the-envelope calculations or tinkering with simple computer models that are just not good enough. It is an approach that is oblivious to the checkered history of weather and climate control.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MOST of the research for this book was conducted during a research leave supported by Colby College, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Early versions of this work were presented at a number of venues. I extend my profound gratitude to my hosts, sponsors, listeners, and questioners.

  Special thanks are due to Ralph Cicerone and Lee Hamilton and their staffs; British Broadcasting Corporation filmmakers Fiona Scott and Weini Tesfu; 4th Row Films producers and directors Robert Greene and Greta Wink; Wilson Center Environmental Change and Security director Geof Dabelko, Wilson Quarterly editor Steve Lagerfeld and assistant editor Rebecca Rosen, Wilson Center press director Joe Brinley, and Wilson Center librarian Janet Spikes; National Academy of Science archivists Dan Barbiero and Janice Goldblum; Colby College librarians Susan Cole, Margaret Menchen, Darylyne Provost, and Alisia Wygant Rizett; Len Bruno and the staffs of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and the NOAA Central Library; and a host of other archivists and librarians.

  The following individuals provided extremely helpful perspectives and welcome encouragement: Stephen Cole, NASA Goddard; Lindsay Collins, Brooke Larson, and Theda Perdue, Woodrow Wilson Center; Matthew Connelly, Columbia University; Bill Frank and Charles Hosler, Pennsylvania State University; Justin Grubich and Alexey Voinov, AAAS Policy Fellows; Vladimir Jankovic, Manchester University; D. Whitney King, Ursula Reidel-Schrewe, and Thomas Shattuck, Colby College; Roger Launius, David DeVorkin, Martin Collins, and Michael Neufeld, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Milton Leitenberg, University of Maryland; Michael MacCracken and John Topping, Climate Institute; Alan Robock, Rutgers University; Richard Somerville, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; and Roger Turner, University of Pennsylvania.

  Gregory Cushman and students in his graduate seminar at the University of Kansas read and commented on an early draft of the manuscript; so, too, did Roger Launus, Alan Robock, and several unnamed reviewers. Research assistants Noah B. Bonnheim, Alice W. Evans, Amie R. Fleming, Ashley J. Oliver, Mette Fog Olwig, Mandy Reynolds, and James S. Westhafer made essential contributions to the process. My editor, Anne Routon, greatly facilitated production of the book.

  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 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.1 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?”2 The question mark is well placed, for far from solving a policy dilemma, he actually opened a can of worms, albeit from a historical 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 minimizing unwanted side effects, whether physical or moral—is now both possible and desirable. How did we arrive at this situation?3

  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 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 course” of expedited moderation in aerial matters, seeking neither to control the sky nor to diminish the importance of environmental problems we face.

  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” or “rain queen” 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.