The Weathermakers (1967)

by Ben Bova

  But there was going to be a meeting of the Resources Managers of the New England States, one of a series of regional meetings for various departments of the state governments. This one was for the people who worry about natural resources . . . such as water.

  I cornered Ted in Tuli’s kinetics lab and told him about it. “It’s going to be over the Fourth of July weekend.”

  “Foul up the weekend to talk to a bunch of bureaucrats?” He was plainly disgusted.

  “To talk,” I replied, “with the people who’ll buy drought alleviation . . . if you can sell it.”

  “If I can sell it? Insults yet! Okay bossman, you want fireworks for the Glorious Fourth, you’ll get ’em.”

  It took some string-pulling to get us on the conference agenda. I finally had to talk to a Congressman from Lynn; he was on the House of Representatives’ Science and Natural Resources Committee, and was helping to make the arrangements for the meeting.

  The biggest job was getting Ted prepared to speak to a group of non-meteorologists. The first time he rehearsed his talk he spent fifty minutes showing slides and explaining the science of meteorology. We all tried to argue him out of it.

  “It’s got to be simplified,” I insisted. “These people don’t understand meteorology. I couldn’t even follow most of your talk.”

  He sat on the couch in my office and folded his arms like a stubborn little boy. “What do you want me to do, tell ‘em fairytales?”

  “Right! Exactly right,” I said. “Tell them a fairy tale . . . a horror stow. Show them how bad this drought’s going to be. And then show them enough to convince them that you can break it up.”

  “Is that fair?” Tuli asked.

  “If you’re talking to people who don’t understand the nature of the problem,” Barney said, “you’ve got to speak in language that will get through to them.”

  “Okay,” Ted said with a shrug. “The talk’ll be show business, not science.”

  Take the energy of a full-fledged storm and compress it into a narrow funnel so that its wind speed reaches five hundred knots, causing a semi-vacuum inside its rotary structure. Such winds hit a wall with a force of a thousand pounds per square foot. And the vacuum immediately behind the wind makes the normal air pressure in a building explode the walls outward. Such a funnel makes a fine weapon, especially in a crowded city. It is called a tornado.

  It was a gray, soggy afternoon in Tulsa, with thick bulbous clouds hanging low. The weather map showed a strong cold front approaching from the northwest, pushing into oppressively humid tropical air. A tornado alert had been issued by the Weather Bureau, and planes were seeding some of the clouds, trying to disperse them before danger struck. The shopping center was jammed nonetheless; tomorrow, the Fourth, stores would be closed. The funnel dropped out of the clouds suddenly, hissing and writhing like a supergiant snake, spewing lightning. It touched a pond and instantly sucked it dry, hopped over a parking lot, and pounced on the main shopping buildings. They exploded. It was all over in thirty seconds. Forty-two killed, more than a hundred injured. The funnel disappeared, and soon after the clouds blew away. The sun shone down on five acres of sheer devastation.

  Ted and I saw the results of the tornado on the TV news as we ‘coptered out to the meeting on the morning of the Fourth.

  “Instead of taking a chance on weather control,” he muttered, gesturing toward the wreckage shown on the TV screen, “they’d rather sit back and let that happen.”

  The conference was taking place in a resort hotel in the Berkshire Mountains. We flew over lovely wooded hills and rolling farmlands. As we went farther west, though, more and more brown patches were sprinkled in among the green. The lakes and ponds were shrinking; we could see the muddy, rocky edges that were normally under water.

  “Dry streambed,” Ted pointed out to me. “And there’s another.”

  “It looks pretty serious,” I said, looking at the sandy gullies that had been streams.

  “This is nothing. Wait another couple of months. And next summer’ll be a beaut.”

  “But your forecasts don’t go that far.”

  “This kind of pattern runs four to five years before it changes, unless something kinky happens . . . like weather control.”

  The hotel was swarming with conference members. They had come from all six New England states, from New York, and from Washington. We arrived just before lunch, in time for the brief outdoor ceremony in honor of the Fourth.

  As we elbowed our way through the crowd to one of the hotel’s four restaurants, Ted grumbled, “More politicians here than I’ve ever seen under one roof.”

  We ate quickly and then got one of the hotel’s assistant managers to show us to the conference room where we were scheduled to speak. It was a small, windowless room, with a slide projector set up at one end and a projection screen at the other.

  “Got here early,” Ted said as the manager shut the door behind him. “Nobody’s here.”

  “I’ll put your slides in the projector,” I said.

  I was putting the last slide in when the door opened and a man in his middle thirties stepped into the room.

  “I’m Jim Dennis,” he said, extending his hand to us.

  Congressman Dennis had a round pleasant face, slightly ruddy, with a slow smile and eyes that seemed to look well past the surface of things. He was about my own height, and of medium build.

  “Why’s a Congressman from Lynn worrying about the drought?” Ted asked. “Lynn’s got a desalting plant.”

  Dennis thought a moment before answering. “I wouldn’t say I’m worried, exactly—I’m concerned. I’m on the House Science Committee. We’ve been hearing some grumblings about the drought, but the experts have been telling us there’s no problem, no problem at all. They’ve been saying it louder and louder the past month or so. Now it seems you boys think there is a problem.”

  “Don’t trust the experts?” Ted jabbed.

  Dennis smiled. “Not when they all agree.”

  Within a few minutes our audience started arriving. Congressman Dennis knew all of them by name and introduced us as they came in. By the time we started, there were eleven men sitting around the conference table. They all came from the agricultural departments of the New England states, except for one representative of the Boston Weather Bureau office, a Mr. Arnold.

  Must be somebody new, Ted scribbled on a pad for me to read. Never saw him at Climatology.

  After they were all seated, Ted launched into his talk. His slides were mainly photos of the big viewscreen map at Aeolus, picturing how the drought would remain and worsen for the rest of the year.

  “And we’re still on the downslide,” he summarized. “The drought hasn’t reached bottom yet; there’s worse to come.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Arnold said. He was spare, sharp-featured, with thinning hair combed over his bald spots.

  Ted flicked off the slide projector and the room lights came up.

  “Just how much faith can we put in these forecasts?” Arnold demanded. “Six months ahead is much too far to draw concrete conclusions.”

  “Half a dozen top business firms’re buying our long-range predictions. And even though the forecasts for six months ahead aren’t as reliable as our two-week forecasts, they still show the general trend. The drought’s going to be with us for a long time.”

  “There’s a big difference between two weeks and six months.”

  Ted walked slowly down to the meteorologist’s chair, his face reddening. Before he could say anything, I jumped in.

  “I think our forecasting method is much more detailed than the Weather Bureau’s, so even a six-month forecast will be considerably more accurate than you might suspect at first glance.”

  Ted, looming over Mr. Arnold, added in a barely controlled voice, “Monday morning I’ll send each of you our regular weekly forecast. It’ll predict pinpoint weather conditions, hour by hour, for every section of New England for the next fourteen days. Compare it w
ith any other forecast you want to—there’s nothing as accurate or as detailed.”

  “This is all beside the point,” one of the others said. “I don’t see where the drought can really hurt us. After all, we have the desalting plants . . . there’s no water shortage, we have the whole ocean to draw from.”

  “That’s all right for you in Rhode Island,” the man next to him said. “One desalting plant covers all your needs. But in New Hampshire we’re already feeling the pinch. Dairy farms and some industrial plants are complaining about poor-quality water and some actual shortages.”

  “Same thing here in Western Massachusetts,” agreed the man across from them. Gesturing with a long cigar, he added, “According to the people in Washington, we couldn’t get another desalting plant built in less than two years. By then the damage will have been done.”

  “But this is all a matter of control and conservation, isn’t it?” the Rhode Islander countered. “There’s plenty of water to go ’round. You’ve just got to stop wasting it.” Congressman Dennis objected. “People have been working on water conservation for years, and some very good steps have been taken. We’re doing about as well in that respect as you can expect, and certainly we’re not going to do much better overnight. The problem is that there may not be enough water available, if Mr. Marrett is right and the drought continues.”

  “We still use only about seven percent of the rain that actually falls,” Arnold said. “The rest goes off to the sea.”

  “That may be true,” Dennis agreed calmly, “but it’s the best we can do right now.”

  Ted walked back to the head of the table. “Let’s face facts. All the work you’ve put into water management and pollution control has been more than matched by growing population and industry. You’ve been running as hard as you can just to stay abreast of the problem. Now the drought’s going to knock your legs out from under you. Unless something changes darned soon, you’re going to go on water rationing.”

  “We could lose billions of dollars . . . farm products, industrial output . . .”

  “Not to mention our jobs,” someone muttered.

  “Then you’ve got to act!” Ted snapped. They all jolted to attention and looked at him. “We can break up this drought. We can end it, by making deliberate, controlled changes in the weather.”

  Now they looked at each other and started murmuring.

  “If you mean cloud seeding, that’s been tried and—”

  “There’s no sense seeding clouds when the conditions aren’t right,” Ted answered. “I’m talking about making the conditions what we want them to be, so rain’ll fall naturally. Weather control . . . breaking the drought pattern.”

  “But if there’s no moisture in the air, how—”

  “Listen. There’s six times more water moving over our heads right now than there is in all the lakes and streams of New England. All we have to do is bring it down here where we need it.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “We can make the long-range weather forecasts. We have chemicals and energy sources for changing the weather. We can predict what the changes’ll be, so that we can tell beforehand if they’ll do harm or good.”

  “Have you really done any of this?”

  “Not on the scale that’ll be needed for breaking the drought, no.”

  “But on any scale at all? Has it been done?”

  Ted glanced at me and grinned. “If it hadn’t been, we wouldn’t be here now.”

  “And just how do you expect to break the drought?” Arnold asked, with a hint of acid in his tone.

  “If I knew the answers I’d be out doing the job. But I know how to get the answers.”

  “How?”

  Ted ticked off on his fingers. “First, do a theoretical study of the conditions necessary for normal rainfall. This’ll be partly a historical study of past records to see what the normal patterns are, from the ground up to the ionosphere. At the same time we’ll run computer models of large-scale weather patterns to see how they affect the New England situation.”

  “Large scale?”

  “Planetary patterns . . . northern hemisphere, mostly.”

  Their eyes widened, but they kept listening.

  “Second: after we’ve got a handle on the conditions you need for normal rainfall, we’ll compare ‘em with this drought condition. Then we’ll set up some lab experiments and computer simulations to see if we can make simple changes to the weather that’ll trigger the lasting kind of change we want.”

  He looked around the table to see if they were following him. “The atmosphere’s like one of those children’s humpty-dumpty toys. It resists change. Has tremendous powers of equilibrium. Hit it from one side and it’ll just rock back and forth until it comes back to where it started.”

  “But it does change,” one of the men said.

  “Sure! Weather changes minute to minute, and climate changes too—like this drought. But climate changes are slow and involve huge gobs of energy. We can’t compete with the natural energy balances in the atmosphere . . . they’re too big and we’re too little. It’d be like a man going against a mammoth.”

  Congressman Dennis chuckled. “Men slaughtered the mammoths.”

  “Right,” Ted agreed. “But not with muscles. With brains.”

  “What are you driving at?” Arnold demanded.

  “Just this: we’ve got to look for natural situations in the drought pattern where we can tip the scales a little and swing big changes in our favor. We can’t force the atmosphere to change completely against its natural balance . . . but we can find chances to trigger the change we want with just a little nudge at the right time and place.”

  “One or two simple modifications won’t change a pattern as deeply impressed as this one,” Arnold said.

  “Maybe not. But in the lab we can take a look at all the possible changes we can make. And with these long-range forecasts we can see which changes’ll break up the drought, and then go out and make ’em.”

  “Pie in the sky,” Arnold said. “You can’t go around tinkering with the weather and—”

  “Not tinkering!” Ted snapped. “We’ll be running controlled experiments, based on theoretical predictions and computer simulations. Same way engineers design airplanes and rockets.”

  He leaned his big fists on the table and said to them, “Instead of just watching the drought ruin us, I want to see human intelligence put to work to stop it. We don’t have to sit around and wait for nature to run its course, any more than a sick man has to go without medicine. We can break this drought. Let’s do it.”

  10. Competition

  THE committee seemed impressed by Ted’s speech, and several of the men promised to look into our drought-alleviation idea. But the following Monday morning, back at Aeolus, Ted was gloomy.

  “Same old story,” he grumbled. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

  When I came back to my office after lunch, though, a call from Congressman Dennis was waiting for me.

  “I got your forecast this morning,” he said, holding up the photoprinted copy for me to see. “It looks very impressive.”

  “Thanks. We like to think it is.”

  “I took the liberty of calling a few friends here and there,” he went on, with a knowing grin. “Do you realize that it really did rain this morning in Sherman Mills, Maine? And the fog you predicted along the Connecticut Turnpike came and went on schedule, just as you predicted?”

  I hadn’t read the forecast in detail, so I merely smiled and nodded.

  “According to the date on this copy,” Dennis went on, “these predictions were issued last Wednesday.”

  “Yes, we send out that type on Wednesdays. The forecast was actually made almost a week ago.”

  “I had lunch with the Governor this noontime, at the State House, and I showed him your predictions. He was interested.”

  “Oh? How interested?”

  Dennis let me hang in suspense for a moment. Then, “W
ell, I had phoned him about Ted’s talk on the drought and weather control. He asked me over for lunch to discuss it further. I think the next step is for you people to see him.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I want to get Ted into this.”

  I buzzed the switchboard and they connected Ted’s phone to the line. I still saw only Dennis’ face on the viewscreen, but I could hear Ted’s voice as Dennis explained the Governor’s interest.

  “Now we can really get to work,” Ted beamed. “Tell the Governor he’s a far-sighted statesman.”

  Dennis laughed. “He won’t believe that. Besides, he only wants to do some talking; he hasn’t signed a contract with you yet.”

  “He will,” Ted answered, “if he wants the drought broken.”

  Ted signed off, and I thanked the Congressman for his help.

  He leaned a little closer to the viewscreen and said in a confidential whisper, “Don’t thank me. Politicians are always looking for something good to hitch their wagons to. Weather control might make me a Senator some day.”

  “I certainly hope so,” I said.

  “So do my five kids!”

  It took several conferences at the State House, and an inspection tour of Aeolus by the Governor and his staff, but by mid-October we had a contract with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to study methods of alleviating the drought. By the end of the month the five other New England states had given us similar contracts. We plunged into a whirlwind of work. Ted hired additional scientific staffers, and split the staff into two distinct groups: one for turning out the forecasts, and the other concentrating completely on the drought. For the first time since Aeolus Research opened up, I could stop looking for new business; we had more than we could handle. Even the Environmental Science Services Administration came in with a small contract. ESSA wanted to coordinate our work with other studies being done by various Government agencies, mainly in the fields of water conservation and management.