Fixing the Sky

by James Rodger Fleming

  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.4 In the 1840s, James Espy, the first meteorologist in U.S. government service, proposed rainmaking by lighting huge fires to stimulate convective updrafts.5 The following era in rainmaking was dominated by artillerists and “rain fakers,” the so-called pluviculturalists.6

  Nineteenth-century climatologists could find no trends in the weather records beyond variability and 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 (1848–1923), who wrote about “the climate of the geological and historical past.” 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 by 7 to 9°C (12 to 16 °F).

  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 (William Thomson). 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.”7

  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. Most scientists believed 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. 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°C (0.9°F) 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.8

  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 preceded the massive World War II 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 burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline to land one airplane in the fog.

  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. At the same time, hopeful developments in digital computing led to speculation that a perfect machine forecast of weather and climate 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.”9 Yet only three years later, the President’s Science Advisory Committee 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.10

  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 80 percent will be necessary, 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 provid
e cheap, reliable technological “fixes” for the climate system through macro-engineering options that include “solar radiation management,” carbon capture and sequestration, 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.11 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.12 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. Three 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.

  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.13

  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.”14 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, predi
ction, 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 provided our first glimpses of the possibility 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, Earth observations from space, and extremely precise measurement of atmospheric chemical species, 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.