Fixing the Sky

by James Rodger Fleming

  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 1890s. 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, 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. 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 field trials and fullscale implementation as a technological fix for global warming. But in their quest to create a “planetary thermostat,” they lack a widespread following and appear to most mainstream scientists, environmentalists, and policymakers as overly 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 cast of dreamers and losers. If this history provides new insights, raises new issues, provokes new controversies, or serves to inform social, ethical, and public policy considerations, I will deem the effort worthwhile. 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.

  1

  STORIES OF CONTROL

  The General Electric Company was science fiction.

  —KURT VONNEGUT

  THROUGHOUT history and across cultures, civilizations have told stories about gods and heroes who have attempted to control that which may be largely uncontrollable, including phenomena both above and below the horizon. There are many sources for such stories. Myth, religion, and traditional practices form the foundations of culture and are often invoked when people seek group solidarity—for example, when the expected rains fail to arrive or a violent storm rages. Stories drawn from Greek mythology, the Western canon, Native American rainmaking, and recent fiction are presented here, followed by examples of geo-science fiction before about 1960—drawn from the pages of pulp fiction, the stage and silver screen, and the boob tube—that serve to illuminate popular culture. But much more than edification is at stake. Storytelling skirts the borderlands between fact and fantasy and acknowledges their reciprocal relationship. Here the comic and tragicomic genres provide fresh insights into the speculative practices of the meteorological Don Quixotes and Rube Goldbergs of the past. Such storytelling clearly trumps the heroic and the tragic genres so typical in the literature of science studies. It is an excursion that historians of science, technology, and environment have only recently begun to take.

  Phaethon’s Blunder

  In uncovering the deeper cultural roots of weather and climate engineering, it is instructive to consider the wisdom invested in mythological stories, since whether we realize it or not, much of Western civilization rests on these foundations. In Greek mythology, the youth Phaethon lost control of the Sun chariot, and his recklessness caused extensive damage to the Earth before Zeus shot him out of the sky. The story began when Phaethon, mocked by a schoolmate for claiming to be the son of Helios, asked his mother, Clymene, for proof of his heavenly birth. She sent him east toward the sunrise to the awe-inspiring palace of the Sun god in India. Helios received the youth warmly and granted him a wish. Phaethon immediately asked his father to be permitted for one day to drive the chariot of the Sun, causing Helios to repent of his promise, since the path of the zodiac was steep and treacherous and the horses were difficult, if not impossible, to control. Helios replied prophetically, “Beware, my son, lest I be the donor of a fatal gift; recall your request while yet you may.... It is not honor, but destruction you seek.... I beg you to choose more wisely.”1 But the youth held to his demand, and Helios honored his promise. At the break of dawn, the horses were harnessed to the resplendent Sun chariot, and Helios, with a foreboding sigh, urged his son to spare the whip, hold tight the reins, and “keep within the limit of the middle zone,” neither too far south or north, nor too high or low: “The middle course is safest and best” (63).

  Now Phaethon spared the whip; that was not the problem. A bigger problem was that the youth was a lightweight (literally) and the horses sensed this, “and as a ship without ballast is tossed hither and thither on the sea, so the chariot, without its accustomed weight, was dashed about as if empty” (64). Also Phaethon was a completely inexperienced driver without a clue as to the proper route to take: “He is alarmed, and knows not how to guide them; nor, if he knew, has he the power” (64). The chariot veered out of the zodiac, with hapless Phaethon looking down on the vast expanse of the Earth, growing pale and shaking with terror. He repented of his request, but it was too late. The chariot was borne along “like a vessel that flies before a tempest,” and Phaethon, losing control completely, dropped the reins. So much for the middle course:

  The horses, when they felt them loose on their backs, dashed headlong, and unrestrained went off into unknown regions of the sky, in among the stars, hurling the chariot over pathless places, now up in the high heaven, now down almost to earth.... The clouds begin to smoke, and the mountain tops take fire; the fields are parched with heat, the plants wither, the trees with their leafy branches burn, the harvest is ablaze! But these are small things. Great cities perished, with their walls and towers; whole nations with their people were consumed to ashes! The forestclad mountains burned.... Then Phaeton beheld the world on fire, and felt the heat intolerable. The air he breathed was like the air of a furnace and full of burning ashes, and the smoke was of a pitchy darkness. (65–66)

  1.1 Phaethon, from the series The Four Disgracers (1588) by Hendrick Goltzius (Netherlandish, 1558–1617). Icarus, Ixion, and Tantalus are also called “disgracers” for their overweening ambition.

  With the Earth on fire, the oceans at risk, and the poles smoking, Atlas did more than shrug—he fainted. The Earth, overcome with heat and thirst, implored Zeus to intervene, “lest sea, Earth, and heaven perish, [and] we fall into ancient Chaos. Save what yet remains to us from the devouring flame. O, take thought for our deliverance in this awful moment” (67). Zeus responded by shooting the devious charioteer out of the sky with a fatal lightning bolt as Helios looked on in shock and dismay (figure 1.1). A utilitarian ethic applies in the myth. After much of the Earth was incinerated, Phaethon was killed by a higher authority to avoid further damage. And rightly so.

  The story of Phaethon was invoked in 2007 by the noted meteorologist Kerry Emanuel to frame a short discussion of contemporary climate change science and politics. Emanuel, widely known and respected for his hurricane studies, called attention to a growing scientific consensus on climate change prominently and authoritatively spearheaded by today’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, yet he admitted pointedly that “we are ... conscious of our own collective ignorance of how the climate system works.”2 Abruptly returning to myth, Emanuel ended his essay, “Like it or not, we have been handed Phaeton’s reins, and we will have to learn how to control climate if we are to avoid his fate” (69; emphasis added). Emanuel thus advocated repeating Phaethon’s blunder. Think underage driver of gasoline tanker, taken with father’s permission, veers out of control in reckless, high-speed chase before being subdued by the authorities. Or more globally, geoengineering project given the green light last year results in the collapse of the Indian monsoon, leaving millions starving.

  What about Emanuel’s final thought—that we “will have to learn how to control climate”? That is the subject of the final chapter of this book. Cambridge scientist Ross Hoffman has proposed a speculative “star wars” system to redirect hurricanes by beaming lasers at them from satellites—assum
ing one knew where the storm was originally headed and that there would be no liabilities along its new path. Is this an example of Phaethon’s reins? Since the Sun god Helios was directly involved, what about other means of “solar radiation management,” such as Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen’s suggestion (made in 2006, but actually a much older idea) to cool the Earth by injecting sulfates or other reflective aerosols into the tropical stratosphere? There are many, many more such dangerous and expensive proposals of environmental control that invoke the inexperience and possible tragedy of the myth of Phaethon.

  Remember, Helios made a fundamentally flawed decision to give his son the reins, and that decision had catastrophic consequences. He did, however, give Phaethon apiece of good advice about steering the Sun chariot through the middle course of the zodiacal signs. For humanity, the best we can do between this world and the next is to admit our “own collective ignorance,” remain humble, and avoid angering both the Sun god and his boss. Will this involve following the “middle course” of collective energy efficiency, environmental stewardship, and ethical choices? Certainly to do nothing is out of the question. But could we try to do too much? Will someone or some group trying to “fix” the climate repeat Phaethon’s blunder? Greek mythology is replete with such stories, characters, and moral lessons.

  Paradise Lost and the Inferno

  Biblical themes permeate the Western canon, and some of them speak either directly or indirectly to the human role in weather and climate control. In Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton alludes to a divinely instituted shift in the Earth’s axis (and thus its climate) as a consequence of the original ancestors’ lapse from grace. According to Milton, while Eden was the ultimate temperate clime, watered with gentle mists, God, in anger and for punishment, rearranged the Earth and its surroundings to generate excessive heat, cold, and storms: “the Creator, calling forth by name His mightie Angels, gave them several charge.”3 The Sun was to move and shine so as to affect the Earth “with cold and heat scarce tolerable” (10.653–654); the planets were to align in sextile, square, opposition, and trine “thir influence malignant ... to showre” (10.662); the winds were to blow from the four corners to “confound Sea, Aire, and Shoar” (10.665–666); and the thunder was to roll “with terror through the dark Aereal Hall” (10.667). The biggest change, however, resulted from tipping the axis of the Earth: “Some say he bid his Angels turne ascanse the Poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more from the Sun’s Axle; they with labor push’d oblique the Centric Globe ... to bring in change of Seasons to each Clime; else had the Spring perpetual smil’d on Earth with vernant Flours, equal in Days and Nights” (10.668–671, 677–680).