Fixing the Sky
Page 26
With the reputation of the field of weather control severely tarnished as it is, the military’s semi-official public line is “you can’t control how the world is changing around you, so you have to be able to control how you react to that change.”68 Spokesmen for this view emphasize training, discipline, and vigilance. The air force will say it is in the business of improving the accuracy and usefulness of its forecasts and its capabilities in general by applying operational risk management techniques to both routine and exceptional weather services. This is true so far as it goes, but there is probably much more that the military simply does not know or cannot say—most likely the latter.
On the other side of the coin are conspiracy theorists who see a toxic cloud on every horizon. Their fears are fueled by statements such as those made in 1997 by Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, who warned of “an eco-type of terrorism whereby [adversaries] can alter the climate, set off earthquakes [and] volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.... It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that’s why this is so important.”69 Cohen, known to levitate on occasion, at least rhetorically, was responding, off the cuff, to questions about the possibility of all sorts of futuristic weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, and his remarks should not be misconstrued. Nevertheless, conspiracy theorists have focused on his words in support of their suspicions that the military is supporting secret geoengineering projects involving directed energy beams, chem trails, or other technologies. The historical record, rather than such speculation, is actually much more revealing—and chilling.
7
FEARS, FANTASIES, AND POSSIBILITIES OF CONTROL
Present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more awful. After global climate control becomes possible, perhaps all our present involvements will seem simple. We should not deceive ourselves: once such possibilities become actual, they will be exploited.
—JOHN VON NEUMANN, “CAN WE SURVIVE TECHNOLOGY?”
CLIMATE fears, fantasies, and the possibility of global climate control were widely discussed by scientists and in the popular press in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Some chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and, yes, meteorologists tried to “interfere” with natural processes, not with dry ice or silver iodide but with new Promethean possibilities of climate tinkering opened up by the technologies of digital computing, satellite remote sensing, nuclear power, and atmospheric nuclear testing. Aspects of this story involve engineers’ pipe dreams of mega-construction projects that would result in an ice-free Arctic Ocean, a well-regulated Mediterranean Sea, or an electrified and well-watered Africa. Pundits also fantasized about engineering the climate and possibly weaponizing it, using, for example, nuclear weapons as triggers. Far from being a heroic story of invention and innovation, global climate control has had, from its first mention in the literature of science fiction, a dark side, hinting at the possibility of global accidents or hostile acts. The warnings of two close scientific associates, John von Neumann (1903–1957) and Harry Wexler (1911–1962), one famous and one as yet relatively unknown, provide a framework for examining such issues. Von Neumann was a mathematician extraordinaire at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, and a pioneer in the application of digital computing techniques to the problem of numerical weather prediction and climate modeling. It was the dark side of climate control that led von Neumann to ponder the brave new world of such techniques. Wexler was chief of scientific services at the U.S. Weather Bureau. He was instrumental in advancing the agenda for climate modeling and promoted many other new technologies, especially meteorological satellites. It was Wexler who conducted the first serious technical analysis of climate engineering and issued an early warning about the possibilities of climate control. It was the very real possibility of purposeful destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer that led Wexler to spell out, in great technical detail, the dangers of both inadvertent and intentional climate tinkering. The interplay of such technical, scientific, and social issues moves beyond the timeworn origin stories of the modern atmospheric sciences into another dimension, a marketplace of wild ideas, a “Hall of Fantasy” or “Twilight Zone” whose boundaries are that of imagination.
Fears
We are apprehensive about climate change, we seek to understand it, and some may seek to stop it. The word “apprehension” signifies several distinct meanings: (1) fear, (2) awareness, and (3) intervention. In Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (1998), I examined how people became aware of and sought to understand phenomena in which they were immersed, that covered the entire globe, that had both natural and anthropogenic components, and that changed constantly on a multiplicity of temporal and spatial scales. What do climate scientists know about climate change and how do they know it? By what authority and by what historical pathways have they arrived at this knowledge? How have they established privileged positions? I offered some reflections on the ways such perspectives emerged historically: from appeals to authority, data collection, fundamental physical theory, critical experiments, models (including computer models), new technologies (including space-based observations), to consensus building and the beginnings of coordinated action.
I also examined climate-related fears, including drought, crop failures, volcano weather, apocalyptic visions of the return of the deadly glaciers, and global warming. The cultural geographer Yi-fu Tuan once observed, “To apprehend is to risk apprehensiveness.”1 For much of history, people feared that the powers of evil were active during inclement weather or that when the rains failed to arrive or it rained too much something was terribly wrong with either nature or, more likely, the social order. Many also saw themselves as agents of climate change. Even in fictional accounts of weather and climate control, much of the dramatic tension is derived from fundamental fears. An incomplete understanding, fueled by fear, may result in ineffective or even dangerous interventions. In the field of climate change, the two main approaches seem to be big technical fixes and social engineering.
In 1955 in a prominent article titled “Can We Survive Technology?” von Neumann referred to climate control as a thoroughly “abnormal” industry. He thought that weather control using chemical agents and climate control through modifying surface albedo or otherwise managing solar radiation were distinct possibilities for the near future. He argued that such intervention could have “rather fantastic effects” on a scale difficult to imagine. He pointed out that it was not necessarily rational to alter the climate of specific regions or purposely trigger a new ice age. Tinkering with the Earth’s heat budget or the atmosphere’s general circulation “will merge each nation’s affairs with those of every other more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war may already have done.” In his opinion, climate control, like other “intrinsically useful” modern technologies, could lend itself to unprecedented destruction and to forms of warfare as yet unimagined. Climate manipulation could alter the entire globe and shatter the existing political order. He made the Janus-faced nature of weather and climate control clear. The central question was not “What can we do?” but “What should we do?” This was the “maturing crisis of technology,” a crisis made more urgent by the rapidity of progress.
Banning particular technologies was not the answer for von Neumann. Perhaps, he thought, war could be eliminated as a means of national policy. Yet he ultimately deemed survival only a “possibility,” since elements of future conflict existed then, as today, while the means of destruction grew ever more powerful and was reaching the global level.
In Baconian terms, do we consider climate to be based on the unconstrained operations of nature, now modified inadvertently by human activities, or do we seek to engineer climate, constrain it, and mold it to our will? Certainly, the ubiquity and scale of indoor air-conditioning could not have been imagined less than a century ago, but what about fixing the sky itself? In attempting to do so, w
e run the risk of violently rending the bonds of nature and unleashing unintended side effects or purposely calculated destruction. After all, von Neumann identified frenetic “progress” as a key contributor to the maturing crisis of technology. Fumbling for an ultimate solution, but falling well short, he suggested that the brightest prospects for survival lay in patience, flexibility, intelligence, humility, dedication, oversight, sacrifice—and a healthy dose of good luck.2
Fantasies
Global climate control has a history rooted in the quest for perfectly accurate machine forecasts and supported by the dream of perfectly accurate data acquisition. Calculating the weather has long been a goal of meteorologists. By the turn of the twentieth century, Felix Exner and Vilhelm Bjerknes had identified the basic equations of atmospheric dynamics. In 1922 Louis Fry Richardson had actually tried to solve the equations numerically with rather poor data and without the use of a computer. Their dreams—to solve the equations of motion for the atmosphere faster than the daily weather develops—were fulfilled with the advent of numerical weather prediction in the 1950s. This story has been told often, always as a heroic saga—a quest to do what no one has ever done before. Kristine Harper is the latest in a long line of historians and meteorologists to illuminate the “genesis” of modern meteorology, its “exodus” from weather bureau captivity, and its arrival at the edge of a “promised land” of digital computer modeling.3 As complex (and familiar, at least in outline) as this story might be, there is nevertheless a story as yet untold, a darker tale of digital climate modeling, prediction, and control.
Just after World War II, in October 1945, Vladimir K. Zworykin, associate research director at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, wrote his influential but now all but forgotten mimeographed “Outline of Weather Proposal” (figure 7.1). He began by discussing the importance to meteorology of accurate prediction, which he thought was entering a new era. Modern communication systems were beginning to allow the systematic compilation of scattered and remote observations, and, he hoped, new computing equipment would be developed that could solve the equations of atmospheric motion, or at least search quickly for statistical regularities and past analog weather conditions. He imagined “an automatic plotting board” that would instantly digest and display all this information.
Zworykin suggested that “exact scientific weather knowledge” might allow for effective weather control. If a perfectly accurate machine could be developed that could predict the immediate future state of the atmosphere and identify the precise time and location of leverage points or locations sensitive to rapid storm development, effective intervention might be possible. A paramilitary rapid-deployment force might then be sent to intervene in the weather as it happened—literally to pour oil on troubled ocean waters or use physical barriers, giant flame throwers, or even atomic bombs to disrupt storms before they formed, deflect them from populated areas, and otherwise control the weather. Zworykin suggested a study of the origins and tracks of hurricanes, with a view to their prediction, prevention, and even diversion. Long-term climatic changes might be engineered by large-scale geographical modification projects involving such climatically sensitive areas as deserts, glaciers, and mountainous regions. In effect, numerical experimentation using computer models would guide field experiments and interventions in both weather and climate. According to Zworykin,
[t]he eventual goal to be attained is the international organization of means to study weather phenomena as global phenomena and to channel the world’s weather, as far as possible, in such a way as to minimize the damage from catastrophic disturbances, and otherwise to benefit the world to the greatest extent by improved climatic conditions where possible. Such an international organization may contribute to world peace by integrating the world interest in a common problem and turning scientific energy to peaceful pursuits. It is conceivable that eventual far-reaching beneficial effects on the world economy may contribute to the cause of peace.4
7.1 Cover of Vladimir K. Zworykin’s “Outline of Weather Proposal,” October 1945. (WEXLER PAPERS)
Zworykin’s proposal gained a powerful formal endorsement when von Neumann attached a letter to it dated October 24, 1945, stating: “I agree with you completely. ... This would provide a basis for scientific approach[es] to influencing the weather.” Using computer-generated predictions, von Neumann envisioned that weather and climate systems “could be controlled, or at least directed, by the release of perfectly practical amounts of energy” or by “altering the absorption and reflection properties of the ground or the sea or the atmosphere.” It was a project that neatly fit von Neumann’s overall agenda and philosophy: “All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.”5 Zworykin’s proposal also contained a long endorsement by the oceanographer Athelstan Spilhaus, then a U.S. Army major, who ended his letter of November 6, 1945, with these words: “In weather control, meteorology has a new goal worthy of its greatest efforts.”6
Popularizations
Complicating the picture at the time were suggestions about the use of atomic weapons for climate control and announcements of new discoveries in cloud seeding. In 1945 the prominent scientist-humanist Julian Huxley, then head of UNESCO, had spoken to an audience of 20,000 at an arms control conference at Madison Square Garden about the possibilities of using nuclear weapons as “atomic dynamite” for “landscaping the Earth” or perhaps using them to change the climate by dissolving the polar ice cap. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on record as advocating the use of atomic bombs for “cracking the Antarctic icebox” to gain access to its known mineral deposits.7 “Sarnoff Predicts Weather Control” read the headline on the front page of the New York Times on October 1, 1946. The previous evening, at his testimonial dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, RCA president Brigadier General David Sarnoff had speculated on worthy peaceful projects for the postwar era. Among them were “transformations of deserts into gardens through diversion of ocean currents,” a technique that could also be reversed in time of war to turn fertile lands into deserts, and ordering “rain or sunshine by pressing radio buttons,”8 an accomplishment that, Sarnoff declared, would require a World Weather Bureau in charge of global forecasting and control (much like the Weather Distributing Administration proposed in 1938). A commentator in the New Yorker intuited the problems with such control. “Who,” in this civil service outfit, he asked, “would decide whether a day was to be sunny, rainy, overcast ... or enriched by a stimulating blizzard?” It would be “some befuddled functionary,” probably bedeviled by special interests such as the raincoat and galoshes manufacturers, the beachwear and sunburn lotion industries, and resort owners and farmers. Or if a storm was to be diverted, “Detour it where? Out to sea, to hit some ship with no influence in Washington?”9 Recall that all this was just one month before the General Electric Corporation announced the news of Vincent Schaefer’s cloud-seeding exploits and Irving Langmuir began making his fantastic claims about weather control. But such notions are still around. In 2009 a fantastic proposal was floated for just such a bureau or administration to implement regional-scale geoengineering—in the Arctic, in certain ocean regions, or for certain storms—to attempt to moderate specific climate change impacts.10
In the era of cloud seeding, von Neumann and Zworykin, especially the latter, continued to feed public speculation about control. In January 1947, both men spoke in New York at a joint session of the American Meteorological Society and the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences, chaired by incoming AMS president Henry G. Houghton. Von Neumann’s talk, “Future Uses of High Speed Computing in Meteorology,” was followed by Zworykin’s much more controversial “Discussion of the Possibility of Weather Control.” According to the New York Times: “Hurricanes may be dispersed, Dr. Zworykin said, and rain may be made, first through the speed which an electronic computer now approaching completion can synthesize all elements in weather problems, and second, through application of energ
y in small doses from spreads of blazing oil to heat critical portions of the atmosphere or blackened-over areas to cool them.”11 Zworykin focused on “trigger” mechanisms such as artificial fogs or even cloud seeding as examples of adding small amounts of energy to cause enormous effects, claiming that the missing ingredient was not the techniques but how to “make the most of our weather information mathematically.” A follow-up story the next day ended with the comment “If Dr. Zworykin is right the weather-makers of the future are the inventors of calculating machines.”12
Most scientists thought this speculation was premature. Wexler and a colleague who dined at Zworykin’s home discussed weather control with him, including techniques such as igniting oil on the sea surface to redirect hurricanes, but Wexler indicated that Zworykin’s views “were not shared by most tropical meteorologists.”13 The distinguished oceanographer Harald U. Sverdrup at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was not convinced by Zworykin’s claim that “the underlying general physical principles governing weather behavior are mostly well understood.” Regarding weather control, he wrote: “It seems that only in rare cases can we expect to know the initial conditions in sufficient detail to predict the consequences of a ‘trigger action.’”14 Yet talk of triggers was something the military understood. In a 1947 fund-raising speech presented at the annual alumni dinner at MIT, General George C. Kenney, commander of the Strategic Air Command, speaking of future weapons systems, asserted: “If rain could be kept from falling where it has been falling for ages,” it is conceivable that “the nation which first learns to plot the paths of air masses accurately and learns to control the time and place of precipitation will dominate the globe.”15 He urged MIT to look into this, suggesting a multimilliondollar research program.