Fixing the Sky

by James Rodger Fleming

  Not all space seeding was nuclear. In 1960 the Department of Defense and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory announced a plan to launch 500 million tiny copper wires into an 1,800-mile orbital ring to serve as radio antennae. Since the Earth’s ionosphere was vulnerable to enemy attack by a thermonuclear detonation, and undersea cables might be cut by a hostile power, the military wanted to be able to guarantee secure worldwide communication channels, regardless of the protests of other nations about space debris or the concerns of astronomers about visual or radio interference. The first launch, in 1961, failed, but two years later the detritus injected by Project West Ford (originally called Project Needles) was used to bounce radio messages across the continent.

  7.4 “Weather Modification”: (above) schematic drawing of the layout for a hoveringtype aircraft equipped with a nuclear heat source (note the lead-lined crew cabin and the little pinwheel blowers for air inlet and mixing); (below) nuclear weather modification helicopter in action (1) suppressing rain on one side of the mountain and (2) filling a reservoir on the other. (WEXLER PAPERS)

  This is indeed geoengineering. The experiment effectively created an artificial ionosphere, “better” than the original since it would not be disrupted by magnetic storms or solar flares. Wexler, however, was concerned that the environmental effects of the cloud of needles had not been fully considered, including their effect on the Earth’s heat budget, magnetic field, and ozone levels. Astronomers protested bitterly, since the layer of needles interfered with their observations, especially in the new field of radio astronomy.58 Although the cloud of needles behaved broadly as designed and mostly dispersed after about three years, rendering it useless for radio communication, as of 2010 some copper “needles” are still in orbit. Occasionally, one of them reenters the Earth’s atmosphere and flashes briefly as it burns up as an artificial meteor. Astronomers soon will be forced to oppose proposals for solar radiation management, since any attempt to attenuate sunlight will also attenuate starlight (chapter 8).

  In February 1962, Wexler was informed of a review by an ad hoc panel at NASA convened to consider the “High Water Experiment,” the upcoming release of almost 100 tons of water into the ionosphere. The delivery vehicle was a Saturn test rocket to be launched from Cape Canaveral to an altitude of 65 miles and then destroyed. The panel, chaired by atmospheric scientist William W. Kellogg of the RAND Corporation, concluded, on the basis of some back-of-the-envelope calculations, that “it was unable to predict exactly what would happen following the rupture of the Saturn tanks.”59 They supposed that the water would boil instantly in the vacuum of space and then form ice crystals in a cloud about 6 miles wide and up to 20 miles long that would gradually fall out and dissipate downrange (figure 7.5). Some of the water would also dissociate, forming atomic O and H. Noctilucent clouds should form, and the radio properties of the ionosphere might be affected, with possible disruption to stratospheric ozone. The members of the panel knew that “introducing more H would change something” (4), but they could not say what. Nevertheless, they considered the scale of this test, literally a “drop in the bucket,” and predicted that “no major change in the atmosphere will take place that will hinder human activities” (1). They also predicted, correctly, that “in fact it may turn out to be hard to detect any effects at all (alas!), after the first few minutes” (1).

  Kellogg and the panel were not completely confident that they understood all the factors involved in this experiment and readily admitted to “a good deal of uncertainty.” At the time, atmospheric scientists were used to the idea “that on occasion small changes can ‘trigger’ larger ones, if the conditions in the atmosphere are in a kind of metastable state.” Kellogg asked, “Is there such a condition in the upper atmosphere?” (6). He was unable to identify any, and the panel suggested no contingency plans for any “trigger” effects.

  7.5 “High Water Experiment,” February 1962: William W. Kellogg’s “Sketch showing how the various sizes of ice particles produced from the moving Saturn vehicle would be expected to travel in the upper atmosphere and finally sublime as they fall to lower altitudes,” prepared on the basis of an ad hoc NASA panel discussion. (WEXLER PAPERS)

  Harry Wexler and the Possibilities of Climate Control

  “The subject of weather and climate control is now becoming respectable to talk about.”60 This was Harry Wexler’s opening line in his 1962 speech “On the Possibilities of Climate Control.” Wexler based his remarks on newly available technical capacities in climate modeling and satellite remote sensing, new scientific insights into the Earth’s heat budget and stratospheric ozone layer, and new diplomatic initiatives, notably President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 speech at the United Nations proposing “cooperative efforts between all nations in weather prediction and eventually in weather control.”61 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, flush with the success of two space spectaculars carrying Russian cosmonauts into orbit, had also mentioned weather control in his report to the Supreme Soviet in July 1961. Wexler noted that the subject had recently received serious attention from the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee, the Department of State, and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Atmospheric Sciences. The last had recommended increased funding for large-scale cooperative weather control projects and made it part of the proposal that led to the creation of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. For its part, the United Nations, with Wexler’s scientific input through the State Department, had issued a resolution on international cooperation in the peaceful uses of outer space, recommending “greater knowledge of basic physical forces affecting climate and the possibility of large-scale weather modification.”62 Before this, statements about controlling the atmosphere had typically been provided by non-meteorologists: chemists, cloud-seeding enthusiasts, futurists, generals, and admirals.

  Wexler was none of the above. He was one of the most influential meteorologists of the first half of the twentieth century, and his career, as revealed in his publications and well-preserved office files, touched every aspect of weather and climate science. He was born in 1911 in Fall River, Massachusetts, and died suddenly of a heart attack in August 1962 at age fifty-one during a working vacation in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The third son of Russian immigrants Samuel and Mamie (Hornstein) Wexler, Harry was interested in science at an early age, an interest he shared with his childhood friend and future brother-inlaw, the noted meteorologist Jerome Namias. Wexler majored in mathematics at Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1932. He then attended MIT, earning his master’s degree in 1934 and his doctorate in 1939 under the mentorship of the influential meteorologist Carl-Gustav Rossby. Wexler worked for the U.S. Weather Bureau throughout his career, initially on operationalizing Bergen School techniques for air mass and frontal analysis and later as head of research.

  Following the outbreak of war in Europe, Wexler served in the U.S. military’s crash program to train a new cadre of weather forecasters. On a leave of absence from the weather bureau, he taught at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of meteorology. In 1941 he returned to the weather bureau as senior meteorologist in charge of training and research, working to assist in defense preparations. He accepted a commission as captain in the U.S. Army in 1942 and served as the senior instructor of meteorology to the U.S. Army Air Force’s Aviation Cadet School at Grand Rapids, Michigan. While in this position, he joined the University Meteorological Committee, established to coordinate military efforts in meteorological training.63

  After his honorable discharge in January 1946 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, Wexler returned to the weather bureau, becoming chief of the Special Scientific Services division and serving on the Pentagon’s Research and Development Board. In this capacity, he encouraged the development of new technologies, including tracing nuclear fallout, airborne observations of hurricanes, sounding rockets, and weather radar. He was a pioneer in the use of electronic computers for numerical weather prediction and general circulation m
odeling, serving as the weather bureau liaison to von Neumann’s IAS meteorology project and playing a more central role than has hitherto been acknowledged. In 1954 he helped institutionalize the U.S. Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit, a partnership of the weather bureau with the air force and navy “to produce prognostic weather charts on an operational basis using numerical techniques.” A year later, after a successful numerical experiment by Norman Phillips, in which he was able to simulate realistic features of the general circulation of the atmosphere, von Neumann and Wexler argued for the creation of a General Circulation Research Section (later Laboratory) in the weather bureau. The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton, New Jersey, and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction in Camp Springs, Maryland, trace their origins to these roots.64

  Taking up Rossby’s call for more information about geophysical interactions between the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere, Wexler accepted the added challenge involved in serving as chief scientist for the U.S. expedition to the Antarctic for the International Geophysical Year (IGY; 1957–1958). By doing so, he could integrate critical new information about both the South Pole and the Southern Hemisphere into a global picture of circulation and dynamics of the entire atmosphere. Wexler also incorporated the results of theoretical work on the influence of rising carbon dioxide levels into the weather bureau’s climate-modeling efforts and instituted radiation, ozone, and, notably, carbon dioxide measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory, which were established under his guidance just prior to the IGY.65

  Atmospheric observation by rockets and satellites also came under Wexler’s purview. He served as chairman of several influential committees on this subject, including the Upper-Atmosphere Committee of the American Geophysical Union, the National Advisory Committee on Aviation’s Special Committee for the Upper Atmosphere, and the National Research Council’s Space Science Board. Wexler was in charge of the meteorology of the TIROS (Television Infrared Observation Satellite) meteorological satellite program and helped support the first Earth heat budget experiment flown on Explorer 7. In 1961 the Kennedy administration appointed Wexler as the lead negotiator for the United States in talks with the Soviet Union concerning the joint use of meteorological satellites. The negotiations expanded into a multinational effort to institute a World Weather Watch (W W W), with Wexler and Soviet academician Victor A. Bugaev as the architects for a new program to be administered by the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. Formally established in 1963 and still in existence, the World Weather Watch coordinates the efforts of member nations by combining observing systems, telecommunication facilities, and data-processing and forecasting centers to make available meteorological and related environmental information needed to provide efficient weather services in all countries. Wexler was clearly on top of his science, a leader in new techniques and technologies, and a figure of international importance. In other words, he was a meteorological heavyweight.66

  In 1958 Wexler published a paper in Science that examined some of the consequences of tinkering with the Earth’s heat budget. He began by describing the two streams of radiant energy and their seasonal and geographic distribution, one stream directed downward and the other upward, which “dominate the climate and weather of the planet Earth.”67 The downward stream of energy consists of the solar radiation absorbed by the Earth’s surface and atmosphere after accounting for losses by reflection. The upward stream is infrared radiation emitted to space by the Earth’s surface and atmosphere, the latter mostly from atmospheric water vapor, clouds, carbon dioxide, and ozone. Wexler wrote: “In seeking to modify climate and weather on a grand scale it is tempting to speculate about ways to change the shape of these basic radiation curves by artificial means” (1059), especially by changing the reflectivity of the Earth. After a brief examination of possible albedo changes caused by using carbon dust to blacken the deserts and the polar ice caps, Wexler turned to the notion, probably originating with Teller, that detonating ten really “clean” hydrogen bombs in the Arctic Ocean would produce a dense ice cloud in northern latitudes and would likely result in the removal of the sea ice. The balance of the paper in Science is an examination of the radiative, thermal, and meteorological consequences of this outrageous act, not only for warming the polar regions but also for the equatorial belt and middle latitudes. Noting perceptively that “the disappearance of the Arctic ice pack would not necessarily be a blessing to mankind” (1062–1063) and implying that a nation like the Soviet Union already had the firepower to try such an experiment, Wexler concluded with a paragraph whose relevance has not been diminished by time: “When serious proposals for large-scale weather modification are advanced, as they inevitably will be, the full resources of generalcirculation knowledge and computational meteorology must be brought to bear in predicting the results so as to avoid the unhappy situation of the cure being worse than the ailment” (1063).

  In 1962, armed with the latest results from computer models and satellite radiance measurements as applied to studies of the Earth’s heat budget, Wexler expanded his study to examine theoretical questions concerning natural and anthropogenic climate forcings, both inadvertent and purposeful. He did this in his lectures to technical audiences: “On the Possibilities of Climate Control,” presented at the Boston chapter of the American Meteorological Society, the Traveler’s Research Corporation in Hartford, and the UCLA Department of Meteorology.68 After reminding his listeners that Kennedy and Khrushchev had made climate modification “respectable” to talk about, Wexler quoted extensively from Zworykin’s weather control proposal and von Neumann’s response to it.

  Wexler discussed the problem of increasing global pollution from industry and reviewed recent developments in atmospheric science, including computing and satellites that led him to believe that manipulating and controlling large-scale phenomena in the atmosphere were becoming distinct possibilities. He cited rising carbon dioxide emissions as an example of indirect control, mentioning the Callendar effect as one of the ways in which humanity was already inadvertently modifying global climate: “We are releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other gases and particles into the lower atmosphere, which may have serious effects on the radiation or heat balance, which determines our present pattern of climate and weather.”69

  Wexler warned that the space age was introducing an entirely new kind of “atmospheric pollution” problem. He was particularly worried that some types of rocket fuel might release chlorine or bromine, “which could destroy naturally occurring atmospheric ozone and open up a ‘hole,’ admitting passage of harmful ultra-violet radiation to the lower atmosphere” (2). Changes in the upper atmosphere caused by increasing contrails, space experiments gone awry, or the actions of a hostile power could disrupt the ozonosphere, the ionosphere, or even the general circulation and climate on which human existence depends. Wexler felt that it was urgent to use “the most advanced mathematical models of atmospheric behavior” (3) to study the physical, chemical, and meteorological consequences of such interferences. He then explained how the weather bureau was in the process of acquiring new computers and developing new models to “simulate the behavior of the actual atmosphere and examine artificial influences that Man is introducing in greater and greater measure as he contaminates the atmosphere” (4). Both the Christian Science Monitor and the Boston Globe ran prominent stories on this aspect of his lecture.70

  Wexler told his audiences that he was concerned with planetary-scale manipulation of the environment that would result in “rather large-scale effects on general circulation patterns in short or longer periods, even approaching that of climatic change.”71 He assured them that he did not intend to cover all possibilities “but just a few ... limited primarily to interferences with the Earth’s radiative balance on a rather large scale: I shall discuss in a purely hypothetical framework those atmospheric influences that man might attempt deliberately to exert and also those which he may now be performing or will soo
n be performing, perhaps in ignorance of its consequences. We are in weather control now whether we know it or not” (4).

  He was clearly interested in both inadvertent climatic effects—such as might be created by industrial emissions, rocket exhaust gases, or space experiments gone awry—and purposeful interventions, whether peaceful or done with hostile intent. Echoing von Neumann’s 1955 warning about technology, Wexler continued: “Even in this day of global experiments, such as the world-wide Argus electron seeding of the Earth’s magnetic field at 300 miles height, man and machinery orbiting the Earth at 100 miles seventeen times in one day, and 100 megaton bombs—are we any closer to some idea of the approaches which could lead to an eventual ‘solution’ [to the problem of climate control]?” (3). He noted “a growing anxiety” in the public pronouncements that “Man, in applying his growing energies and facilities against the power of the winds and storms, may do so with more enthusiasm than knowledge and so cause more harm than good.”72

  Wexler was well aware that any intervention in the Earth’s heat budget would change the atmospheric circulation patterns, the storm tracks, and the weather itself, so, as he pointed out, weather and climate control are not two different things. After presenting some twenty technical slides on the atmosphere’s radiative heat budget and discussing means of manipulating it, Wexler concluded with a grand summary of highly speculative techniques to heat, cool, or otherwise restructure the atmosphere: