Page 118 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

ordered a review of Krick’s work by scientific elites Vannevar Bush, Karl Comp-
ton, and Warren Weaver, who concluded that Krick “claims to do things that he
can’t do [and] claims to have done things he didn’t do.” About the same time,
the weather bureau accused Krick of using its equipment on loan to Caltech for
commercial gain. In 1948 DuBridge discontinued the meteorology program at
Caltech and accepted Krick’s resignation, but Krick already had a new job, as a
commercial rainmaker. 44
Soon after the General Electric Corporation’s cloud-seeding experiments,
Krick requested and received a set of GE reports on weather research. He fol-
lowed with interest the saga of Project Cirrus and Irving Langmuir’s claims
for the silver iodide generator in New Mexico (chapter 5). Krick visited GE in
February 1950, seeking advice on the latest cloud-seeding technologies, but the
visit was tense. He had been marketing his rainmaking projects out west by rep-
resenting himself as having an unofficial relationship with GE, while dropping
the names of Langmuir, Vincent Schaefer, and Bernard Vonnegut with his cus-
tomers as if they were his close colleagues. When the science editor of the San
Francisco Chronicle contacted GE in conjunction with a story he was planning
on Krick’s rainmaking claims, he was informed that there was “no connection
whatsoever” between Krick and GE, other than supplying him with background
material as was done for many others. 45
During the western drought of the early 1950s, Krick began cloud-seeding
operations for large agricultural concerns. His clients included wheat farmers,
ranchers, and stream-flow-enhancement projects on the Salt River in Arizona
and the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. In the latter project, Krick was
credited by the Bureau of Reclamation with an 83 percent enhancement of the
river flow, but the weather bureau considered this claim meaningless and sought
to discredit him whenever possible. At the height of its operations, Krick’s com-
pany was conducting seeding operations covering 130 million acres of western
46
lands, in all the areas where Charles Hatfield had operated (figure 3.5). By 1954
cloud seeding had been attempted in about thirty nations, including Austra-
lia, Canada, France, South Africa, Spain, Peru, and Israel, and that year a total
of fifty-seven commercial cloud-seeding projects were under way in twenty-five
states and territories, including Hawaii and Puerto Rico. 47
Later, Krick snagged a contract to run silver iodide generators in Squaw Val-
ley for the 1960 Winter olympics and claimed that the deep snow pack was in
part the result of his efforts. He remained active in ultra-long-range forecasting,
expressing his belief in an orderly universe (and atmosphere) and the sorting out
of its regularities through the use of analog methods and digital computers. Echo-
ing a common sentiment about long-range prediction at the time (chapter 7),

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