Page 119 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

3.5 Irving Krick’s generators for cloud-seeding operations in seventeen western states
and Mexico. (willard haselbach, “‘rain maker of the rockies’: history’s
biggest weather experiment underway,” denver post, april 22, 1951, 17a)

Krick proclaimed, “Give me enough time, men, and electronic computers
48
and I’ll tell you the Newfoundland weather for 200 years from now.” He also
claimed, echoing the surety and determinism of the famous mathematicians
Gottfried Leibniz and Pierre-Simon Laplace, “If we had precise information back
to the Ice Age, we could pinpoint the weather at 3:10 p.m. on March 11, 3004 in
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Tokyo”—a prediction no one would be around to verify. Although he said that
he had voted for Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, Krick offered
a free (and lucky) long-range forecast for the inauguration of President John F.
Kennedy: “fair, cold, and dry.” Controversy continued to follow Krick, how-
ever. He resigned from the American Meteorological Society (AMS) after being
accused of making unsubstantiated claims for his forecasting methods and for
violating the society’s code of professional ethics, but he rejoined in 1985, because,
he said, he had outlived most of his enemies. His necrology in the Bulletin of the
American Meteorological Society constitutes a study in understatement. 50

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