Page 122 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

interviewed the excited Webb County chief of staff, Raul Casso, who explained
that society had wanted to create rain for centuries and that he believed it was
now possible: “Making it rain . . . has always been one of man’s age-old aspira-
tions. . . . [Y]ou have [dowsing] forks and diviners, and rain gods and all sorts
of things that people have done to try to evoke rain; but you can’t do it—until
55
now.” Heatwave Berler, however, smelled a rat.
In the closing moments of one of his evening weathercasts, Heatwave humbly
expressed his concerns about the project, saying that he was not arguing that it
was impossible for the project to work, just that there was no evidence of it work-
ing. He interviewed Casso, asking him if the county commissioners had sought
the opinion of any scientists before making the decision to spend $1.2 million
of the taxpayers’ money on the project. Casso initially listed the various civic
groups they had talked to, but eventually admitted that no, they had not asked
any scientists. Heatwave’s questions generated a list of explanations from How-
ard (doing business as Earthwise Technologies), all of which Heatwave systemati-
cally debunked.
Heatwave, now fully engaged with the issue, used his weathercast to express
his concerns about the lack of peer-reviewed articles and improper documenta-
tion provided to the commissioners. He also found it interesting that Howard,
like Dyrenforth and Hatfield long before him, was trying to make it rain dur-
ing the naturally occurring rainy season. Earthwise was claiming experimental
successes based on only one year of precipitation measurements, a timeframe
that Heatwave stressed was much too short when dealing with weather, espe-
cially when rainfall amounts in different years and in different locales can vary
by as much as an order of magnitude. He drew the analogy to tossing a coin
once and then concluding that all coin tosses would have the same outcome.
When Heatwave discovered that similar projects elsewhere had been termi-
nated due to lack of evidence, Earthwise Technologies responded that there
was a lot of research and articles on the methodology, but that unfortunately it
was all in Russian and had not been translated. This puzzled Heatwave, since
the American Meteorological Society and the World Meteorological organi-
zation, to name only two organizations, had a long history of cooperation with
Russian meteorologists and issued reports and abstracts in translation to over-
come language barriers. The absurdity of the situation spurred a spoof adver-
tisement for “Dud Light” on the local radio, the gist of which was that for only
$5 million you can get a machine that magically makes rain, with instructions
in Russian and with the guarantee that it has failed to work everywhere else it
was tried. 56

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