Page 13 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

into them, spend up to several hours spiraling in their growing updrafts and
collecting data, and then exit the tops of budding thunderstorms for absolute-
ly spectacular views. This project was conducted in 1973 over the Continental
Divide near Leadville, Colorado. Its poignant but unintended link to weather
control came one evening, unexpectedly, when the Colorado state police visited
our lodgings and informed us that someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail into
the hangar and had burned up one wing of the glider. Apparently, some of the
locals mistakenly thought that we were engaged in cloud seeding, or, colloquially,
“stealing their sky water.”
In my next project, at the University of Washington, I flew in a World War
II–era surplus bomber equipped with cloud physics equipment to investigate
the claims of the weather modification community. The problem was, we usu-
ally flew only when the weather was bad, so we were buffeted quite frequently
by Pacific storms. Early one morning, after a particularly harrowing night of fly-
ing, the airplane clipped off the top of a pine tree during our landing approach.
I recall pulling a 2-inch-diameter branch out of the equipment slung below the
plane and deciding, pretty much there and then, that I would be seeking other,
safer modes of engagement with the atmosphere.
The history of science and technology, including its relevance to public pol-
icy, became for me that mode of engagement. I received my doctorate in his-
tory at Princeton University with a dissertation on the history of meteorology
in America. Since then, I have had more than a passing interest in the history of
weather and climate modification and have written several essays on the topic. I
also remain deeply involved in issues involving climate change history and public
policy. Today’s climate engineers are championing an approach to the problem
of what to do about climate change that arouses my deepest suspicions regard-
ing technological fixes. It is a seriously flawed and speculative undertaking that
typically involves impractical or even dangerous schemes to “fix the sky.” Propos-
als include “solar radiation management” and other forms of planetary leverage,
including thermodynamically impractical schemes for large-scale carbon capture
and sequestration. The proposals are typically supported by scribbling back-of-
the-envelope calculations or tinkering with simple computer models that are just
not good enough. It is an approach that is oblivious to the checkered history of
weather and climate control.

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