Page 172 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

public responsibility particularly when they deny it has any large scale effect . . .
to stink up the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of miles down wind pro-
ducing God knows what effect is a dangerous thing.” 58
Nevertheless, Langmuir touted chemical seeding agents as being superior to
natural ice nuclei because they act at higher temperatures, they do not melt or
evaporate, and they can be spewed into the atmosphere over widespread areas to
remain active until it snows. He echoed the GE News Bureau in making unsub-
stantiated claims that the chemical might eliminate severe aircraft icing, suppress
hailstorms, and perhaps, since by his estimates only 200 pounds of silver iodide
would be needed to seed the entire atmosphere of the United States, could result
in large-scale weather or even climatic changes. 59

the new mexico Seedings

Project Cirrus was operating in Socorro, New Mexico, in July 1949, with Von-
negut running a test burner on the ground while the military air crews, with
Langmuir and Schaefer as observers, seeded clouds aloft with dry ice. one day,
one of Vonnegut’s cumulus clouds “really whooped it up, and the first thing I
knew there was lightning, and it was all very exciting, and I thought, ‘Gee, I won-
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der if I’m responsible for it.’” When his colleagues returned that evening with
no results to report, Vonnegut ventured the suggestion that perhaps his ground
generators had glaciated all the clouds, so the dry ice seeding planes could not
find any for their experiments.
Noting that widespread rains were reported downwind on this day, Lang-
muir ordered seeding to be done periodically, once a week for eighty-two weeks,
from December 1949 to July 1951. Then, even before the data were collected and
other possibilities explored, he proceeded to make the outrageous claim that
large-scale seven-day periodicities in the nation’s weather were being caused by
Vonnegut’s single ground-based silver iodide generator located in New Mexico.
Langmuir supported his claim by noting that the Midwest and East were moister
than normal during this period, while the Southwest was drier than normal—
conditions that occur naturally on a regular basis, although he did have to admit,
sheepishly, that in the weeks when the generators were not operating, “rains were
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about forty percent greater than the other weeks.” Nevertheless, Langmuir
went so far as to claim that severe flooding in the Midwest and the ohio Valley,
accompanied by widespread property damage and loss of life, was the result of
these experiments. He apparently “proved” his result using unconventional statis-
tical methods of his own devising.

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