Page 181 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

place. If there had been no cloud seeding, there would be no radiation, even if the
radiation had reached that far, it would never have been on such a huge scale. They
decided to keep the cloud seeding quiet. They thought that the public would never
find out about it. Everything would stay a secret and nobody would need to take
responsibility. 79

This was truly a pathological situation.

* * * * *

Intervention in a weather system, any weather system, carries immense ethi-
cal considerations. one of the moral pitfalls could be that trying to modify the
weather in one place could actually cause a disaster elsewhere. This is true in local-
and regional-scale situations (Lynmouth and Chernobyl) as well as in large-scale
instances (intervening in hurricanes and synoptic weather). It may also be true
of the Earth’s climate in general. Weather and climate are essentially very chaotic
systems, and although they may be somewhat predictable on short timescales, in
many cases surprises will arise from non-linear interactions. There are all sorts of
unknowns. As Irving Langmuir told his audience at the 1953 lecture on pathologi-
cal science, when you are examining new or threshold phenomena in science, it
means that you do not know—you really do not know—whether you are seeing
something important or not. In such cases, it is much better to err on the side
of caution than to try to operationalize what is unknown. Ironically, by his own
criteria, Langmuir’s final undertaking—his involvement in weather and climate
control—must be judged a pathological obsession and somewhat of a scientific
dead end. Pathological science may be bad enough, but pathological engineering
can actually create disasters. Remember this as you analyze the odd mixtures of
wild speculation, faulty logic, poor experimental design, passionate certainty, and
appeals to authority that so often arise in the fields of weather and climate control.

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