Page 207 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, and a pio-
neer in the application of digital computing techniques to the problem of numer-
ical weather prediction and climate modeling. It was the dark side of climate con-
trol that led von Neumann to ponder the brave new world of such techniques.
Wexler was chief of scientific services at the U.S. Weather Bureau. He was instru-
mental in advancing the agenda for climate modeling and promoted many other
new technologies, especially meteorological satellites. It was Wexler who con-
ducted the first serious technical analysis of climate engineering and issued an
early warning about the possibilities of climate control. It was the very real pos-
sibility of purposeful destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer that led Wexler
to spell out, in great technical detail, the dangers of both inadvertent and inten-
tional climate tinkering. The interplay of such technical, scientific, and social
issues moves beyond the timeworn origin stories of the modern atmospheric sci-
ences into another dimension, a marketplace of wild ideas, a “Hall of Fantasy” or
“Twilight Zone” whose boundaries are that of imagination.

fears

We are apprehensive about climate change, we seek to understand it, and some
may seek to stop it. The word “apprehension” signifies several distinct mean-
ings: (1) fear, (2) awareness, and (3) intervention. In Historical Perspectives on
Climate Change (1998), I examined how people became aware of and sought to
understand phenomena in which they were immersed, that covered the entire
globe, that had both natural and anthropogenic components, and that changed
constantly on a multiplicity of temporal and spatial scales. What do climate sci-
entists know about climate change and how do they know it? By what author-
ity and by what historical pathways have they arrived at this knowledge? How
have they established privileged positions? I offered some reflections on the ways
such perspectives emerged historically: from appeals to authority, data collection,
fundamental physical theory, critical experiments, models (including computer
models), new technologies (including space-based observations), to consensus
building and the beginnings of coordinated action.
I also examined climate-related fears, including drought, crop failures, vol-
cano weather, apocalyptic visions of the return of the deadly glaciers, and global
warming. The cultural geographer Yi-fu Tuan once observed, “To apprehend is
1
to risk apprehensiveness.” For much of history, people feared that the powers of
evil were active during inclement weather or that when the rains failed to arrive
or it rained too much something was terribly wrong with either nature or, more

190 | fearS, fantaSieS, and PoSSibilitieS of Control