Page 209 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky
P. 209

fantasies


                   Global climate control has a history rooted in the quest for perfectly accurate
                   machine forecasts and supported by the dream of perfectly accurate data acqui-
                   sition. Calculating the weather has long been a goal of meteorologists. By the
                   turn of the twentieth century, Felix Exner and Vilhelm Bjerknes had identified
                   the basic equations of atmospheric dynamics. In 1922 Louis Fry Richardson had
                   actually tried to solve the equations numerically with rather poor data and with-
                   out the use of a computer. Their dreams—to solve the equations of motion for
                   the atmosphere faster than the daily weather develops—were fulfilled with the
                   advent of numerical weather prediction in the 1950s. This story has been told
                   often, always as a heroic saga—a quest to do what no one has ever done before.
                   Kristine Harper is the latest in a long line of historians and meteorologists to illu-
                   minate the “genesis” of modern meteorology, its “exodus” from weather bureau
                   captivity, and its arrival at the edge of a “promised land” of digital computer
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                   modeling.  As complex (and familiar, at least in outline) as this story might be,
                   there is nevertheless a story as yet untold, a darker tale of digital climate model-
                   ing, prediction, and control.
                     Just  after  World  War  II,  in  october  1945,  Vladimir  K.  Zworykin,  associ-
                   ate research director at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) Laboratory
                   in Princeton, New Jersey, wrote his influential but now all but forgotten mim-
                   eographed “outline of Weather Proposal” (figure 7.1). He began by discussing
                   the importance to meteorology of accurate prediction, which he thought was
                   entering a new era. Modern communication systems were beginning to allow
                   the systematic compilation of scattered and remote observations, and, he hoped,
                   new computing equipment would be developed that could solve the equations
                   of atmospheric motion, or at least search quickly for statistical regularities and
                   past analog weather conditions. He imagined “an automatic plotting board” that
                   would instantly digest and display all this information.
                     Zworykin  suggested  that  “exact  scientific  weather  knowledge”  might  allow
                   for effective weather control. If a perfectly accurate machine could be developed
                   that  could  predict  the  immediate  future  state  of  the  atmosphere  and  identify
                   the precise time and location of leverage points or locations sensitive to rapid
                   storm  development,  effective  intervention  might  be  possible.  A  paramilitary
                   rapid-deployment force might then be sent to intervene in the weather as it hap-
                   pened—literally  to  pour  oil  on  troubled  ocean  waters  or  use  physical  barriers,
                   giant flame throwers, or even atomic bombs to disrupt storms before they formed,
                   deflect them from populated areas, and otherwise control the weather. Zworykin
                   suggested a study of the origins and tracks of hurricanes, with a view to their


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