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
3
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
192 | fearS, fantaSieS, and PoSSibilitieS of Control