Page 212 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Langmuir began making his fantastic claims about weather control. But such
notions are still around. In 2009 a fantastic proposal was floated for just such
a bureau or administration to implement regional-scale geoengineering—in the
Arctic, in certain ocean regions, or for certain storms—to attempt to moderate
specific climate change impacts. 10
In the era of cloud seeding, von Neumann and Zworykin, especially the latter,
continued to feed public speculation about control. In January 1947, both men
spoke in New York at a joint session of the American Meteorological Society and
the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences, chaired by incoming AMS president
Henry G. Houghton. Von Neumann’s talk, “Future Uses of High Speed Com-
puting in Meteorology,” was followed by Zworykin’s much more controversial
“Discussion of the Possibility of Weather Control.” According to the New York
Times: “Hurricanes may be dispersed, Dr. Zworykin said, and rain may be made,
first through the speed which an electronic computer now approaching com-
pletion can synthesize all elements in weather problems, and second, through
application of energy in small doses from spreads of blazing oil to heat critical
11
portions of the atmosphere or blackened-over areas to cool them.” Zworykin
focused on “trigger” mechanisms such as artificial fogs or even cloud seeding as
examples of adding small amounts of energy to cause enormous effects, claiming
that the missing ingredient was not the techniques but how to “make the most of
our weather information mathematically.” A follow-up story the next day ended
with the comment “If Dr. Zworykin is right the weather-makers of the future are
the inventors of calculating machines.” 12
Most scientists thought this speculation was premature. Wexler and a col-
league who dined at Zworykin’s home discussed weather control with him,
including techniques such as igniting oil on the sea surface to redirect hurricanes,
but Wexler indicated that Zworykin’s views “were not shared by most tropical
13
meteorologists.” The distinguished oceanographer Harald U. Sverdrup at the
Scripps Institution of oceanography was not convinced by Zworykin’s claim
that “the underlying general physical principles governing weather behavior
are mostly well understood.” Regarding weather control, he wrote: “It seems
that only in rare cases can we expect to know the initial conditions in suffi-
14
cient detail to predict the consequences of a ‘trigger action.’” Yet talk of trig-
gers was something the military understood. In a 1947 fund-raising speech
presented at the annual alumni dinner at MIT, General George C. Kenney,
commander of the Strategic Air Command, speaking of future weapons sys-
tems, asserted: “If rain could be kept from falling where it has been falling for
ages,” it is conceivable that “the nation which first learns to plot the paths of air
masses accurately and learns to control the time and place of precipitation will

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