Page 214 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

to symbolize his notion that chaos theory, developed by his graduate school
adviser, Edward Lorenz, might be used to control weather systems such as hur-
ricanes. Since the atmosphere is chaotic and exhibits extreme sensitivity to small
changes, he argued, a series of “just right” perturbations might be used to con-
trol the weather. Echoing the perennial hope of William Suddards Franklin, who
believed in perturbations, and the pathological hype of Irving Langmuir, who
advocated control, Hoffman asked us to imagine a world with no droughts, no
tornadoes, no snowstorms during rush hour, and no killer hurricanes.
Hoffman proposed an atmospheric controller similar in its characteristics to
feedback systems common in many industrial processes. The components of his
integrated system included numerical weather prediction (NWP), data assimila-
tion systems, and satellite remote sensing—all part of today’s normal meteoro-
logical practices. Where Hoffman’s system differed was in adding a fourth com-
ponent, what he called “perturbations,” into natural weather systems to move
them off course. These are planned interventions in natural systems that are then
to be monitored by remote sensing and modeled via NWP in an endless man-
agement loop. He provided examples of global-scale interventions that included
changing the altitude and flight paths of airplanes to optimize contrail formation
for perturbing solar and infrared radiation, launching reflectors into low Earth
orbit to produce bright spots on the night side and shadows on the day side of
the Earth, running wind turbines as high-speed fans at a sufficient scale to trans-
fer atmospheric momentum and influence storm tracks, and the pièce de résis-
tance, a space solar power generator that would “downlink microwave energy” to
provide a tunable atmospheric heat source—an orbiting death ray to zap hurri-
canes or anything else in the way.
His goal was not to eliminate hurricanes but just to “control their paths”
in order to prevent them from striking population centers. To demonstrate
o
o
his ideas, Hoffman increased the sea surface temperature by 5 C (9 F) in one
quadrant of a computer model of Hurricane Iniki. The model responded by
“steering” the storm away from the Hawaiian Islands. Hoffman concluded by
gesturing in the direction of legal and ethical questions, asking, “If we can
do it, do we want to?” Just imagine the lawsuits from those poor folks over
17
whose property Hoffman steers the storm! And isn’t “steering” too strong a
term to use to describe the result of a chaotic perturbation? Hoffman’s effort
was supported by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, which funded
wild futuristic ideas such as space elevators, robotic asteroid patrols, antimat-
ter propulsion, and genetically modified organisms for terraforming other
18
planets. Hoffman cited as his inspiration Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of a
Global Weather Authority:

fearS, fantaSieS, and PoSSibilitieS of Control | 197