Page 215 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

It had not been easy to persuade the surviving superpowers to relinquish their
orbital fortresses and to hand them over to the Global Weather Authority, in what
was—if the metaphor could be stretched that far—the last and most dramatic
example of beating swords into plowshares. Now the lasers that had once threat-
ened mankind directed their beams into carefully selected portions of the atmo-
sphere, or onto heat-absorbing target areas in remote regions of the Earth. The
energy they contained was trifling compared with that of the smallest storm; but
so is the energy of the falling stone that triggers an avalanche, or the single neutron
that starts a chain reaction. 19

But Hoffman also alluded to possible future misuse and militarization. Every
prophetic call to “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into prun-
ing hooks” (Isaiah 2:4) can be countered by another prophet calling, “Beat your
plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears” (Joel 3:10).
Hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel has been generally supportive of Hoffman’s
hurricane control quest: “Weather modification will occur, almost inevitably . . .
the recent results, that suggest you can do it with a little tiny bit of energy placed
in the right place, will prove irresistible, and one can only hope that it is done for
the right reasons and to good ends.” on another occasion, Emanuel opined:
20
“We might be able to prevent or reduce vulnerability to serious hurricanes by
controlling the storm, by reducing its intensity, by steering it out to sea. I don’t
21
think it would take very many years to come up with a technology.” Recall that
it was Emanuel who advanced the dubious notion of taking up Phaethon’s reins.
In June 2009, Microsoft's Bill Gates announced that he intended to fight hur-
ricanes by manipulating the sea, “draining warm water from the surface to the
22
depths, through a long tube.” one commentator on the proposal suggested not
to “mess with Mother Nature”; another included the hope that this technique
might work better than the Windows operating system!

Soviet fantasies

Vladimir Lenin set the tone for Soviet attitudes toward “the mastery of nature.”
According to his philosophy, a new era was dawning through “objectively correct
reflection” on independently occurring phenomena and processes embedded in
23
the absolute and eternal laws of nature. Mastery would be manifest in praxis.
Two decades later, in 1948, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin announced his “Great Plan
for the Transformation of Nature,” an ultimately futile attempt to expand the
24
Soviet economy by harnessing nature and controlling the weather and climate.

198 | fearS, fantaSieS, and PoSSibilitieS of Control