Page 23 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

The dawn of aviation brought new needs and challenges, with fog dispersal
taking center stage. A number of ineffective efforts using chemical and electri-
cal means preceded the massive World War II fog-clearing project FIDo (Fog
Investigation and Dispersal operation), which allowed British Royal Air Force
and Allied planes to take off and land when the Germans were grounded. With
national survival at stake, it did not matter that it required burning 6,000 gallons
of gasoline to land one airplane in the fog.
After World War II, promising discoveries in “cloud seeding” at the General
Electric Corporation rapidly devolved into questionable practices by military
and commercial rainmakers seeking to control the weather. At the same time,
hopeful developments in digital computing led to speculation that a perfect
machine forecast of weather and climate could lead to perfect understanding and
control. During the cold war, speculation about geoengineering by the Soviets
promoted a chilling vision (to Westerners) of global climate control. Geoscien-
tific speculators in the West returned the favor.
By 1962 the results of early computer simulations of the general circulation
of the atmosphere and the first satellite estimates of the Earth’s heat budget led
Harry Wexler, head of research at the U.S. Weather Bureau, to warn a United
Nations symposium on the environment of the “inherent risk” in attempted
climate control “of irremediable harm to our planet or side effects counterbal-
9
ancing the possible short-term benefits.” Yet only three years later, the Presi-
dent’s Science Advisory Committee reported that scientists might soon need to
increase the Earth’s albedo, or planetary brightness, deliberately in response to
increased warming from carbon dioxide emissions. 10
During the hot summer of 1988, with Yellowstone National Park in flames
and global warming in the headlines, an international scientific conference spon-
sored by the UN and the World Meteorological organization recommended
reductions of carbon dioxide emissions to 20 percent below 1988 levels, to be
achieved by 2005. Today, we are nowhere near reaching that goal. Experts advise
that reductions of greenhouse gas emissions of at least 80 percent will be neces-
sary, while popular cries of “Stop global warming” and “Control climate change”
are becoming more and more widespread. Invoking the unlikelihood that such
reductions will be accomplished voluntarily and the fear of passing a climate “tip-
ping point,” some modern-day climate engineers are suggesting that they can pro-
vide cheap, reliable technological “fixes” for the climate system through macro-
engineering options that include “solar radiation management,” carbon capture
and sequestration, and other invasive techniques of “planetary surgery.”
Weather and climate are intimately related: weather is the state of the atmo-
sphere at a given place and time, while climate is the aggregate of weather con-

6 | introduCtion