Page 239 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

7.8 Harry Wexler’s “Rosetta Stone” note, linking Sydney Chapman, oliver Wulf,
rocket fuel, and catalytic ozone-destroying reactions triggered by chlorine and bromine.
(wexler papers)

relating to his career—from his early work at MIT, his work as liaison to the
IAS meteorology project, his research into all sorts of new technologies, to his
final speeches on ozone depletion and climate control—headed into the archives,
probably not to be seen and certainly not to be reevaluated until today.
The well-known and well-documented supersonic transport (SST) and strato-
spheric-ozone-depletion issues date only to the 1970s and do not include Wex-
ler’s role. The idea that bromine and other halogens could destroy stratospheric
ozone was published in 1974, while chlorofluorocarbon production expanded
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rapidly and dramatically after 1962. Had Wexler lived to publish his ideas, they
would certainly have been noticed and could have led to a different outcome
and perhaps an earlier coordinated response to the issue of stratospheric ozone
depletion. Recently, I have been in correspondence with three notable ozone
scientists about Wexler’s early work: Nobel laureates Sherwood Rowland and
Paul Crutzen and current National Academy of Sciences president Ralph Cice-
rone. They are uniformly interested and quite amazed by Wexler’s insights and
accomplishments.
Remarkable, too, is the fact that with all his sophistication and the leading
roles he played in the development of computer modeling, satellite monitoring,
and many, many other technical fields, Wexler still opened his 1962 lectures by
quoting extensively from Zworykin’s “outline of Weather Proposal” (1945) and
von Neumann’s response to it. A colleague who heard Wexler’s lecture in Boston
wrote that climate engineering constituted “a delightful area of mental gymnas-
tics. Let’s hope the entire world is satisfied to play the game on this plane until
the state of meteorological knowledge is truly adequate for big league experimen-

222 | fearS, fantaSieS, and PoSSibilitieS of Control