Page 24 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky
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ditions  over  time.  A  vast  body  of  scientific  literature  addresses  these  interac-
                  tions. In addition, historians are revisiting the ancient but elusive term Klima,
                  seeking to recover its multiple social connotations.  Weather, climate, and the
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                  climate of opinion matter in complex ways that invite—some might say require
                  or demand—the attention of both scientists and historians.
                    Yet some may wonder how weather and climate are interrelated rather than
                  distinct. Both, for example, are at the center of the debate over greenhouse warm-
                  ing and hurricane intensity.  A few may claim that rainmaking, for example, has
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                  nothing to do with climate engineering, but any intervention in the Earth’s radia-
                  tion or heat budget (such as managing solar radiation) would affect the general
                  circulation and thus the location of upper-level patterns, including the jet stream
                  and storm tracks. Thus the weather itself would be changed by such manipula-
                  tion. Conversely, intervening in severe storms by changing their intensity or their
                  tracks or modifying weather on a scale as large as a region, a continent, or the
                  Pacific basin would obviously affect cloudiness, temperature, and precipitation
                  patterns, with major consequences for monsoonal flows and ultimately the gen-
                  eral circulation. If repeated systematically, such interventions would influence
                  the overall heat budget and the climate.
                     In the 1950s, Irving Langmuir sought to cause changes in the seasons and the
                  climate of large regions such as the North American continent and the Pacific
                  ocean by massive seeding of weather systems. Three decades earlier, L. Francis
                  Warren tried to develop a system of universal weather control using electrified
                  sand. In the 1840s, James Espy’s proposed large fires were intended to act as artifi-
                  cial volcanoes, triggering regular rains along the entire eastern seaboard to change
                  the climate and improve the health of the region, while Thomas Jefferson specu-
                  lated on climate engineering at the dawn of the nineteenth century and thought
                  that the sum total of American agricultural practices would surely change local
                  weather and warm the entire continent. Thus, both by definition and in histori-
                  cal practice, weather and climate occupy a continuous spectrum ranging from
                  local to global scales and from short- to long-term temporal changes. As Harry
                  Wexler liked to point out, if you change the weather repeatedly on a large spatial
                  scale, you are changing the climate, and vice versa.
                     I have set down in writing my ideas about fixing the sky—primarily histori-
                  cal ideas about mending, repairing, or somehow improving perceived defects
                  in the weather or in climate systems—but fixing the sky has many, many other
                  possible meanings. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the “sky” is the apparent
                  arch or vault of heaven, whether covered with clouds or clear and blue; it may
                  be the climate or clime of a particular region, nowadays usually designated more
                  globally than locally. The appearance of the sky is variously sunny, starry, hazy,


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