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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