Page 253 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

huge fires was theoretically sound and demonstrable on a small scale, yet impos-
sible to implement operationally. Ward called Robert Dyrenforth’s experiments
a “national disgrace” and thought it “highly important that no such occasion
should arise again” (13). He called the production of rain for profit to “hoodwink”
desperate farmers the work of “pure fakirs.” He claimed, perhaps too hastily, that
“the speculations of former times have been discarded,” and now we know the
facts. How could he have known that speculation would increase over the next
eight decades? Asking “How far can man control his climate?” Ward replied that
we can protect against and prevent unwanted weather damage, but “we can not
produce rain or change the order of nature.” He saw “no hope . . . of our ever
being able to bring about any but local modifications of the weather and climate”
(18). Citing the opinion of Sir Napier Shaw, Ward concluded, “We are lords of
every specimen of air which we can bottle up or imprison in our laboratories
[but] in the open air we are practically powerless” (6). These words were writ-
ten in 1930, before the dawn of cloud physics as a field, before the General Elec-
tric Corporation’s cloud-seeding experiments, before the fantasies of ultimate
control, and before the rise of serious fears of weather and climate warfare in the
1950s and 1960s.

Climate leverage

The noted Soviet geoscientist Mikhail Ivanovitch Budyko (1920–2001) was
deeply concerned about both the enhanced greenhouse effect and the growing
problem of waste heat. At a 1961 conference in Leningrad on “problems of cli-
mate control,” he pointed out that at current and projected rates of growth, the
waste heat produced by human energy generation could, in two hundred years,
rival that of the Earth’s radiation balance, rendering life on Earth “impossible.”
30
Cities already generated more than five times more energy than the natural
radiation balance, and if thermonuclear power was harnessed, he warned, dan-
gerous temperature levels could be reached within a few decades. The threat of
such excessive heat led him to become a strong advocate for learning to control
and regulate climate. His colleague, academician M. Ye. Shvets, advanced a pro-
posal to inject 36 million tons of 1-micron dust particles into the stratosphere,
which would blanket the Northern Hemisphere within six months. His calcula-
tions indicated that such a dust screen would reduce solar radiation by 10 per-
o

o
cent and temperatures by 2 to 3 C (3.6 to 5.4 F). Such an intervention was also
expected to reduce evaporative losses, increase precipitation, and thus increase
water supply. 31

236 | tHe Climate enGineerS