Page 26 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

son said, “Coal is a portable climate. . . . Watt and Stephenson whispered in the
ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile,
and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta,
and with its comfort brings its industrial power.” Just one century ago, indus-
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trial power was applied to cooling, drying, and purifying the air when Willis H.
Carrier invented an industrial air-conditioning system. Carrier’s invention has
now infiltrated all aspects of modern life. It is doubtful whether the American
Sun Belt would be growing as it is today without the widespread use of home,
auto, and industrial air-conditioning. As these brief examples indicate, control-
ling the weather and climate is something we all do (on a small scale), while
some fantasize about it on a large scale. Clark Spence, in his entertaining book
The Rainmakers, surveyed the sometimes fantastic and always quixotic history
of scientific weather modification before World War II. Here those stories are
expanded and continued after 1945.
While many works in the history of science and technology have been crafted
in a heroic mode—great men with great ideas “standing on the shoulders of
giants”—and environmental histories are often written as tragedies, the his-
tory of weather and climate control is best told by invoking a broader range of
approaches, including a mixture of the tragic and comedic genres. Most of the
rainmakers and climate engineers portray their activities as heroic and dramatic
attempts to rescue humanity from a recalcitrant sky by exercising control over it;
however, their efforts often have commercial or military dimensions and almost
always fall far short of the stated goals. Here is where tragicomedy—or perhaps
just comedy—best captures the flawed anti-heroics of those who would seek to
fix the sky or control the weather and climate. In this book, I present a comedy
of ideas extending from the mythological past to the present, with the com-
mon denominator being farce, and sometimes satire, especially when the hype
becomes too great. Most of the stories emphasize the perennial nature of the
claims, the hubris and ineptitude of the protagonists, the largely pathological sci-
ence on which they are based, the opportunistic appeals to new technologies, the
false sense that macro-engineering will solve more problems than it creates, and
the ineptitude of the protagonists.
The trinity of understanding, prediction, and control undergirds the domi-
nant fantasies of both science and science fiction. Understanding often involves
reducing a complex phenomenon to a set of basic laws or mechanisms. This may
even involve extreme “molecular reductionism”—for example, in the treatment
of silver iodide (AgI) as a “trigger” mechanism for widespread weather modifi-
cation or of carbon dioxide, today’s environmental molecule of choice, as an

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