Page 27 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

international symbol of human intervention in the climate system, signaling and
codifying both affluence and apprehension.
Prediction introduces the time dimension in which the future state of a natu-
ral phenomenon is specified. If you understand a phenomenon, scientists say, you
should be able to predict its behavior. But while rather precise prediction of the
appearances of the sky was practiced in antiquity, weather prediction and basic
climate modeling were not possible until the mid-1950s when digital computing
provided our first glimpses of the possibility of handling the extreme complexity
of this nonlinear system.
Control is the third member of the trinity, but understanding does not imply
either predictability or control. If you know from observation that horses need
pasture and fresh water, you may predict that a wild herd will gather in the grassy
fields near the river. Capturing them, taming them, and bending them to your
will, however, is a far more difficult undertaking. For some, in the age of digital
computing, Earth observations from space, and extremely precise measurement
of atmospheric chemical species, controlling the weather and climate is more
desirable than merely observing or predicting it. Some think that this is now pos-
sible and that science and technology have given us an Archimedean set of levers
with which to move the Earth. This book examines these ancient, perennial, and
contemporary quests and questions by placing recent developments in the con-
text of the deeper past.
Chapter 1, stories of control, highlights imaginative and speculative literature
on the control of nature. It draws from the classical tradition, including Phae-
thon’s blunder, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, among oth-
ers. The examples indicate that myth, magic, religion, and legend are not relics
of the past but constitute deep roots and living sparks of contemporary practices.
An excursion into early geoscientific fiction follows, demonstrating the affinities
between the genre of science fiction and the fantasies of the cloud and climate
controllers. The works of famous authors such as Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and
Kurt Vonnegut serve to anchor the analysis of a host of lesser-known but still
important, enlightening, and entertaining early fiction. Tales of the rainmak-
ers, including the well-known play The Rainmaker, by N. Richard Nash, appear
alongside popularizations from the television series Sky King and comics from
Warner Brothers and Walt Disney. Here, as in Twain, the comedic genre clearly
trumps the heroic and the tragic. It is also clear that fiction writing has a moral
core that is missing from the speculative proposals of scientists and engineers.
Moreover, the writers tend to employ female voices to remind their predomi-
nantly male protagonists of their ethical excesses.

10 | introduCtion