Page 29 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

has since reached the level of domed stadiums and indoor shopping malls, fall-
ing just shy of totally air-conditioned cities. Also in the 1930s and early 1940s,
meteorologists shared their visions of technological breakthroughs in the com-
ing decades leading to perfect forecasts and the holy grail of weather control.
Chapter 5 examines the defining characteristics of “pathological science”
established by Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir and then proceeds to indict him
on his own criteria. Langmuir, and to some extent his associates at General Elec-
tric, was an overenthusiastic supporter of weather control by using dry ice and
silver iodide as cloud-seeding agents. When the military took over the project,
the stage was set for heavy-handed intervention in hurricanes, large-scale tests
with few controls, and sweeping but unsupportable claims. As the technique
spread around the world, a host of commercial cloud seeders, personified by
Irving Krick, made their living at the expense of those in need of rainfall. The
chapter concludes with stories of meteorological disasters in England and
the former Soviet Union attributed to but not proved to have been caused by
cloud seeding.
The mood darkens considerably in chapter 6 as military themes take center
stage. What are the historical dimensions of military interest and involvement
in the weather; how were the clouds weaponized, especially in the cold war era;
and how did a race for weather control domination emerge between the United
States and the Soviet Union? The sordid episode of rainmaking in Vietnam over
the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the ban by the United Nations on environmental
warfare quashed much of this enthusiasm in the 1970s. Yet the weather and cli-
mate warriors are with us still, preparing to “own” and manipulate the weather
over the battlefields of the future and seeking to control the evolving nature of
climate change in the interest of national security.
Chapter 7 examines climate fears, climate fantasies, and the possibility of
global climate control between 1945 and 1962. It illuminates technical, sci-
entific, social, and popular issues and moves us beyond the timeworn origin
stories of numerical weather prediction into a new field of numerical climate
control—a marketplace of wild ideas, a twentieth-century Hall of Fantasy, or
even Twilight Zone, whose boundaries are those of imagination. It does so by
examining some of the chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and, yes, meteo-
rologists who tried to “interfere” with natural processes. They intervened not
with dry ice or silver iodide, but with the new Promethean possibilities of cli-
mate tinkering using digital computing, satellite remote sensing, and nuclear
power. Key players include Vladimir Zworykin, the inventor of television, and
the noted mathematician John von Neumann, both of whom were seeking a
perfect forecasting machine, and Harry Wexler, who imagined cutting a hole

12 | introduCtion