Page 94 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

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rain fakerS

Among the many people who “live by their wits” there is a class who prey
upon others subtly yet publicly. Their impelling motives, cupidity and desire
for notoriety are stimulated by their vanity, and their rudder is hypocrisy.
Although it is their business to live at the expense of others, it is not as parasites
or fawning dependents; rather, they make dupes of their patrons, and they
do this by pretending to possess knowledge or skill of a high order in some
professional line. Their victims become their prey through sheer credulity and
the predatory class [is known as] charlatans.

—Daniel Hering, Foibles and Fallacies of Science

“ t is not in human nature to suffer from a prolonged or repeated evil

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without seeking for a remedy” —so wrote Daniel Hering in 1924
I regarding weather control. In the struggle of the agriculturalist
against hail and drought, that “remedy” was to seek new techniques for altering
the weather. When the rainmaker mixed his proprietary chemicals and a sprinkle
of rain touched the parched prairie, it was hard to dissuade the relieved farmers
from believing that they had witnessed a miracle. Hering called this charlatan-
ism an “old, familiar form of delusion”—post hoc, ergo propter hoc—and a weather
control, “vagary.” After the hail cannons were discharged with a mighty roar and
the storm clouds dissipated, “it [was] hard . . . to convince the relieved grape
growers that the cannons [had] not shot the storm away” (249).
The hoopla and hype of Robert Dyrenforth and his team could well be con-
sidered a form of charlatanism, except that they made some attempt, modest as it
was, to explain their assumptions and they conducted their affairs without exten-
sive marketing efforts. Like James Espy before him, Dyrenforth fits better into
the sincere but deluded category of those who became overly enthusiastic about