Fixing the Sky (21 page)

3.5 Irving Krick's generators for cloud-seeding operations in seventeen western states and Mexico. (WILLARD HASELBACH, “‘RAIN MAKER OF THE ROCKIES': HISTORY'S BIGGEST WEATHER EXPERIMENT UNDERWAY,”
DENVER POST
, APRIL 22, 1951, 17A)

In 1951 a near fatal experiment with radium led Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), an eccentric Austrian-born physician and practicing psychoanalyst, to conclude that he had discovered a new type of proprietary energy he called “deadly orgone,” which, in its material form, he claimed, appeared in the air as black toxic specks that could calm the winds, cause tree leaves to droop, silence the birds and insects, and even sicken humans. The following year, Reich invented a “cloudbuster,” a cluster of hollow pipes resembling a Gatling gun, to attract and remove the deadly orgone from the atmosphere. Running water through the tubes served to rinse out and drain off the accumulated toxins. Or so he claimed.

Reich, who had worked with Sigmund Freud on human sexuality in the 1920s, moved to Germany in 1930 and joined the Communist Party, seeking to combine social theory and personal liberation from sexual taboos. When the Nazis came to power, Reich was forced into an itinerant life in a number of Scandinavian countries, where he experimented, using basic electrical equipment, on what he termed “bioelectric energy.” His experiments led him to believe that he had discovered a fundamental motive power of the universe, which he first called “bions” and later “orgone energy.” He postulated that this energy permeated all life and was also present in the atmosphere. Moving from Norway to the United States in 1939, Reich lectured on the psychological aspects of orgone energy and devised a simple device he named the Orgone Energy Accumulator to demonstrate his theories on both healthy and cancerous tissue. In the late 1940s, accused of fraud and suspected of conducting a sex racket, Reich moved his operation to a remote location in Rangely, Maine, to an estate he called Organon. It was here that he discovered “deadly orgone.”
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Reich claimed to be able to prevent or produce rain wherever he pointed his cloudbuster; he even devised a smaller-scale medical device that he pointed at his patients! After all, isn't it either raining or not raining all the time? And aren't patients either mostly healthy or unhealthy? An eyewitness to a demonstration in Maine in 1953 reported: “The strangest looking clouds you ever saw began to form soon after they got the thing rolling.”
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Maintaining Reich's legacy, a dedicated band of enthusiasts is currently clearing the air of “chemtrails,” with homemade cloudbusters constructed from copper pipe, quartz crystals, and metal filings. They are “repairing the sky.”
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They do so at the risk of their health, however, since plans published on the Internet do not include a drain for the deadly orgone. Use of this device will be followed by rain or clearing skies—your choice.

If Charles Hatfield were active today, he might be working for Earthwise Technologies, trying to peddle the company's ion rain project. Unsung heroes often emerge, however, to expose the charlatans and to contest unsupportable claims. Richard “Heatwave” Berler, a television weatherman in Laredo, Texas, deserves to receive a journalism award for using moments stolen from his nightly weathercast to confront the charlatans and reveal the madness. In late November 2003, in response to an unsolicited proposal, the Webb County Commissioners Court issued a contract to Earthwise Technologies for rainmaking in the vicinity of Laredo. The project, called Provaqua, involved building four large iongenerating rain towers spanning the Rio Grande watershed at a cost of up to $5 million. Webb County taxpayers were asked to pay $1.2 million, with the balance coming from Mexico.

Earthwise, a sole proprietorship operating out of Dallas, Texas, was promoting an unproven Russian technology known as IOLA (ionization of the local areas). Three years earlier, the company—or, more accurately, Steven Howard, its president and sole employee—made an unsuccessful bid to install up to twenty-five “ionization platforms” in the Houston–Galveston area, a heavily populated region and, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, a non-attainment area for air pollution. For a fee of $25 million a year, he offered to clear the region's air of particulate matter and reduce concentrations of ozone near the ground. According to Howard, the company's patented IOLA technology would create an ascending “convection chimney” to draw in polluted air and disperse pollutants more rapidly and at greater heights than occurs naturally. Much like a giant home air purifier, Howard explained, the devices would help precipitate heavier particles and could mitigate the formation of ground-level ozone.

The Laredo project claimed to be able to harness and redirect natural atmospheric energy processes in the Earth's hydrological cycle. According to Howard, clouds were not necessary to produce rain. Ions floating up from the tall electrified towers that his company proposed to erect would cling to humidity in the air, generating clouds and producing a slow, gentle rain. The ions would also attract new “aerial rivers of moisture” from the Gulf of Mexico and would disperse pollution and freshen and purify the air. In a presentation to the commissioners court, Howard further explained that IOLA “changes the electrical charge of water vapor, thereby speeding up the natural velocity of condensation.” Earthwise offered to generate a 15 to 20 percent minimum increase in measurable rainfall, with a maximum 300 percent increase.
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Local TV channel KGNS
interviewed the excited Webb County chief of staff, Raul Casso, who explained that society had wanted to create rain for centuries and that he believed it was now possible: “Making it rain ... has always been one of man's age-old aspirations. ... [Y]ou have [dowsing] forks and diviners, and rain gods and all sorts of things that people have done to try to evoke rain; but you can't do it—until now.”
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Heatwave Berler, however, smelled a rat.

In the closing moments of one of his evening weathercasts, Heatwave humbly expressed his concerns about the project, saying that he was not arguing that it was impossible for the project to work, just that there was no evidence of it working. He interviewed Casso, asking him if the county commissioners had sought the opinion of any scientists before making the decision to spend $1.2 million of the taxpayers' money on the project. Casso initially listed the various civic groups they had talked to, but eventually admitted that no, they had not asked any scientists. Heatwave's questions generated a list of explanations from Howard (doing business as Earthwise Technologies), all of which Heatwave systematically debunked.

Heatwave, now fully engaged with the issue, used his weathercast to express his concerns about the lack of peer-reviewed articles and improper documentation provided to the commissioners. He also found it interesting that Howard, like Dyrenforth and Hatfield long before him, was trying to make it rain during the naturally occurring rainy season. Earthwise was claiming experimental successes based on only one year of precipitation measurements, a timeframe that Heatwave stressed was much too short when dealing with weather, especially when rainfall amounts in different years and in different locales can vary by as much as an order of magnitude. He drew the analogy to tossing a coin once and then concluding that all coin tosses would have the same outcome. When Heatwave discovered that similar projects elsewhere had been terminated due to lack of evidence, Earthwise Technologies responded that there was a lot of research and articles on the methodology, but that unfortunately it was all in Russian and had not been translated. This puzzled Heatwave, since the American Meteorological Society and the World Meteorological Organization, to name only two organizations, had a long history of cooperation with Russian meteorologists and issued reports and abstracts in translation to overcome language barriers. The absurdity of the situation spurred a spoof advertisement for “Dud Light” on the local radio, the gist of which was that for only $5 million you can get a machine that magically makes rain, with instructions in Russian and with the guarantee that it has failed to work everywhere else it was tried.
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The fiasco ended in a dramatic Webb County Commissioners Court meeting in December 2003 during which Judge Louis Bruni aggressively and embarrassingly supported funding. He was voted down by the county commissioners because of the overwhelming rejection of the project from their voter constituency, largely brought about by Heatwave's investigations. A local magazine,
Laredos
, summarized the mood of the meeting: “While the early minutes of the meeting were glossed by a thin patina of civility, the proceedings quickly degenerated into a side show of blatant disdain, sarcasm, chicanery, the rearing of ugly heads, a couple of juggling acts, patronizing platitudes, and for some on the sidelines of county government, incredulity that public leaders conducted county business in this manner.”
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Humble Heatwave Berler had stood up to and defeated the rainmakers, saving the county and the region millions of dollars and further embarrassment.

Hail shooting to protect a crop and rainmaking in times of drought are usually considered to be desperate acts by desperate people. But there are other dimensions, both cultural and psychological. One is the solidarity of a community trying to do something, anything, to augment Providence. Another is the sheer entertainment value of a traveling rainmaker's entourage coming to town with its mysteries, loud fireworks, and showmanship. Many times, people do both: pray
and
hire a rainmaker. Charles Hatfield undoubtedly turned a profit by working with the moist air masses provided by nature and predicted by the weather bureau. John Stingo and George Sykes combined climatology, handicapping, and complicated apparatus in executing their confidence game. They, like Clinton Jewell and others, kept their secret techniques under close wraps. Others, like Frank Melbourne, made their money by selling their secrets as a kind of franchise operation to the highest bidders.

Common traits of successful charlatans include seeking financial gain by taking credit for natural rains. Little to no capital and no business training are needed. A sense of ethical responsibility or long-term engagement with a community may be detrimental. Use of the latest technologies, juxtaposed in odd and mysterious ways with claims of esoteric knowledge, and recitation of a scientific mantra also seem to help.

Practicing meteorologists were uniform in their criticism of rainmaking and hail shooting. In 1895 meteorologist Alexander McAdie wrote: “Rainmakers of our time bang and thrash the air, hoping to cause rain by concussion. They may well be compared to impatient children hammering on reservoirs in
a vain effort to make the water flow.”
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Weather forecaster Ford Carpenter's examination into the methods of the rainmaker revealed “a disregard of physical laws,” with no proof or prospect of success;
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and Cornell University president David Starr Jordan ridiculed rainmakers when he called their attempts to grow rich without risk or effort “the art of pluviculture,”
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a practice that William Humphreys defined as “the growing and marketing of rain-making schemes, a never-failing drought crop.”
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Are there charlatans out there now ? Certainly there are huge commercial interests, similar to Irving Krick's, hoping to profit from the scientific and social angst surrounding looming water shortages, damaging storms, and climate change. The Provaqua project in Laredo is one obvious example. Massive ocean iron fertilization schemes to cash in on carbon credits also come to mind (chapter 8). Weather control is currently being practiced on five continents in some forty-seven countries, through some 150 experimental and operational programs. To what effect? In 2002 the Texas Department of Agriculture provided funding of $2.4 million for rainmaking activities. Throughout the American West, agricultural, water conservation, and hydropower interests are conducting routine weather modification operations that cover about one-third of the total area. They are not sure if their efforts are effective,
but they are afraid to stop
!

In 2003 the National Academy of Sciences issued the report
Critical Issues in Weather Modification Research
. The study cited looming social and environmental challenges such as water shortages and drought, property damage and loss of life from severe storms as justifications for investing in major new national and international programs in weather modification research—in essence, finding engineering solutions for nature's shortfalls and wrath. Although the report acknowledged that there was no “convincing scientific proof of efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts,” its authors believed that there should be “a renewed commitment” in the field. The fact is, weather modification has never been shown to work in a reliable and controllable way, and the report admitted as much: “Evaluation methodologies vary but in general do not provide convincing scientific evidence for either success or failure.”
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This has been true throughout history, and it remains true today.