Fixing the Sky (36 page)

Two conferences reviewing ENMOD have been held since its ratification, one in 1984 and one in 1992. The 1984 review conference pushed, without success, to expand the scope of the treaty and to reduce the threshold for violations. The 1992 meeting was influenced by the first Persian Gulf War, which included belligerent environmental acts such as torching oil wells. This conference expanded the convention to cover herbicides and various “low-tech” interventions such as using fire for military purposes. As of this writing, however, the ENMOD treaty has not been used formally to accuse a country of a violation.
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Of relevance to climate engineering, ENMOD prohibits environmental modification techniques that change “through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes—the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.”
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This restriction would be relevant on the scale of climate or ocean engineering. Today's climate engineers emphasize the altruistic aspects of their work—saving the world from global warming, while also declaring “war” on global warming. They are fully aware, however, of the military implications of the techniques they
are developing. In this case, a revised version of ENMOD may be the best hope of providing the international community with sufficient diplomatic leverage to stop any unacceptable collateral damage from geoengineering, or even to intervene if rogue states or terrorist groups were to employ these techniques.

While purposeful military or hostile intent would be required to trigger the existing convention, all climate-engineering schemes involve deliberate manipulation of the dynamics, composition, or structure of the Earth, and all such schemes carry the potential for “widespread, long-lasting and severe” harm on national, regional, and possibly global scales. At a minimum, ENMOD will have to be revisited under its provisions for consultation of the parties before any large-scale climate engineering projects are field-tested or deployed and before any human or environmental damage is either threatened or done. The present war on global warming must be viewed as the outgrowth of a long historical process in which military metaphors are much more than metaphors. They are hardnosed realities influencing the course of scientific research, military policy, and perhaps most tellingly, our attitudes toward nature.

The history of meteorology and military history have many points of significant overlap and mutual influence. Weather warriors have long sought to take advantage of natural phenomena and, in the twentieth century, to manipulate them for military advantage. The interaction of science and the military seems to be well on its way to fulfilling a Faustian bargain struck in the early modern era if not before. Weapons systems of the past and current centuries have increasingly been based on science; they have also been increasingly lethal (especially to civilians), increasingly toxic, and increasingly pathological. Physics, chemistry, and biology have weaponized the atom, molecule, virus, and bacterium, while the geosciences have militarized the global environment in the air, under the seas, and in outer space. In the cold war era, it was presumed that clouds, storms, and even the climate, like any other natural phenomenon, could be controlled and weaponized. Nano-scale warfare meets geo-scale warfare. It was further presumed that a weather warfare race, analogous to the space race, was under way and that the other side was probably ahead. All was fair in war, especially surreptitious programs.

The cases presented here go beyond simple military support or patronage for science. They clearly document the interpenetration of values and perspectives among meteorologists and military officers. Project Cirrus, Project Stormfury, and their kin were all too common during the cold war. When military cloud
seeding in Vietnam was revealed in the press, it caused an immediate firestorm of controversy. People were concerned at the time that we had opened a Pandora's box of evil and we really did not know where it might lead. Ultimately, it led to international embarrassment for the United States and the ratification of the rather toothless ENMOD convention. But if ENMOD was born from abuse, can it be revised and reinvigorated to prevent larger abuses?

In the decades following the ratification of ENMOD, the rhetoric of the meteorological community emphasized scientific internationalism and the free exchange of data and information, even as much of its funding continued to flow from cold war military sources. The showcase international research collaboration of the 1980s, the Global Atmospheric Research Programme, served the dual needs of the U.S. world-spanning military.
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After the collapse of communism, the U.S. national laboratories, showcases for the talents of weapons scientists, suddenly became “greener,” providing a boost to Edward Teller's ongoing program of training atmospheric scientists, many of them armed with basic physics and access to military funding and hardware, hell-bent on “fixing the sky.”
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After 2001, classified meteorological research, funded by the deep pockets of the military and the Department of Homeland Security, was dedicated, for example, to detecting and predicting the spread of plumes of heavier-than-air gases in urban settings, especially Washington, D.C., or to seeking effective chemical sniffers for toxic, explosive, or radiological sources in and around government buildings, airports, train stations, and harbors.

With the reputation of the field of weather control severely tarnished as it is, the military's semi-official public line is “you can't control how the world is changing around you, so you have to be able to control how you react to that change.”
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Spokesmen for this view emphasize training, discipline, and vigilance. The air force will say it is in the business of improving the accuracy and usefulness of its forecasts and its capabilities in general by applying operational risk management techniques to both routine and exceptional weather services. This is true so far as it goes, but there is probably much more that the military simply does not know or cannot say—most likely the latter.

On the other side of the coin are conspiracy theorists who see a toxic cloud on every horizon. Their fears are fueled by statements such as those made in 1997 by Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, who warned of “an eco-type of terrorism whereby [adversaries] can alter the climate, set off earthquakes [and] volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.... It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that's why this is so important.”
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Cohen, known to levitate on occasion, at least rhetorically, was responding, off the cuff, to questions about the possibility of all sorts of
futuristic weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, and his remarks should not be misconstrued. Nevertheless, conspiracy theorists have focused on his words in support of their suspicions that the military is supporting secret geoengineering projects involving directed energy beams, chem trails, or other technologies. The historical record, rather than such speculation, is actually much more revealing—and chilling.

FEARS, FANTASIES, AND POSSIBILITIES OF CONTROL

—JOHN VON NEUMANN, “CAN WE SURVIVE TECHNOLOGY?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CLIMATE
fears, fantasies, and the possibility of global climate control were widely discussed by scientists and in the popular press in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Some chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and, yes, meteorologists tried to “interfere” with natural processes, not with dry ice or silver iodide but with new Promethean possibilities of climate tinkering opened up by the technologies of digital computing, satellite remote sensing, nuclear power, and atmospheric nuclear testing. Aspects of this story involve engineers' pipe dreams of mega-construction projects that would result in an ice-free Arctic Ocean, a well-regulated Mediterranean Sea, or an electrified and well-watered Africa. Pundits also fantasized about engineering the climate and possibly weaponizing it, using, for example, nuclear weapons as triggers. Far from being a heroic story of invention and innovation, global climate control has had, from its first mention in the literature of science fiction, a dark side, hinting at the possibility of global accidents or hostile acts. The warnings of two close scientific associates, John von Neumann (1903–1957) and Harry Wexler (1911–1962), one famous and one as yet relatively unknown, provide a framework for examining such issues. Von Neumann was a mathematician extraordinaire
at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, and a pioneer in the application of digital computing techniques to the problem of numerical weather prediction and climate modeling. It was the dark side of climate control that led von Neumann to ponder the brave new world of such techniques. Wexler was chief of scientific services at the U.S. Weather Bureau. He was instrumental in advancing the agenda for climate modeling and promoted many other new technologies, especially meteorological satellites. It was Wexler who conducted the first serious technical analysis of climate engineering and issued an early warning about the possibilities of climate control. It was the very real possibility of purposeful destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer that led Wexler to spell out, in great technical detail, the dangers of both inadvertent and intentional climate tinkering. The interplay of such technical, scientific, and social issues moves beyond the timeworn origin stories of the modern atmospheric sciences into another dimension, a marketplace of wild ideas, a “Hall of Fantasy” or “Twilight Zone” whose boundaries are that of imagination.

We are apprehensive about climate change, we seek to understand it, and some may seek to stop it. The word “apprehension” signifies several distinct meanings: (1) fear, (2) awareness, and (3) intervention. In
Historical Perspectives on Climate Change
(1998), I examined how people became aware of and sought to understand phenomena in which they were immersed, that covered the entire globe, that had both natural and anthropogenic components, and that changed constantly on a multiplicity of temporal and spatial scales. What do climate scientists know about climate change and how do they know it? By what authority and by what historical pathways have they arrived at this knowledge? How have they established privileged positions? I offered some reflections on the ways such perspectives emerged historically: from appeals to authority, data collection, fundamental physical theory, critical experiments, models (including computer models), new technologies (including space-based observations), to consensus building and the beginnings of coordinated action.

I also examined climate-related fears, including drought, crop failures, volcano weather, apocalyptic visions of the return of the deadly glaciers, and global warming. The cultural geographer Yi-fu Tuan once observed, “To apprehend is to risk apprehensiveness.”
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For much of history, people feared that the powers of evil were active during inclement weather or that when the rains failed to arrive or it rained too much something was terribly wrong with either nature or, more
likely, the social order. Many also saw themselves as agents of climate change. Even in fictional accounts of weather and climate control, much of the dramatic tension is derived from fundamental fears. An incomplete understanding, fueled by fear, may result in ineffective or even dangerous interventions. In the field of climate change, the two main approaches seem to be big technical fixes and social engineering.