Fixing the Sky (37 page)

In 1955 in a prominent article titled “Can We Survive Technology?” von Neumann referred to climate control as a thoroughly “abnormal” industry. He thought that weather control using chemical agents and climate control through modifying surface albedo or otherwise managing solar radiation were distinct possibilities for the near future. He argued that such intervention could have “rather fantastic effects” on a scale difficult to imagine. He pointed out that it was not necessarily rational to alter the climate of specific regions or purposely trigger a new ice age. Tinkering with the Earth's heat budget or the atmosphere's general circulation “will merge each nation's affairs with those of every other more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war may already have done.” In his opinion, climate control, like other “intrinsically useful” modern technologies, could lend itself to unprecedented destruction and to forms of warfare as yet unimagined. Climate manipulation could alter the entire globe and shatter the existing political order. He made the Janus-faced nature of weather and climate control clear. The central question was not “What can we do?” but “What should we do?” This was the “maturing crisis of technology,” a crisis made more urgent by the rapidity of progress.

Banning particular technologies was not the answer for von Neumann. Perhaps, he thought, war could be eliminated as a means of national policy. Yet he ultimately deemed survival only a “possibility,” since elements of future conflict existed then, as today, while the means of destruction grew ever more powerful and was reaching the global level.

In Baconian terms, do we consider climate to be based on the unconstrained operations of nature, now modified inadvertently by human activities, or do we seek to engineer climate, constrain it, and mold it to our will? Certainly, the ubiquity and scale of indoor air-conditioning could not have been imagined less than a century ago, but what about fixing the sky itself? In attempting to do so, we run the risk of violently rending the bonds of nature and unleashing unintended side effects or purposely calculated destruction. After all, von Neumann identified frenetic “progress” as a key contributor to the maturing crisis of technology. Fumbling for an ultimate solution, but falling well short, he suggested that the brightest prospects for survival lay in patience, flexibility, intelligence, humility, dedication, oversight, sacrifice—and a healthy dose of good luck.
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Global climate control has a history rooted in the quest for perfectly accurate machine forecasts and supported by the dream of perfectly accurate data acquisition. Calculating the weather has long been a goal of meteorologists. By the turn of the twentieth century, Felix Exner and Vilhelm Bjerknes had identified the basic equations of atmospheric dynamics. In 1922 Louis Fry Richardson had actually tried to solve the equations numerically with rather poor data and without the use of a computer. Their dreams—to solve the equations of motion for the atmosphere faster than the daily weather develops—were fulfilled with the advent of numerical weather prediction in the 1950s. This story has been told often, always as a heroic saga—a quest to do what no one has ever done before. Kristine Harper is the latest in a long line of historians and meteorologists to illuminate the “genesis” of modern meteorology, its “exodus” from weather bureau captivity, and its arrival at the edge of a “promised land” of digital computer modeling.
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As complex (and familiar, at least in outline) as this story might be, there is nevertheless a story as yet untold, a darker tale of digital climate modeling, prediction, and control.

Just after World War II, in October 1945, Vladimir K. Zworykin, associate research director at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, wrote his influential but now all but forgotten mimeographed “Outline of Weather Proposal” (figure 7.1). He began by discussing the importance to meteorology of accurate prediction, which he thought was entering a new era. Modern communication systems were beginning to allow the systematic compilation of scattered and remote observations, and, he hoped, new computing equipment would be developed that could solve the equations of atmospheric motion, or at least search quickly for statistical regularities and past analog weather conditions. He imagined “an automatic plotting board” that would instantly digest and display all this information.

Zworykin suggested that “exact scientific weather knowledge” might allow for effective weather control. If a perfectly accurate machine could be developed that could predict the immediate future state of the atmosphere and identify the precise time and location of leverage points or locations sensitive to rapid storm development, effective intervention might be possible. A paramilitary rapid-deployment force might then be sent to intervene in the weather as it happened—literally to pour oil on troubled ocean waters or use physical barriers, giant flame throwers, or even atomic bombs to disrupt storms before they formed, deflect them from populated areas, and otherwise control the weather. Zworykin suggested a study of the origins and tracks of hurricanes, with a view to their
prediction, prevention, and even diversion. Long-term climatic changes might be engineered by large-scale geographical modification projects involving such climatically sensitive areas as deserts, glaciers, and mountainous regions. In effect, numerical experimentation using computer models would guide field experiments and interventions in both weather and climate. According to Zworykin,

7.1 Cover of Vladimir K. Zworykin's “Outline of Weather Proposal,” October 1945. (WEXLER PAPERS)

Zworykin's proposal gained a powerful formal endorsement when von Neumann attached a letter to it dated October 24, 1945, stating: “I agree with you completely. ... This would provide a basis for scientific approach[es] to influencing the weather.” Using computer-generated predictions, von Neumann envisioned that weather and climate systems “could be controlled, or at least directed,
by the release of perfectly practical amounts of energy” or by “altering the absorption and reflection properties of the ground or the sea or the atmosphere.” It was a project that neatly fit von Neumann's overall agenda and philosophy: “All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.”
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Zworykin's proposal also contained a long endorsement by the oceanographer Athelstan Spilhaus, then a U.S. Army major, who ended his letter of November 6, 1945, with these words: “In weather control, meteorology has a new goal worthy of its greatest efforts.”
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Complicating the picture at the time were suggestions about the use of atomic weapons for climate control and announcements of new discoveries in cloud seeding. In 1945 the prominent scientist-humanist Julian Huxley, then head of UNESCO, had spoken to an audience of 20,000 at an arms control conference at Madison Square Garden about the possibilities of using nuclear weapons as “atomic dynamite” for “landscaping the Earth” or perhaps using them to change the climate by dissolving the polar ice cap. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on record as advocating the use of atomic bombs for “cracking the Antarctic icebox” to gain access to its known mineral deposits.
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“Sarnoff Predicts Weather Control” read the headline on the front page of the
New York Times
on October 1, 1946. The previous evening, at his testimonial dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, RCA president Brigadier General David Sarnoff had speculated on worthy peaceful projects for the postwar era. Among them were “transformations of deserts into gardens through diversion of ocean currents,” a technique that could also be reversed in time of war to turn fertile lands into deserts, and ordering “rain or sunshine by pressing radio buttons,”
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an accomplishment that, Sarnoff declared, would require a World Weather Bureau in charge of global forecasting and control (much like the Weather Distributing Administration proposed in 1938). A commentator in the
New Yorker
intuited the problems with such control. “Who,” in this civil service outfit, he asked, “would decide whether a day was to be sunny, rainy, overcast ... or enriched by a stimulating blizzard?” It would be “some befuddled functionary,” probably bedeviled by special interests such as the raincoat and galoshes manufacturers, the beachwear and sunburn lotion industries, and resort owners and farmers. Or if a storm was to be diverted, “Detour it where? Out to sea, to hit some ship with no influence in Washington?”
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Recall that all this was just one month before the General Electric Corporation announced the news of Vincent Schaefer's cloud-seeding exploits and Irving
Langmuir began making his fantastic claims about weather control. But such notions are still around. In 2009 a fantastic proposal was floated for just such a bureau or administration to implement regional-scale geoengineering—in the Arctic, in certain ocean regions, or for certain storms—to attempt to moderate specific climate change impacts.
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In the era of cloud seeding, von Neumann and Zworykin, especially the latter, continued to feed public speculation about control. In January 1947, both men spoke in New York at a joint session of the American Meteorological Society and the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences, chaired by incoming AMS president Henry G. Houghton. Von Neumann's talk, “Future Uses of High Speed Computing in Meteorology,” was followed by Zworykin's much more controversial “Discussion of the Possibility of Weather Control.” According to the
New York Times
: “Hurricanes may be dispersed, Dr. Zworykin said, and rain may be made, first through the speed which an electronic computer now approaching completion can synthesize all elements in weather problems, and second, through application of energy in small doses from spreads of blazing oil to heat critical portions of the atmosphere or blackened-over areas to cool them.”
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Zworykin focused on “trigger” mechanisms such as artificial fogs or even cloud seeding as examples of adding small amounts of energy to cause enormous effects, claiming that the missing ingredient was not the techniques but how to “make the most of our weather information mathematically.” A follow-up story the next day ended with the comment “If Dr. Zworykin is right the weather-makers of the future are the inventors of calculating machines.”
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Most scientists thought this speculation was premature. Wexler and a colleague who dined at Zworykin's home discussed weather control with him, including techniques such as igniting oil on the sea surface to redirect hurricanes, but Wexler indicated that Zworykin's views “were not shared by most tropical meteorologists.”
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The distinguished oceanographer Harald U. Sverdrup at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was not convinced by Zworykin's claim that “the underlying general physical principles governing weather behavior are mostly well understood.” Regarding weather control, he wrote: “It seems that only in rare cases can we expect to know the initial conditions in sufficient detail to predict the consequences of a ‘trigger action.'”
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Yet talk of triggers was something the military understood. In a 1947 fund-raising speech presented at the annual alumni dinner at MIT, General George C. Kenney, commander of the Strategic Air Command, speaking of future weapons systems, asserted: “If rain could be kept from falling where it has been falling for ages,” it is conceivable that “the nation which first learns to plot the paths of air masses accurately and learns to control the time and place of precipitation will
dominate the globe.”
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He urged MIT to look into this, suggesting a multimilliondollar research program.

That spring, Martin Mann, an associate editor of
Popular Science Monthly
, sent a draft of his article “War Against Hail,” to von Neumann for corrections. The article began with a declaration of war against hail, announcing that the army would soon be using Schaefer's cloud-seeding techniques in its quest for triggers—“With enough triggers, weather could be made to order!”
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Mann then highlighted the quest at the IAS to develop numerical “model experiments,” which he said would reveal additional triggers: