Don't like the weather? Change it
The weird science of weather modification makes a comeback
Strange weather
Pop-up Strange weather
GLOBAL COOLING: To counteract global warming, John Latham of the
National Center for Atmospheric Research has proposed a system of
enormous eggbeater-like turbines that would stir up seawater,
thickening the cloud cover to reflect more of the sun's energy back
into space. (Photo / Stephen Salter)
By Drake Bennett | July 3, 2005
In the summer of 1930, George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes, a
self-professed ''minister of Zoroastrianism" and flat-earther (his
calculations put the sun's distance from Earth at 3,300 miles), was
hired by the Westchester Racing Association to ensure good weather for
the horse races at Belmont Park. As described by historian Clark C.
Spence in ''The Rainmakers" (1980), the contract promised Sykes $1,000
for every dry day during a week in early September, but required him
to pay back twice that for every wet one.
For seven days Sykes's device--a jalopic pile of wire, antennae, jars
of colored water, old radio sets, a vase, an electric heater and a toy
propeller--was blessed by sun. But the following Saturday, after his
contract was extended, the rains came. And when Sykes, looking to
outwit fate, promised more rain two days later, the appointed day
instead passed dry.
At press time, the National Weather Service was predicting a sunny
July 4th in Boston, with temperatures in the low 80s. Still, it would
be nice to be sure, wouldn't it? Seventy-five years after Doc Sykes's
Belmost lucky streak ended in disgrace, the weather still resists our
best efforts at prediction, much less control.
Not that this has stopped us from trying. Recent years have seen a
growing interest not merely in forecasting, but in the seemingly
fanciful prospect of customizing the weather. In 2003 the National
Academy of Sciences recommended ''a coordinated national program" to
''conduct a sustained research effort" into weather modification.
Politicians in Western and Southwestern states are funding attempts to
tickle more moisture out of the clouds, and this March, Senator Kay
Bailey Hutchison of Texas introduced a bill to create a national
Weather Modification Operations and Research Board.
Last fall, a meteorologist named Ross Hoffman suggested in Scientific
American that a network of microwave-beaming satellites could
literally take the wind out of hurricanes. In some of the driest parts
of Mexico, a Bedford-based company called Ionogenics is testing a
rainmaking apparatus that uses an array of steel poles to ionize the
air. China, a country with widespread cloud seeding, has announced
plans to engineer clear weather in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.
Meanwhile, deepening concern over the possibly cataclysmic effects of
climate change has spurred a number of recent proposals, some sketched
out in considerable detail, to engineer a measure of counteractive
cooling. John Latham, an atmospheric physicist at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., has proposed increasing
the reflectivity of the cloud cover by stirring up water va**** from
the ocean with a fleet of giant egg-beater-like turbines. A few years
ago, a team led by the late Edward Teller suggested creating a similar
effect by launching a million tons of tiny aluminum balloons into the
atmosphere. The Teller team also revived a proposal, last explored in
the early 1990s, to build an adjustable 2,000-kilometer-wide mirror in
space to deflect some of the sun's energy before it reaches
us.Continued...
July 3, 2005
In the summer of 1930, George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes, a
self-professed ''minister of Zoroastrianism" and flat-earther (his
calculations put the sun's distance from Earth at 3,300 miles), was
hired by the Westchester Racing Association to ensure good weather for
the horse races at Belmont Park. As described by historian Clark C.
Spence in ''The Rainmakers" (1980), the contract promised Sykes $1,000
for every dry day during a week in early September, but required him
to pay back twice that for every wet one.
For seven days Sykes's device--a jalopic pile of wire, antennae, jars
of colored water, old radio sets, a vase, an electric heater and a toy
propeller--was blessed by sun. But the following Saturday, after his
contract was extended, the rains came. And when Sykes, looking to
outwit fate, promised more rain two days later, the appointed day
instead passed dry.
At press time, the National Weather Service was predicting a sunny
July 4th in Boston, with temperatures in the low 80s. Still, it would
be nice to be sure, wouldn't it? Seventy-five years after Doc Sykes's
Belmost lucky streak ended in disgrace, the weather still resists our
best efforts at prediction, much less control.
Not that this has stopped us from trying. Recent years have seen a
growing interest not merely in forecasting, but in the seemingly
fanciful prospect of customizing the weather. In 2003 the National
Academy of Sciences recommended ''a coordinated national program" to
''conduct a sustained research effort" into weather modification.
Politicians in Western and Southwestern states are funding attempts to
tickle more moisture out of the clouds, and this March, Senator Kay
Bailey Hutchison of Texas introduced a bill to create a national
Weather Modification Operations and Research Board.
Last fall, a meteorologist named Ross Hoffman suggested in Scientific
American that a network of microwave-beaming satellites could
literally take the wind out of hurricanes. In some of the driest parts
of Mexico, a Bedford-based company called Ionogenics is testing a
rainmaking apparatus that uses an array of steel poles to ionize the
air. China, a country with widespread cloud seeding, has announced
plans to engineer clear weather in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.
Meanwhile, deepening concern over the possibly cataclysmic effects of
climate change has spurred a number of recent proposals, some sketched
out in considerable detail, to engineer a measure of counteractive
cooling. John Latham, an atmospheric physicist at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., has proposed increasing
the reflectivity of the cloud cover by stirring up water va**** from
the ocean with a fleet of giant egg-beater-like turbines. A few years
ago, a team led by the late Edward Teller suggested creating a similar
effect by launching a million tons of tiny aluminum balloons into the
atmosphere. The Teller team also revived a proposal, last explored in
the early 1990s, to build an adjustable 2,000-kilometer-wide mirror in
space to deflect some of the sun's energy before it reaches us.
Page 2 of 4 --
To be sure, within the meteorological establishment the enthusiasm for
weather modification is far from universal. And climate engineering--
the alteration of global, rather than local, weather systems--remains
purely theoretical. Still, after decades of disfavor, such ideas are
getting a second look. As our ability to comprehend the weather
improves and as the threat of climate change looms larger, some
scientists are ready to brave the uncertainty and tangled ethics of
tinkering with the skies.
In 1946, over Mount Greylock in western Massachusetts, a General
Electric research chemist named Vincent Schaefer scattered three
pounds of crushed dry ice out of an airplane into a cloud and set off
a snow flurry. It was the world's first successful cloud seeding--
later that year, the meteorologist Bernard Vonnegut (brother to the
novelist) discovered that silver iodide smoke had a similar effect--
and weather modification emerged from the realm of con men and
eccentrics. Most meteorologists remained skeptical, but by 1951, 10
percent of the United States was under commercial cloud seeding.
''Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters on any desired
scale" was only decades away, predicted John von Neumann, the
mathematician who helped invent and began programming the first
electronic computers to model the weather.
Over the next 30 years, the federal government spent hundreds of
millions of dollars on projects all over the country to increase
precipitation, to mitigate hailstorms (an age-old enemy of farmers),
and, most successfully, to clear the fog from around air****ts. Perhaps
the era's most ambitious endeavor was Project Stormfury, which sent up
airplanes to seed the eye walls of hurricanes with silver iodide to
weaken the winds before landfall.
The US military, unsurprisingly, was intrigued by the possibility of a
godlike meteorological arsenal. According to Spencer Weart, a
physicist and historian of science at the American Institute of
Physics, the thinking in the Defense Department was ''maybe we'll give
the Russians a real Cold War, or maybe they'll give us one, so we
should be ready." Pentagon money funded much of the era's climate
research, helping to create the weather models we now use in
forecasting. War gamers dreamed up climatological warfare scenarios
like laying down a blanket of fog over an airfield or visiting drought
upon an enemy's breadbasket.
One plan even made it off the drawing board. From 1966 to 1972, under
the code name Project Popeye, the US Air Force flew thousands of cloud-
seeding sorties over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, hoping to muddy it into
impassability. (While there's some evidence that rain did increase,
it's unclear what difference this made on the ground.) When the
details of the plan surfaced in the press, the public outcry led to an
international treaty banning ''Military or any other hostile use of
environmental modification techniques
July 3, 2005
In the summer of 1930, George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes, a
self-professed ''minister of Zoroastrianism" and flat-earther (his
calculations put the sun's distance from Earth at 3,300 miles), was
hired by the Westchester Racing Association to ensure good weather for
the horse races at Belmont Park. As described by historian Clark C.
Spence in ''The Rainmakers" (1980), the contract promised Sykes $1,000
for every dry day during a week in early September, but required him
to pay back twice that for every wet one.
For seven days Sykes's device--a jalopic pile of wire, antennae, jars
of colored water, old radio sets, a vase, an electric heater and a toy
propeller--was blessed by sun. But the following Saturday, after his
contract was extended, the rains came. And when Sykes, looking to
outwit fate, promised more rain two days later, the appointed day
instead passed dry.
At press time, the National Weather Service was predicting a sunny
July 4th in Boston, with temperatures in the low 80s. Still, it would
be nice to be sure, wouldn't it? Seventy-five years after Doc Sykes's
Belmost lucky streak ended in disgrace, the weather still resists our
best efforts at prediction, much less control.
Not that this has stopped us from trying. Recent years have seen a
growing interest not merely in forecasting, but in the seemingly
fanciful prospect of customizing the weather. In 2003 the National
Academy of Sciences recommended ''a coordinated national program" to
''conduct a sustained research effort" into weather modification.
Politicians in Western and Southwestern states are funding attempts to
tickle more moisture out of the clouds, and this March, Senator Kay
Bailey Hutchison of Texas introduced a bill to create a national
Weather Modification Operations and Research Board.
Last fall, a meteorologist named Ross Hoffman suggested in Scientific
American that a network of microwave-beaming satellites could
literally take the wind out of hurricanes. In some of the driest parts
of Mexico, a Bedford-based company called Ionogenics is testing a
rainmaking apparatus that uses an array of steel poles to ionize the
air. China, a country with widespread cloud seeding, has announced
plans to engineer clear weather in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.
Meanwhile, deepening concern over the possibly cataclysmic effects of
climate change has spurred a number of recent proposals, some sketched
out in considerable detail, to engineer a measure of counteractive
cooling. John Latham, an atmospheric physicist at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., has proposed increasing
the reflectivity of the cloud cover by stirring up water va**** from
the ocean with a fleet of giant egg-beater-like turbines. A few years
ago, a team led by the late Edward Teller suggested creating a similar
effect by launching a million tons of tiny aluminum balloons into the
atmosphere. The Teller team also revived a proposal, last explored in
the early 1990s, to build an adjustable 2,000-kilometer-wide mirror in
space to deflect some of the sun's energy before it reaches us.
To be sure, within the meteorological establishment the enthusiasm for
weather modification is far from universal. And climate engineering--
the alteration of global, rather than local, weather systems--remains
purely theoretical. Still, after decades of disfavor, such ideas are
getting a second look. As our ability to comprehend the weather
improves and as the threat of climate change looms larger, some
scientists are ready to brave the uncertainty and tangled ethics of
tinkering with the skies.
.. . .
In 1946, over Mount Greylock in western Massachusetts, a General
Electric research chemist named Vincent Schaefer scattered three
pounds of crushed dry ice out of an airplane into a cloud and set off
a snow flurry. It was the world's first successful cloud seeding--
later that year, the meteorologist Bernard Vonnegut (brother to the
novelist) discovered that silver iodide smoke had a similar effect--
and weather modification emerged from the realm of con men and
eccentrics. Most meteorologists remained skeptical, but by 1951, 10
percent of the United States was under commercial cloud seeding.
''Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters on any desired
scale" was only decades away, predicted John von Neumann, the
mathematician who helped invent and began programming the first
electronic computers to model the weather.
Over the next 30 years, the federal government spent hundreds of
millions of dollars on projects all over the country to increase
precipitation, to mitigate hailstorms (an age-old enemy of farmers),
and, most successfully, to clear the fog from around air****ts. Perhaps
the era's most ambitious endeavor was Project Stormfury, which sent up
airplanes to seed the eye walls of hurricanes with silver iodide to
weaken the winds before landfall.
The US military, unsurprisingly, was intrigued by the possibility of a
godlike meteorological arsenal. According to Spencer Weart, a
physicist and historian of science at the American Institute of
Physics, the thinking in the Defense Department was ''maybe we'll give
the Russians a real Cold War, or maybe they'll give us one, so we
should be ready." Pentagon money funded much of the era's climate
research, helping to create the weather models we now use in
forecasting. War gamers dreamed up climatological warfare scenarios
like laying down a blanket of fog over an airfield or visiting drought
upon an enemy's breadbasket.
One plan even made it off the drawing board. From 1966 to 1972, under
the code name Project Popeye, the US Air Force flew thousands of cloud-
seeding sorties over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, hoping to muddy it into
impassability. (While there's some evidence that rain did increase,
it's unclear what difference this made on the ground.) When the
details of the plan surfaced in the press, the public outcry led to an
international treaty banning ''Military or any other hostile use of
environmental modification techniques."
Page 3 of 4 --
But the grandest climate engineering schemes came from the Soviet
Union. The most Promethean among them was a late 1950s proposal to dam
the Bering Strait and, by pumping water from the Arctic Ocean into the
Pacific, draw warm water northward from the Atlantic to melt the polar
ice pack, making the Arctic Ocean navigable and warming Siberia. The
leading Soviet climatologist, Mikhail I. Budyko, cautioned against it,
arguing that the ultimate effects were too difficult to predict
(though he himself had played with the idea of warming the Arctic by
covering it in soot to decrease its reflectivity). John F. Kennedy, as
a presidential candidate, suggested the United States look into
collaborating on the project.
While the two countries continued desultory discussions of the Bering
Strait plan into the 1970s, the American government was by then losing
interest in the whole field of weather modification. After years of
increases, federal research money was cut sharply in 1973. Commercial
cloud seeding continued, and a few states maintained their own cloud
seeding programs, but over the next decade federal research funding
effectively dropped to zero.
The problem, in part, was that there was no consensus on the efficacy
of cloud seeding, the focus of almost all research up to that point.
Study after study had been inconclusive. ''The government had put a
lot of money into it and they hadn't been able to prove a damn thing,"
says Weart.
The change in the political climate, however, wasn't simply the result
of scientific failures. Chunglin Kwa, a historian of science at the
University of Amsterdam and one of the few scholars to study the
history of weather modification in depth, writes that, when it fell
out of public favor, the field had ''existed for most of its history
with little clear evidence that rainmaking and hurricane abatement
worked, but there was equally little clear evidence that it did not."
Many meteorologists, he notes, argued that research deserved further
funding.
What had changed, Kwa argues, were attitudes, especially American
ones, about technology, risk, and nature. ''There was the development
of an attitude to not mess with Mother Nature," he said in an
interview. With the growth of the environmental movement in the 1970s
and 1980s came a conviction that human beings were foolishly tempting
fate by trying to impose their will on nature, whether by damming up
rivers or tapping the clouds. Environmentalists enlisted mounting
signs of our unintentional weather modification--clear-cutting
forests, for example, decreases rainfall, while smokestacks increase
it--to argue that humanity was already disrupting the balance of
nature.
The threat, in other words, wasn't that weather modification would
fail but that it would work--a concern that still shapes the debate.
''There's a real sense that the climate system is complicated enough
that if you start messing around with it you're likely to get an
outcome you didn't expect," says Edward Boyle, a professor of ocean
geochemistry at MIT.
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