Fixing the Sky (29 page)

The next lines in Schaefer's notebook reveal the true excitement of the moment: “I turned to Curt and we shook hands as I said ‘We did it!' Needless to say we were quite excited. The rapidity with which the CO
₂
dispensed from the window seemed to affect the cloud was amazing. It seemed as though it almost exploded the effect was so widespread and rapid.” Later, back at the airport, Langmuir rushed out enthusiastically to congratulate the experimenters, praising the remarkable view from the airport control tower and exclaiming that only minutes after the cloud-seeding run had begun, he had seen long streamers of falling snow pouring out of the base of the cloud more than fifty miles away.

C. Guy Suits, GE vice president and director of research, immediately wrote a memo recommending access to a better airplane, either commercial or military, since the one operated by GE could not fly over 14,000 feet. Demonstrating his easy access to the military, he wrote, “We might want the Army Air Force to give us some help. I think a call to [Major General Curtis E.] LeMay would be helpful in this connection, particularly if [he knows] about the preliminary result of the experiment.”
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The following day, GE told the story in detail, framing it as a triumph of scientific prediction with seemingly limitless practical possibilities: “Schenectady, NY, Nov. 14, 1946—Scientists of the General Electric Company, flying in an airplane over Greylock Mountain in western Massachusetts yesterday, conducted experiments with a cloud three miles long, and were successful in transforming the cloud into snow.”
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Langmuir claimed that this result “completely fulfilled” predictions based on laboratory experiments and calculations. If one pellet of dry ice, “about the size of a pea,” could precipitate several tons of snow, he predicted that “a single plane could generate hundreds of millions of tons of snow” over mountain ski resorts, possibly diverting the snowfall from major cities. Or, depending on conditions, perhaps the seeding technique could be used to clear fogs over airports and harbors or prevent aircraft icing problems. A flurry of news reports followed leaving the lab “snowed under” by hundreds of clippings (figure 5.2). The
New York Times
read, “Three-mile cloud made into snow by dry ice dropped from plane ... opening vista of moisture control by man.” A banner headline in the
Boston Globe
announced, “Snowstorm Manufactured.”
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Louis Gathman and August Veraart rolled over in their graves.

Letters, postcards, and telegrams flooded in, too. One of them asked for indoor snow for a Christmas pageant to replace the white corn flakes used the previous year; another asked for artificial snow for a college winter carnival; and a ski operator seeking market advantage asked for advice. A search-and-rescue operation on Mount Rainier urgently asked GE to clear out the clouds so the team might be able to spot a downed aircraft. Movie producers requested tailor-made blizzards.
A Los Angeles air pollution officer wrote to Schaefer, asking him for advice on how to clear the air over the city. The chairman of the Kansas State Chamber of Commerce sent a telegram to President Harry Truman, asking for relief of the drought conditions using GE technology. This stimulated a reply from Francis W. Reichelderfer, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, to the effect that dry ice seeding worked only in special circumstances, and even then the results were controversial, since no one had established a method to determine how much was caused by human intervention and how much by natural processes. A cane sugar producer in Hawaii wrote that he, too, had tried, in 1941, to make it rain, cooling the clouds by launching slabs of dry ice into the valley fog from a huge slingshot on the mountain summit. Since he was working with warm clouds, he would have needed an enormous amount of dry ice. A newspaper editorial wondered if GE would be forming a “snow cartel” to sell us a white Christmas.
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5.2 Avalanche of news articles received by General Electric after press releases of November 13 and 14, 1946. (SCHAEFER PAPERS)

An extremely optimistic announcement of progress in weather modification appeared in the
General Electric Annual Report
for 1947: “Further experiments
in weather control led to a new knowledge which, it is believed now, will result in
inestimable
benefits for mankind.”
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When one of Schaefer's cloud-seeding attempts coincided with an 8-inch snowfall in upstate New York—earlier the weather bureau had forecast “fair and warmer”—Langmuir was quick to claim that cloud seeding had “triggered” the storm. Cloud seeding was becoming a controversial issue, and Langmuir's exaggerated claims threatened to take the company into litigious territory, far beyond the limits of normal corporate support for research.
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On November 18, 1946, just three days after the public learned about cloud seeding, Simeon H. F. Goldstein, an insurance broker in New York City, wrote to General Electric warning of the need for liability coverage and offering insurance services “to protect your Company against lawsuits for bodily injury and property damage resulting from artificial snowstorms produced at your direction”:

GE lawyers, fearing a deluge of property damage and personal inconvenience suits, immediately tried to silence Langmuir and his team. Langmuir and Schaefer, however, were riding high on a wave of publicity. They were both outspoken, enthusiastic promoters and popularizers of large-scale weather control. But Langmuir had extra clout and flaunted his Nobel laureate status. In the press and before the meteorological community, Langmuir repeatedly expounded his sensational vision of large-scale weather control and even climate control, with possible military implications. It was beginning to get pathological.
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In February 1947, General Electric research director Suits hurriedly called a halt to outdoor experimentation on cloud seeding and instructed Langmuir's team
to serve only as advisers on Project Cirrus, a new classified cloud-seeding effort to be conducted by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the Office of Naval Research, and the U.S. Air Force. As stated in the GE contract, the general purposes of the project were “research study of cloud particles and cloud modifications” by seeding, including investigations of liquid water content, particle sizes and distribution, and vertical cloud development.
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They were searching for fundamental knowledge of cloud physics and chemistry to improve operational forecasting as well as practical techniques of cloud modification for military purposes or possible economic development.
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An important clause in the contract further stipulated that “the entire flight program shall be conducted by the government, using exclusively government personnel and equipment, and shall be under the exclusive control of such government personnel.” Suits notified his staff that “it is essential that all of the GE employees who are working on the project refrain from asserting any control
or
direction over the flight program. The GE research laboratory responsibility is confined
strictly
to laboratory work and reports.”
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GE argued that the whole matter properly belonged to the government, and that the government, by suitable legislation, should both regulate the inducing of rainfall and indemnify for loss any contractor acting on the government's behalf—especially themselves. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal asked Congress for a law “to protect contractors engaged in cloud modification experiments against claims for damages by third parties,”
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but no such legislation was forthcoming. The
Harvard Law School Record
reported:

Between 1947 and 1952, Project Cirrus conducted about 250 experiments involving modification of cold cirrus and stratus clouds, warm and cold cumulus clouds, periodic seeding, forest fire suppression, and a notable attempt to modify a hurricane. Researchers in the project developed a suite of modern techniques applicable to cloud physics, including instruments for measuring temperatures and cloud properties in flight, collecting cloud droplets and ice crystals, and generating artificial nuclei.
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Military aircraft (a B-17, later a B-29, and eventually as many as six planes) equipped with seeding devices, new instrumentation, and camera equipment operated over a 1,000-square-mile restricted flight area just
north of the Schenectady airport, where the team was based. Under the auspices of Project Cirrus, Langmuir consulted with cloud seeders in Central America and corresponded with cloud seeders in Hawaii who were seeking to generate rainfall from warm convective clouds. This stimulated Langmuir's thinking about possible chain reactions in cumulus clouds seeded by as little as a single drop of water. Although the Project Cirrus staff collected and analyzed mountains of photographic and other data, the response of the atmosphere to seeding was erratic and the researchers could not obtain any definitive measures of the efficacy of artificial nucleating agents. The results from several experimental runs were spectacular, however, and the Department of Defense decided to expand the work of Project Cirrus to include rain enhancement experiments in New Mexico, forest fire suppression trials in New England, liquid water seeding of warm clouds in Puerto Rico, and hurricane modification in the Atlantic Ocean.
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One parallel study, the joint Air Force–Weather Bureau Cloud Physics Research Project, found that seeding did indeed produce striking visual changes in clouds, including dissipation of cold stratus decks. However, experiments with clouds over Ohio in 1948 and over California and the Gulf states in 1949 led the researchers to conclude that cloud seeding could not initiate self-propagating storms or relieve drought. The weather bureau spent $85,000 on the project in 1948 and $100,000 in 1949, with the air force supplying aircraft, personnel, and ground radar facilities.
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In October 1947, GE announced that Project Cirrus would be intercepting a hurricane, not to “bust” it but to experiment on the effects of seeding with dry ice on a portion of a storm. Atlantic tropical storm number eight, unofficially dubbed Hurricane King, had just made a devastating pass over southern Florida and was churning in the Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles northeast of Orlando. It was expected to head farther out to sea. On October 13, the Project Cirrus team, led by navy lieutenant commander Daniel Rex and accompanied by Schaefer, bombed the heart of the storm with 80 pounds of dry ice and dropped 100 pounds more into two embedded convective towers.

The newspapers initially reported that the task force had “attacked” the storm in a “hurricane-busting” effort to reduce its winds or redirect it. It was reported in the press as “history's first assault by man on a tropical storm,” an experiment with energies of nature far greater than those unleashed by the atomic bomb.
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The official results were classified as military secrets, and Schaefer told the press
that he was “not allowed to say” whether the seeding had had any visual effects.
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Commander Rex's official report, not yet released, claimed a pronounced modification of the cloud deck that had been seeded. What happened after that, according to Langmuir, “nobody knows,” since Hurricane King made a “hairpin” turn and headed west, smashing into the coast along the Georgia–South Carolina border near Savannah (figure 5.3). In Charleston, a tree fell, killing one person, and the storm caused more than $23 million in damage during its second landfall.
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A letter in a St. Petersburg newspaper from J. M. Enders and addressed to GE research director Suits placed the blame for the devastation on “the weather tinkers of your lab” and pointed out that the people of Savannah were not so sure it was a coincidence. In fact, they were “pretty sore at the army and navy for fooling around with the hurricane.”
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