Fixing the Sky (38 page)

Mann had also interviewed Zworykin for the article, citing his opinion that because of the vast energy generated by weather systems, the use of brute-force methods, even nuclear bombs, to divert a hurricane was futile. Zworykin favored smaller “trigger mechanisms” such as modifying the surface of an island in the path of the storm to make it either darker or more reflective and to upset the storm's already shaky balance of forces. Covering an island with a thin layer of carbon black would absorb heat, while generating a white smoke screen would make it more reflective: “These reflecting-absorbing areas would have to be placed in exactly the right spots and used at exactly the right times” (11)—a job for the decision-making power of the digital computer. Pity the poor Caribbean islanders whose tropical paradises would be invaded and possibly brutalized each hurricane season by paramilitary forces trying to save Miami. How could they clean up all the soot? Mann concluded his article by juxtaposing the more proximate goal of hail suppression and the distant goal of climate control. He also contrasted Vincent Schaefer, the Edison-like everyman “who never even finished high school,” and the Princeton eggheads working on a big military–industrial project.

Over five decades later, Ross Hoffman, principal scientist with Atmospheric and Environmental Research, used a little butterfly as a logo in his presentations
to symbolize his notion that chaos theory, developed by his graduate school adviser, Edward Lorenz, might be used to control weather systems such as hurricanes. Since the atmosphere is chaotic and exhibits extreme sensitivity to small changes, he argued, a series of “just right” perturbations might be used to control the weather. Echoing the perennial hope of William Suddards Franklin, who believed in perturbations, and the pathological hype of Irving Langmuir, who advocated control, Hoffman asked us to imagine a world with no droughts, no tornadoes, no snowstorms during rush hour, and no killer hurricanes.

Hoffman proposed an atmospheric controller similar in its characteristics to feedback systems common in many industrial processes. The components of his integrated system included numerical weather prediction (NWP), data assimilation systems, and satellite remote sensing—all part of today's normal meteorological practices. Where Hoffman's system differed was in adding a fourth component, what he called “perturbations,” into natural weather systems to move them off course. These are planned interventions in natural systems that are then to be monitored by remote sensing and modeled via NWP in an endless management loop. He provided examples of global-scale interventions that included changing the altitude and flight paths of airplanes to optimize contrail formation for perturbing solar and infrared radiation, launching reflectors into low Earth orbit to produce bright spots on the night side and shadows on the day side of the Earth, running wind turbines as high-speed fans at a sufficient scale to transfer atmospheric momentum and influence storm tracks, and the pièce de résistance, a space solar power generator that would “downlink microwave energy” to provide a tunable atmospheric heat source—an orbiting death ray to zap hurricanes or anything else in the way.

His goal was not to eliminate hurricanes but just to “control their paths” in order to prevent them from striking population centers. To demonstrate his ideas, Hoffman increased the sea surface temperature by 5°C (9°F) in one quadrant of a computer model of Hurricane Iniki. The model responded by “steering” the storm away from the Hawaiian Islands. Hoffman concluded by gesturing in the direction of legal and ethical questions, asking, “If we can do it, do we want to?”
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Just imagine the lawsuits from those poor folks over whose property Hoffman steers the storm! And isn't “steering” too strong a term to use to describe the result of a chaotic perturbation? Hoffman's effort was supported by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, which funded wild futuristic ideas such as space elevators, robotic asteroid patrols, antimatter propulsion, and genetically modified organisms for terraforming other planets.
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Hoffman cited as his inspiration Arthur C. Clarke's vision of a Global Weather Authority:

But Hoffman also alluded to possible future misuse and militarization. Every prophetic call to “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:4) can be countered by another prophet calling, “Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears” (Joel 3:10).

Hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel has been generally supportive of Hoffman's hurricane control quest: “Weather modification will occur, almost inevitably ... the recent results, that suggest you can do it with a little tiny bit of energy placed in the right place, will prove irresistible, and one can only hope that it is done for the right reasons and to good ends.”
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On another occasion, Emanuel opined: “We might be able to prevent or reduce vulnerability to serious hurricanes by controlling the storm, by reducing its intensity, by steering it out to sea. I don't think it would take very many years to come up with a technology.”
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Recall that it was Emanuel who advanced the dubious notion of taking up Phaethon's reins. In June 2009, Microsoft's Bill Gates announced that he intended to fight hurricanes by manipulating the sea, “draining warm water from the surface to the depths, through a long tube.”
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One commentator on the proposal suggested not to “mess with Mother Nature”; another included the hope that this technique might work better than the Windows operating system!

Vladimir Lenin set the tone for Soviet attitudes toward “the mastery of nature.” According to his philosophy, a new era was dawning through “objectively correct reflection” on independently occurring phenomena and processes embedded in the absolute and eternal laws of nature. Mastery would be manifest in praxis.
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Two decades later, in 1948, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin announced his “Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature,” an ultimately futile attempt to expand the Soviet economy by harnessing nature and controlling the weather and climate.
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Throughout the cold war era, authors from at least nineteen research institutions in the Soviet Union published numerous books, articles, and reports on weather and climate modification.
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Several popularizations of this literature are notable for their geoengineering fantasies. In
Soviet Electric Power
(1956), Arkadii Borisovich Markin outlined the progress of electrification in the Soviet Union and provided a forecast to the year 2000, when, he supposed, electrical power output would be one hundred times greater than at present. Markin gave special emphasis to the future role of nuclear power, including using nuclear explosions for geoengineering purposes:

Such ideas were derived from the Soviet program Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy, which, like Edward Teller's Project Plowshare, proposed techniques to employ nuclear explosives for peaceful construction purposes. Surely, Markin concluded, the Soviet power engineers can achieve “magnificent results” when inspired by the “omnipotence of human genius” (135).

In
Man Versus Climate
(1960), Soviet authors Nikolai Petrovich Rusin and Liya Abramovna Flit surveyed a large number of schemes for climatic tinkering. Invoking a Jules Verne–style fantasy, the book's cover is illustrated by the Earth surrounded by a Saturn-like ring of dust particles intended to illuminate the Arctic Circle, increase solar energy absorption, and ultimately melt the polar ice caps. Chapters in the book are dedicated to mega-engineering projects such as damming the Congo River to electrify Africa and irrigate the Sahara, diverting the Gulf Stream with a causeway off Newfoundland or harnessing it with turbines installed between Florida and Cuba, and, of course, Petr Mikhailovich Borisov's proposal to dam the Bering Strait to divert Atlantic waters into the Pacific and melt the Arctic sea ice. The authors' ultimate goal was to convince the reader “that man can really be the master of this planet and that the future is in his hands.”
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In a much more politically oriented book,
Methods of Climate Control
(1964), Rusin and Flit admitted that “we are merely on the threshold of the conquest of nature,” attributing the nascent ability to control nature to the emergence of the new Soviet man: “Before the Revolution, under the autocracy, nine-tenths of the territory of Russia had not been studied at all. The Soviet man, taking ownership
of the greatest natural wealth, learned not only how to use it, but how to subordinate nature to his will. And now we are not surprised when we learn that a new sea has been developed or the desert has blossomed.”
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Referring to the macro-engineering projects discussed in their earlier book, Rusin and Flit argued that deeper scientific insight into the laws of nature would result in ever more “grandiose” plans for developing immense energy reserves, controlling the flow of rivers, and subjugating permafrost, to name but a few of the advances that they expected. Science was not just about observing and understanding nature; it was about exploiting and controlling it as well. They cited the program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on this: “The progress of science and technology under the conditions of the Socialist system of economy is making it possible to most effectively utilize the wealth and forces of nature for the interests of the people, make available new forms of energy and create new materials, develop methods for the modification of climatic conditions and master space” (3).

I. Adabashev reviewed many of the same projects in his book
Global Engineering
(1966), with his utopian hopes tinged by strong ideological commitments. Concerning the “second Nile” project in Africa, he wrote: “The great new man-made inland seas would transfigure the Sahara ... and create a new climate in Northern Africa.... Millions and millions of fertile acres would be made to yield two and even three crops a year for the benefit of mankind.”
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This would enhance the “struggle of African peoples for national liberation” against the vested interests of American and European capitalists seeking to control the African economy (161). In essence, Adabashev envisioned in the not-too-distant future a new global hydrologic era of gigantic dams and dikes, pumping stations capable of handling entire seas, and other facilities that would “trigger” various meteorological processes. He called it “a better heating system for our planet, better able to serve all the five continents” (201). But with world population and energy needs increasing, why should a visionary engineer stop with the surface of the Earth? Adabashev concluded his book with a fanciful account of a “Dyson sphere,” one astronomical unit in radius, a new home for humanity roughly a trillion times greater than that of the Earth, synthesized from the remains of the outer planets and capturing all the energy of the Sun—solar-powered sustainable development in action—at least for the next 300 million years! For Adabashev, however, implementation of such projects had been delayed by the continued existence of capitalism, which he likened to “a ball and chain hampering man in his progress towards a happier lot” (237).

The idea of melting the Arctic ice cap dates at least to the 1870s, when Harvard geologist Nathaniel Shaler suggested channeling more of the warm Kuroshio Current through the Bering Strait:

In 1912 Carroll Livingston Riker, an engineer, inventor, and industrialist, proposed a scheme to change the climate of polar regions by tinkering with the ocean currents of the Atlantic. This was to be accomplished by preventing the cold Labrador Current from colliding with the Gulf Stream. To do this, he proposed building a 200-mile causeway extending east from Cape Race off the coast of Newfoundland. The theory was that the causeway could be built by suspending a long rope cable, or “Obstructor,” in the ocean that would act to slow the southward flow of the Labrador Current, causing it to deposit its sediment load. Potential benefits of diverting the Gulf Stream farther east (shades of Thomas Jefferson) included fewer fogs and a general warming of northern climates. Riker's proposal was inspired by recently completed mega-projects such as Henry Flagler's railroad bridge from Key West, Florida, to the mainland and the ongoing excavation of the Panama Canal. The tragic sinking of the
Titanic
also lent urgency to his proposal, since his causeway might help remove icebergs from shipping lanes. Riker was supported in Congress by Representative William Musgrave Calder (R-New York), who proposed the creation of a Commission on the Labrador Current and Gulf Stream. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels was not at all convinced by the proposal, but thought that a general survey of the currents of the Grand Banks would be useful.
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