Watching Government: Manipulating climate

Oct. 18, 2010
The global climate-change debate has raised several serious questions. Geoengineering will not provide the right answer, warns James R. Fleming, a science and technology professor at Colby College in Waterville, Me.

Nick Snow

The global climate-change debate has raised several serious questions. Geoengineering will not provide the right answer, warns James R. Fleming, a science and technology professor at Colby College in Waterville, Me.

"It's untested and dangerous," Fleming said during an Oct. 6 presentation at the Woodrow Wilson Center International Center for Scholars, where he was a 2006-07 policy fellow. "We don't understand it, we can't test it on smaller than planetary scales, and we don't have the political capital, wisdom, or will to govern it."

Fleming was there to discuss his new book, "Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control," which describes government and other efforts to manage climate.

These have ranged from cloud seeding in West Texas to the Chinese government firing chemicals from 30,000 cannons skyward to improve weather for the 2008 Summer Olympics, he said.

But it's hardly a new idea. In 1839, James Espy, the US government's first meteorologist, proposed lighting massive fires to make rain. "He proposed lighting fires from Maine to Georgia each Sunday night to improve rainfall east of the Appalachians," Fleming said.

More recently, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, the US and Soviet governments tried to create storms for military purposes, he continued. "There actually was a weather race, like the space and arms races," he said. "There was a 'we'll try anything' sense in the experiments up there."

An abrupt turn

In one instance in 1947, US scientists successfully intensified an Atlantic storm, which they thought was headed into the open ocean, to hurricane strength. Then they watched in horror as it abruptly turned left and made landfall near Savannah, Ga.

"We often confuse intervention with control," said Fleming. "There are predictable side effects. Where they'll happen is unpredictable."

The 1978 United Nations environmental modification treaty prohibits such actions, he noted. It has been revisited twice since: in 1984, when its scope was expanded and the threshold for violations reduced, and in 1992 after the Persian Gulf War when it was expanded again to cover herbicides and low technology actions.

Weather manipulation nevertheless lurks at the global climate policy debate's edge as a way to buy time while national governments find effective methods to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Geoengineering is being promoted as a "Plan B," according to Fleming. "I'm not sure it's a plan at all," he observed.

Instead, he suggested, "we should convene on a middle path of accelerated mitigation, accelerated efficiency, and accelerated adaptation. I'd like to place our bets on resilience, adaptation, and efforts to change how we use energy."

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