watching it rise

Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson

Well, I’ve been saying this for a number of years: that now we’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write. A lot of what we’re experiencing now is unsurprising because we’ve been prepped for it by science fiction. But I don’t think surrealism is the right way to put it. Surrealism is so often a matter of dreamscapes, of things becoming more than real – and, as a result, more sublime. You think, maybe, of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and the way that he sees these giant catastrophes as a release from our current social set-up: catastrophe and disaster are aestheticized and looked at as a miraculous salvation from our present reality. But it wouldn’t really be like that.
– Kim Stanley Robinson

Following up on a recent NASA conference on very large scale geoengineering solutions to global warming, James Fleming gives us a fascinating history of weather manipulation (pdf with images, plain text html) including this example of an 1891 attempt to bomb the weather into submission:

Two decades later, the publication of the second edition of Powers’s book coincided with a severe and prolonged western drought, prompting a congressional appropriation of $10,000 for a series of field experiments. Secretary of Agriculture Jeremiah Rusk, nominally in charge of both this project and the newly formed U.S. Weather Bureau, chose as the lead investigator Robert St. George Dyrenforth, a flamboyant patent lawyer from Washington, D.C., who possessed no scientific or military experience. Dyrenforth arrived in Texas in August during a severe drought, but also conveniently at the traditional (and commonly noted) onset of the Texas rainy season. He brought an arsenal of explosives, including bombs, cannon, and hydrogen balloons, to be detonated at various altitudes, and engaged in what one observer called “a beautiful imitation of a battle.”

After several months of assaults on the heavens, it did indeed rain. Dyrenforth claimed victory, concluding that his practical skills, combined with his use of special explosives “to keep the weather in an unsettled condition,” could cause or at least enhance ­pre­cipitation—­when conditions were favorable! He warned that bombarding the sky in dry weather, however, would be fruitless, since his technique could stimulate clouds and precipitation but not create ­them.

The Nation, which criticized the government for wasting tax dollars, observed that the effect of the explosion of a 10-foot hydrogen balloon on aerial currents would be less than “the effect of the jump of one vigorous flea upon a ­thousand-­ton steamship running at a speed of twenty knots.” But if there is one lesson from the long history of efforts to modify the weather and climate, it is that neither ­common­sense criticism nor flops deter ­geoengineers.
– James R. Fleming in The Wilson Quarterly

Throughout the article Fleming illustrates that efforts to modify the weather that have been tried have been essentially ineffectual, that the research has (predictably) been often driven by military desires, and that proposals for geoengineering solutions have largely ignored the potential for undesirable or even catastrophic side effects.

See also:

• Workshop Report on Managing Solar Radiation (pdf)
• Weather Modification in Texas
• Guns and sunshades to rescue climate
• Caldeira Lab’s collection on geoengineering for climate change