Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war?
—Job 38:22–23 (NSRV)
Can you lift up your voice to the clouds so that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, “Here we are”?
—Job 38:34–35 (NRSV)
Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the water-skins of the heavens, when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?
—Job 38:37 (NRSV)
Masks of Chaac. Masks of the Mayan rain god, stacked along a staircase leading up the Pyramid of the Magician in Uxmal, near Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico. Source: Photograph by the author.
As one can see from the verses from the whirlwind speech above, God’s power over the weather and wisdom on its workings differentiates Himself from mere mortals such as Job. This association of God with weather is neither unique to the whirlwind speech nor to the Book of Job. In the Torah (or the Pentateuch), the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), one finds:
If you follow my statutes and keep my commandments and observe them faithfully, I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit.
Leviticus 25:3–4 (NRSV)
and
If you will only heed his every commandment that I am commanding you today—loving the Lord your God, and serving him with all your heart and with all your soul—then he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil; and he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you will eat your fill. Take care, or you will be seduced into turning away, serving other gods and worshipping them, for then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain and the land will yield no fruit; then you will perish quickly from the good land that the Lord is giving you.
Deuteronomy 11:13–17 (NSRV)
as well as other similar verses.1 In addition to instructions from the Torah, one finds praise for God’s power over rain. For example:
When he utters his voice, there is a tumult of waters in the heavens, and he makes the mist rise from the ends of the earth. He makes lightnings for the rain, and he brings out the wind from his storehouses.
Jeremiah 10:13 (NRSV)
and
He it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth; he makes lightnings for the rain and brings out the wind from his storehouses.
Psalms 135:7 (NRSV)
Clearly, provenance over the weather, particularly thunder, lightning and rain, is a divine attribute. Indeed, the Indo-European root of the word “divine” derives from a rain and storm sky god.2
Early agricultural people generally had a keen interest in favorable growing seasons and a fear of drought and famine. The façade of the masks of Chaac, the Mayan god of rain,3 shown in the illustration at the head of this chapter is but some of the many that adorn the temples and other structures of the Puuc Mayan site located south of Mérida on the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico. It is small wonder that the people of Uxmal would regard the favor of the rain god with great importance. The Puuc Maya region is an area that has no natural surface water. Rainfall quickly drains into the porous limestone bedrock underlying the region as soon as it falls. From 600 to 1250 CE (the Late Classic to Early Postclassic Mayan periods), the inhabitants of Uxmal and other centers in the region survived by constructing two different kinds of water-capture systems: aquadas were open, still-water reservoirs; chultunob were small underground cisterns with fresh water for household use.4
Recent data based on the oxygen isotopes in the layers of stalagmites from limestone caves in the Puuc region provide a climate record of droughts and wet periods for the past 1,500 years.5 During the Terminal Classic period, about 800 to 950 CE, a series of horrific droughts struck the region. These droughts had estimated rainfall reductions between 38 and 52 percent of the current average monthly rainfall and lasted for from three years up to as many as eighteen years. The regional population, which was thought to be around four million people, was decimated and fell to a few hundred thousand.6 The system of divine kingship virtually disappeared, and the classic Mayan civilization went into a 150-year trajectory of depopulation, social unrest, warfare, and eventual disintegration.7
The Aztec rain god analogous to Chaac was called Tlaloc, the god of hail, thunder, and lighting. Tlaloc required sacrifices, primarily of children, whose tears were thought to encourage the god to bring rain.8 These sacrifices intensified during times of drought. There is a long tree-ring record of drought for the region starting in about 850 CE, and this record has been reconciled with the Aztec calendar.9 The Aztecs had a 260-day religious calendar (the tonalpohuallii) with a count of one to thirteen of the day numbers as well as twenty day signs (Rabbit, Death, Snake, Deer, etc.). They also had a 365-day solar calendar (the xihuitl), with eighteen months of twenty days each and an extra five days that are counted but are outside the calendar and considered unlucky. A solar year takes its name from the festival tonalpohuallii, held on the calendar day of the last (the 360th) day of the solar, xihuitl year. This complicated calendar is loaded with cycles (a thirteen-day tonalpohuallii cycle, a twenty-day sign-cycle interlacing though both calendars, an eighteen-month xihuitl cycle along with the five missing days). Given the complex combinatorics of these different cycles, years can only have four day names—Rabbit (tochtli), Reed (acatl), Flint Knife (tecpatl), and House (calli). It takes fifty-two years to cycle through all the combinations of years. Each combination (One Rabbit, Two Reed, etc.) only comes up once in this fifty-two-year cycle.
The year One Rabbit is the first year in the counting of the fifty-two-year cyclical Aztec calendar. There was a “Curse of One Rabbit Year” because this year was strongly associated with famine and catastrophe. The period between 882 and 1558 CE had thirteen One Rabbit years for which the climatic conditions have been determined.10 Based on climate reconstructions derived from analyzing tree-ring width variations in the region, ten of these thirteen years were immediately proceeded by droughts and were a time of the resulting famines—a remarkable coincidence that is sufficiently unlikely as to be statistically significant.11 One can speculate whether “predictable” catastrophe, even when it is a statistical fluke, is less destabilizing than more random disasters. Apparently the Aztecs, while suffering a fifty-two-year drought-cycle curse of the One Rabbit—along with other additional random droughts—saw the periodic calamity as reinforcing their belief in their calendar and its cycles.12
Along with Chaac and Tlaloc were other analogous rain gods in the Mesoamerican cultures: Cocijo for the Zapotec in southern Mexico, “Jaguar” in Olmec culture, and Dzahui in the Mixtec religion. There is also a strong convergence in other religions in other regions, for example, between Mesoamerican Olmec religious icons and those of the ancient Chinese Shang, the San people of southern Africa, and a long history of rainmaking in Jewish history.13
Indeed, the word “deity” ultimately derives from the Indo-European word *dieṷos god of the daytime sky wielding thunder and lightning. *dieṷos is the source of the word for “god” common to the most Indo-European languages.14 In Greek, *dieṷos is seen as Zeus, the god of sky and thunder. Jupiter, Zeus’s Roman equivalent, was implored to bring rain and break droughts in a sung ceremony, the aquaelicium (Latin: calling the waters), which involved pouring water on a stone moved from its location near the Roman Temple of Mars.15 The words from the root *dieṷos represents “god” in Sanskrit, Latin, Oscan, Volscian, Umbrian, Old Irish, Old Welsh, Modern Welsh, Old Cornish, Breton, Old Icelandic, Old High German, Anglo-Saxon, Lithuanian, Lettic, and Old Prussian.16
Ceremonies, rain dances, and offerings continue to be used to break droughts and control the rain. The modern Mayans still give offerings to ancient gods that have merged with Catholic saints in the hopes of controlling rain, but the gifts are now cacao rather than human sacrifices.17 There is a longstanding tradition of rain dances among Amerindians, notably Hopi, Navaho, and Zuni tribes in the U.S. desert southwest. The paparuda is a Romanian and Bulgarian rain ritual of considerable antiquity and possibly Thracian origin.18 Within the last five years, two governors of U.S. states have proclaimed days of prayer to break droughts. “Sonny” Perdue, governor of Georgia, on November 14, 2007, stated, “I’m here today to appeal to you and to all Georgians and all people who believe in the power of prayer to ask God to shower our state, our region, our nation with the blessings of water.” Texas’s governor Rick Perry proclaimed the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as “Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas”: “I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities, and the restoration of our normal and robust way of life.” Be they the Puuc Mayans, Romans, Georgians, Texans, or any other peoples, drought and lack of rainfall strain the very fabric of a society.
RAINMAKERS
In the United States, particularly in agricultural regions of the American West, rainmakers plied their trade in times of drought. This practice probably reached a crescendo in the “Dust Bowl” era of the Great Depression, in the 1930s. Among this rich collection of mountebanks, dreamers, and confidence tricksters, let us consider but two individuals as examples.
Charles Mallory Hatfield, “The Moisture Accelerator” (c. 1875–January 12, 1958)
Mr. Hatfield transitioned from working as a sewing machine salesman in southern California to rainmaking. By 1902, he had developed a secret mixture of over twenty chemicals that he stored in large evaporating tanks, which he claimed caused rain. By 1904 he was collecting fees of fifty to a hundred dollars for using his tanks and chemicals to produce rain and eventually obtained an assignment to produce eighteen inches of rain over Los Angeles for a thousand dollars.19 By 1906, he had shifted to the Canadian Yukon Territory, where he contracted to create rain for the Klondike goldfield for ten thousand dollars. He failed but still collected $1,100. Then he went back to California, where, as documented in the January 5, 1916, Los Angeles Times:
The Southland was hit by the first in a wave of storms that dumped 11.4 inches of rain. The resulting floods killed 20 people and sparked a flurry of lawsuits, many of them aimed at rainmaker Charles Mallory Hatfield, who billed himself as a “Moisture Accelerator.” The city of San Diego had hired Hatfield to coax precipitation from the clouds.
The city of San Diego reneged on a ten-thousand-dollar contract, which they had made with Mr. Hatfield. Working with his brother Paul, Charles Hatfield claimed 503 successful rainmaking attempts over his career. He eventually retired to Eagle Rock, California, where he continued to sell sewing machines.20 His career inspired a Broadway play that became the 1956 hit film The Rainmaker, starring Katherine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster as the rainmaker. The eighty-one-year-old Hatfield attended the Hollywood premiere.21
Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897–November 3, 1957) and His “Cloudbuster”
Wilhelm Reich was born in Dobzau, Austria. He graduated from the University of Vienna in 1922 and became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He studied under the Nobel laureate Julius Wagner-Jayregg and worked as the deputy director of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic polyclinic. With the rise of Hitler in 1933, Reich moved from Berlin to Scandinavia (to Denmark, where he was accused of corrupting Danish youth, then briefly to Sweden, and in 1934 to Oslo, Norway) and then to New York in 1939. Out of his controversial career in psychoanalysis he developed a general concept of a sexual primordial energy called “orgone.” In 1940, he began to construct devices that could collect and concentrate atmospheric orgone and to experiment with these devices on cures for cancer and promoting plant growth. On January 13, 1941, Reich met with Albert Einstein, who agreed to experiment with an orgone concentrator but lost interest after initial experiments failed.22 Reich eventually proposed a second, antiorgone energy called Deadly Orgone Radiation. He felt that DOR caused desertification, which led to his development of a “cloudbuster” device. In theory, the cloudbusters emitted orgone and channeled it into clouds to destroy DOR and cause rain.23 He conducted several experiments with the device and was eventually hired with apparent success to produce rain to save Maine’s blueberry crop from drought.24 Things ended badly for Reich. Five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was arrested by the FBI on December 12, 1941, largely because he was an immigrant with a communist background. He was held for about a month. Following his release, he enjoyed five very successful years practicing his version of psychotherapy and bought a 160-acre farm in Maine, which he named Orgonon.25 There he constructed a facility that now houses the Wilhelm Reich Museum. In 1947, he was inspected by the Federal Drug Administration following exposés of his work in Harper’s and The New Republic.26 After an unscheduled inspection of Orgonon in 1952, the FDA decided that he was a fraud and obtained an injunction in 1954 to prevent him from interstate shipment of his publications and orgone accumulators.27 In 1956, he was sentenced to two years in federal prison for violating the federal injunction. He died in prison a year later, at the age of sixty.28
WEATHER MODIFICATION AS A SCIENTIFIC ENDEAVOR
Clark C. Spence summarized the history of rainmaking in the United States thus:
Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, it has excited the imagination of Americans and brought forth hundreds of rainmaking schemes for private and public consideration. Some of these suggestions have undoubtedly been the offspring of wags or crackpots; some have been advanced by ignorant, but sincere, persons who clung tenaciously to utterly hopeless beliefs; some have been seriously proposed by men of reputation as scientific solutions to the problem of drought; some—a great, many, unfortunately—have been offered by charlatans and “rain fakirs” interested only in lining their own pocket.
The patina of charlatanism from some of the commercial rainmakers of the early- to mid-twentieth century and the veneer of mysticism from rain ritual in a wide variety of cultures has tended to produce negative or, at the very least, suspicious interpretations of scientific rainmaking research efforts as well.
EARLY RAINMAKING ATTEMPTS IN THE UNITED STATES
In the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century, James Pollard Espy (1785–1860) advanced a theory of storms. The description of his theory sounded very much like that of a steam engine—inrushing winds, heat-induced uplift of air, and condensation of moisture to release atmospheric “steam power” all combined to drive storms.29 Espy was a serious and well-known scientist in his day, and his ideas of storms as engines were consistent with Carnot’s concept of winds and ocean currents as heat engines (discussed in chapter 7). Starting in 1817, Espy was a part-time teacher of mathematics and classics at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and served as the chairman of the Joint Committee on Meteorology of the American Philosophical Society and the Franklin Institute. He established a network of weather observers in each county of Pennsylvania as well as a national network of volunteers. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1942 to become the first federally funded U.S. government meteorologist. He was at the center of meteorological research in his time, and his steam-energy theory of storms was accepted by other influential scientists of the time, including William Ferrell, who was also discussed in chapter 7 with regard to his seminal contribution on the circulation of the atmosphere.30
Espy’s enthusiasm for his theory led him to the concept of generating artificial rains by igniting huge fires. In 1849, he contracted for twelve acres of timber in Fairfax County, Virginia, to be set alight to promote artificial rain. The experiment ended in failure.31 His friends were concerned that his notion of lighting up forests in patches up to seven miles long to generate rain was impractical and potentially embarrassing to him.32 On good advice, after this his rainmaking efforts faded.
The interest in artificial rainmaking certainly did not end with James Espy. Edward Powers produced a book, War and the Weather; or, The Artificial Production of Rain.33 It begins with what might be the theme of scientific rainmaking: “The idea that rain can be produced by human agency, though sufficiently startling, is not one which, in this age of progress, ought to be considered as impossible of practical realization.” Powers’s theory was based on the analysis of observational data. He found upon analysis that rainfall often followed the major battles of the U.S. Civil War. Powers felt this was a consequence of artillery fire inducing rain. It is possible the observed relationship may instead be attributable to a correlation with the tendency of the generals to choose to fight during breaks in the weather when possible.34 The U.S. Congress authorized $2,500 to test the theory.35
In 1880, the Confederate brigadier general Daniel Ruggles (1810–1897), who famously commanded “Ruggles’ Battery” of sixty-two cannons against the Union line known as the “Hornet’s Nest” in the Battle of Shiloh, patented a rainmaking “concussive theory.”36 In 1890, Robert St. George Dryenforth collected the ten thousand dollars appropriated by Congress to break a drought in Texas by using this concussive theory. His attempt included explosives on kites and balloons at different altitudes to compliment ground-level explosions. At the time, the news magazine The Nation characterized this as the “silliest performance that human ingenuity could devise.”37
EARLY RUSSIAN AND AMERICAN EXPLORATIONS IN SCIENTIFIC RAINMAKING AFTER WORLD WAR II
The Leningrad Institute of Rainmaking began field experimentation with rainmaking in 1932 with attempts to produce rain by seeding clouds with calcium chloride. This work lasted until 1939, when the experiments were curtailed because of World War II.38 After the war, the work resumed using dry ice and silver iodide to seed clouds.
Despite a long history of theorization and application of rainmaking methods such as Espy’s concepts, the initiation of scientific research on the modification of local weather conditions is often attributed to Vincent Schaefer’s initial work with freezer chambers and using dry ice to cause ice crystal formation.39 Pure water can be supercooled to temperatures slightly below –40° (which is the same temperature in both Celsius and Fahrenheit), and it will freeze instantly if nuclei of condensation are introduced. In the summer of 1946, while working at the General Electric Research Observatory Laboratories, Schaefer dropped some dry ice into a cold chamber of supercooled water vapor. His breath into the chamber caused it immediately to fill with a cloud of millions of ice crystals. It was soon discovered that silver iodide could also promote explosive growth of ice crystals in chambers filled with supercooled water.40 By November of the same year, Schaefer rented an airplane and spread six pounds of dry-ice pellets in a cloud over the Berkshire Mountains. This created of a streak of ice and snow three miles long. His boss and mentor, the Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir, was watching from the control tower and was on the telephone to the New York Times before the plane landed.41 In the subsequent Times article, Langmuir opined, “a single pellet of dry ice, about the size of a pea…might produce enough ice nuclei to develop several tons of snow,” thus “opening [the] vista of moisture control by man.”42 General Electric became wary of lawsuits that might attach to side effects of cloud-seeding experiments and transferred its work to the U.S. military. This was to emerge from secrecy during in the Vietnam War twenty-five years later and will be discussed in the section that follows.
The General Electric research was the first case of a continued interest in rainmaking by seeding clouds. By the early 1950s, about 10 percent of the U.S. land area was under arrangements with commercial cloud-seeding firms.43 Basically, cloud seeding works on the basis of three related assumptions.44
1. To make rain, either relatively large water droplets must be present in a cloud to collide with one another and form raindrops or there are ice crystals in a supercooled cloud that can release snow and rain.45 Schaefer observed this latter process firsthand in his laboratory’s cold chambers.
2. Some clouds do not produce rain because of a lack of water droplets or ice crystals.
3. The lack of water droplets or ice crystals can be remedied by artificially introducing solid carbon dioxide (dry ice) or silver iodide to induce the formation of ice crystals, by introducing water droplets, or by introducing different materials that absorb water.
A reprise in Science of the success of cloud seeding to produce precipitation based on these assumptions lists only one successful experiment in cloud seeding in the thirty-five years after Schaefer’s initial work.46 One of the reasons for the low success rate derives from the rigor required in the Science review to be considered successful. To evaluate a cloud-seeding experiment statistically, one must develop an experimental design in which there are experimental and controlled cases, usually assigned at random. This means one must not simply apply cloud-seeding procedures to clouds and see that rain occurs; one must also observe cases in which equivalent clouds are not seeded and are scored on whether or not there also is rain. The cases must be randomly selected.
The one successful experiment tabulated in the Science article was an Israeli experiment, which compared rainfall on 388 days when clouds over the watershed of the Sea of Galilee were seeded (or not) in a predetermined random order with silver iodide.47 Rainfall increased 18 percent in a smaller target area and 13 percent in the larger area (the Sea of Galilee watershed). This later finding is important because it goes to a political issue: if more rain is induced by rainmaking in Israel, will less rain fall in Jordan? From this experiment, the answer to this politically loaded question appears to be “no.”
A scientific review of forty-seven years of rainfall modification in Australia concluded that cloud seeding is ineffective in the plains area of Australia but that it may work under certain special conditions in Tasmania.48 A randomized rain enhancement experiment carried out in the Australian plains for 260 days in the years 1988 through 1994 found no significant effect of the rainmaking procedures.49 The experiment was terminated in 1995. One somewhat recent review covers research and application projects up until about 1997. It points to the difficulty in establishing a statistically rigorous verification that the methods work. But it also identifies the great increase in information about the functioning of rain clouds and holds out some promise for the future using new methods.50
Two of the regular themes in the history of scientific rainmaking would have to be: it is harder than it seems, and more information about the workings of clouds and storms is necessary. One sees this in the initial work on cloud seeding springing from Schaefer’s cold chamber observations. It is also the case for the ambitious Project STORMFURY, which attempted to reduce the strongest winds of a hurricane by seeding the area next to the hurricane’s eye. Three hurricanes were experimentally seeded. One promising result, Hurricane Debbie, had wind speeds that dropped but then strengthened after seeding the storm in two instances. The problem is that such behavior also can occur when hurricanes have not been seeded.
Unfortunately, as more was learned about the internal structure of hurricanes, it became clear that the amount of supercooled water in them was not sufficient for the seeding to be successful. Also, the variability of the behavior of hurricanes would have required an infeasible number of tests to be statistically rigorous. The good news is that the STORMFURY studies motivated the acquisition of WP-3D Orion meteorological research airplanes, which have collected invaluable information about the atmospheric sciences and about hurricanes in particular. The Orion data and the other information from the experimental study of rainmaking still provide basic data to test theories on the workings of clouds and storms today.
Indeed, the testing of theories in rainmaking experiments and identifying the need for better scientific knowledge may be the important long-term contribution of large-scale experiments on rainmaking. A large international cloud-seeding experiment in drought-stricken Queensland, Australia, seeded 127 clouds. The statistical variability of the results and the relatively small sample size did not allow for a statistically significant conclusion.51 The results, at the same time, pointed to the importance of the cloud experiments to gain a physical understanding of cloud and rain dynamics. This could be said of many of the other scientific rainmaking experiments of the past.
Notably, early studies in cloud seeding in Missouri found that seeding clouds can possibly reduce the amount of rainfall.52 Possibly this effect arises from having too many particles coalescing water or ice, so that a large number of small droplets form instead of a lesser number of larger droplets that are still large enough to fall to the surface as rain. It highlights how much more we need to know and would like to understand. The U.S. National Research Council in 2003 outlined important issues to be considered in weather modification,53 as did a symposium held by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research on “Macroengineering Options for Climate Change Management and Mitigation” at Cambridge.54 A synthesis among the National Research Council writers and members of the Weather Modification Association aired differences in points of view but largely agreed on the need for an increased program in weather modification.55 One significant point aired in this report was that if the inadvertent changes in global environment can be associated with global-scale climate change, then one might reasonably expect intended modifications to be equally effective.
MAKE MUD, NOT WAR: WEATHER MODIFICATION AS A MILITARY ASSET
Almost as soon as the General Electric Research Laboratory Observatory began its exploration of cloud seeding, its research was transferred to the U.S. military. The military implications of the weather modification technology compelled an enthusiastic response. General George C. Kenney, commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, stated, “The nation that first learns to plot the paths of air masses accurately and learns to control the time and place of precipitation will dominate the globe.”56 Rear Admiral Luis De Florez: “Start now to make control of weather equal in scope to the Manhattan District Project which produced the first A-bomb.”57
During October 1969, Daniel Ellsburg and Anthony Russo photocopied a secret history of the U.S. Vietnam War requested by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara with the title United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, better known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1971, Ellsberg gave forty-three volumes of the material to the New York Times. Release of the Pentagon Papers ignited street protests, controversy, and lawsuits. Senator Mike Gravel (Democrat, Alaska) read 4,100 pages of the material into the Congressional Record using the immunity from the threat of trial for treason for senators on the floor of Congress.58
One of the many things revealed from the Pentagon Papers was the documentation of a military rainmaking program, Project POPEYE, in Southeast Asia, which was designed to hamper the opponents of the United States in the Vietnam War by turning road surfaces to mud, causing landslides along roads, washing out bridges and river crossings, and extending the duration of soggy conditions. The investigative journalist Jack Anderson had reported on Project POPEYE, which he called Project Intermediate-Compatriot in his column in March 1971. Operation POPEYE was briefly mentioned in the Pentagon Papers, which began to be printed by the New York Times on June 23, 1971. On June 29, Senator Gravel read them into the Congressional Record. But it was not until almost a year later, on July 3, 1972, that the existence of Project POPEYE was disclosed on the front page of the New York Times.59
Project POPEYE was not a small operation. During the rainy season from March to November, whenever possible, three C-130 Hercules aircraft (four-engine turboprop military transport airplanes) and two F-4C Phantom long-range fighter/bomber/reconnaissance airplanes flew two sorties daily out of Thailand to seed cumulus clouds with silver iodide. Based on a subsequent Senate subcommittee investigation of the project,60 it was revealed that the Project POPEYE cloud-seeding flights amounted to 2,602 sorties flown over North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia between March 20, 1967, and July 5, 1972. The last flight was two days after Operation POPEYE details were reported in the New York Times. Operation POPEYE was considered a success in meeting its objectives.61
The Senate subcommittee hearings concluded that there was a need for an international agreement to prohibit the use of weather modification as weapons of war.62 The Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques was adopted by resolution by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1976, opened for signature on May 18, 1977, in Geneva, and entered into force on October 5, 1977. As of January 2012, it was ratified by seventy-six countries. The convention bans weather modification for purposes of war. It is now called the Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD).63 In the United States, federal funding for applied weather modification has evaporated since about 1979.64
Even if modification of the environment for military purposes violates ENMOD, there is still the consideration of using environmental modification to ameliorate the effects of other changes in the environment. Stemming from concern about the possibility of a potentially irreversible planetary warming as a consequence of human activities,65 learned societies (the Royal Society, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, American Geophysical Union, etc.) have convened special conferences and published special issues of scientific journals on the topic.66 There are two interrelated topics to consider. The first involves the historical precedents of nations contemplating changing the climate to better their situation in some way. The second involves how actually to modify the climate to “solve” the problem of global warming. The two topics converge on several critical questions that amount to the question: “If we ‘fiddle’ with the climate, who gets to set the thermostat?”
EARLY GEOENGINEERING IDEAS
U.S. postwar research on atmospheric modification was primarily focused on rainmaking. The USSR’s program had a broader focus and included intentional climate modification as a major component.67 In 1948, Stalin developed a plan to expand the Soviet economy by transforming nature and controlling the weather and climate.68 By 1961, the Twenty-Second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party listed control of the climate as one of the USSR’s most urgent problems.69 The USSR occupied a major international position thanks to its development of thermonuclear weapons. The rocket delivery systems for these weapons were a significant byproduct of the Cold War and of Soviet competition with the United States in a space race. The USSR had the research and scientific infrastructure to deliver large, technologically difficult projects. Further, it had a harsh climate that perennially produced problems for Soviet agricultural productivity and development of its wild northern lands.
The proposed climate-modification projects included a plan to orbit metallic particles in a “rings of Saturn” arrangement to reflect heat and light to northern Russia and simultaneously to shade the tropics to produce a more temperate climate there.70 The cover of a book published in 1960 and titled Man Versus Climate featured the Earth surrounded by a planetary ring.71 This book finishes with what well might be the theme of the Soviet era of climate modification:
We have described those mysteries of nature already penetrated by science, the daring projects put forward for transforming our planet, and the fantastic dreams to be realized in the future. Today we are merely on the threshold of the conquest of nature. But if, on turning the last page, the reader is convinced that man can really be the master of this planet and that the future is in his hands, then the authors will consider that they have fulfilled their purpose.
Proposals in the book included such plans as damming and diverting the Congo River to irrigate the Sahara, dispersing cloud cover over the Arctic Basin, blocking the Gulf Stream with a dam between Florida and Cuba, and damming the Bering Strait and then pumping the cold Arctic water into the Pacific and drawing warmer Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean to melt the polar ice.
Melting the Arctic ice was seen by several Soviet scientists as a large-scale application to warm the Russian climate.72 The presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences met in November 1959 to discuss controlling the Arctic climate. There were two follow-on meetings in Leningrad in 1961 and 1962.73 M. I. Budyko, who proposed a human role for the extinction of the megafauna just discussed in chapter 9, was a major figure in Russian climatology in this era. Budyko felt that the Arctic Sea ice, if melted, would not refreeze and would warm and hydrate northern Russia.74 Water in a melted Arctic absorbs incoming solar radiation to heat the region. Conversely, ice reflects incoming solar radiation, and its presence has a cooling effect.
At about the same time in America, the Nobel laureates John von Neumann and Edward Teller advocated manipulation of the weather as a Cold War weapon.75 Two decades later, President Lyndon Johnson’s scientific advisory committee was concerned with options to mitigate the possible planetary warming that could result from fossil fuel burning.76 Opposition on whether to engineer a warmer world or a cooler world between the two Cold War opponents brims with irony.
GEOENGINEERING TO COMPENSATE FOR ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING
The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in June 1991 represents something of a natural experiment on chemistry-based geoengineering. In volcanic eruptions, sulfur dioxide blown into the atmosphere forms sulfate particles that can remain in the stratosphere for months. The Pinatubo eruption lowered air temperatures and reduced the water vapor in the atmosphere. The Nobelist Paul Crutzen in 2006 suggested injecting sulfur into the stratosphere to produce sulfate clouds, which would whiten the Earth from space. The additional clouds would reflect more incoming sunlight back into space and represent a possible way to offset the planetary warming caused by human greenhouse gases.77 Budyko made a similar proposal in 1982 and calculated that ten million tons a year of sulfur dioxide released in the stratosphere would cancel out the expected warming from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from human fossil fuel use.78 Analysis of the Pinatubo eruption event indicated that the shielding of the sun by increased clouds reduced the rate of evaporation of water.79 Injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere is only one of several means to eliminate the possible warming brought upon from increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Imagine a board game for “science nerds” that involves guessing whether a particular scheme for engineering the Earth’s climate was dreamed up in the USSR climate-modification era in the 1960s or elsewhere more recently. The key to winning could stem from realizing that the early Soviet proposals emphasized (mostly) the transportation of heat to new places using megascale public works projects; more recent strategies (also mostly) have involved engineering the Earth’s energy balance. For many of the geoengineering proposals there is a parallel, inadvertent potential climate change that is ongoing.80
Changing the Earth’s Energy Balance on the Incoming Side
One might be able to cool the Earth by reducing the amount of incoming solar radiation. The injection of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect incoming sunlight is but one of the methodologies proposed to compensate for global warming. Others, starting from outside the Earth and moving in are:
• Installation of reflecting materials in orbit. The ideas of orbiting reflective materials around the planet to reflect sunlight were proposed in the early Soviet space era.81 Putting reflectors in space to beam sunlight to Earth to light up solar power facilities in Earth orbit was discussed in 1981 in a U.S. National Academy Committee but was thought to be prohibitively expensive.82 Reflecting shields in low-Earth orbits act as solar sails. Incoming sunlight pushes them out of orbit.83 One can get around this by putting the reflectors in orbit at the L1 Lagrange point, the location in space between the Earth and Sun where the two gravitational attractions are exactly in balance. The shields would need small positional adjustments to remain perched on the Sun-Earth gravitational fence.84 The capability to correct position also would mean one could adjust the shields.85 In 1997, the best guess at the cost of such a system of Lagrangian reflectors was $50 to $500 billion.86 A somewhat similar proposal is to put a cloud of reflective particles around the L1 Lagrange point.87
• Using atmospheric aerosols to cause greater reflection of incoming light. These plans almost invariably involve injection of material into the stratosphere.88 Putting material into the atmosphere nearer the Earth, the troposphere, is vexed by the problem that rainfall washes it out in precipitation. The whitening of the Earth using sulfur dioxide to cause sulfate clouds in the stratosphere is but one of the proposed methods of reflecting more of the incoming solar radiation. Another possibility is the injection of ten million tons of metallic aerosols (probably alumina) into the stratosphere. These could be in the form of a micromesh or microballoons.89 Still another is the injection of soot or black carbon into the stratosphere, but this seems riskier than a sulfur injection.90 Sea salt particles emitted from wind-powered vessels using artificial seawater sprayers could provide the condensation nuclei to produce increased marine stratocumulus clouds, but again there is much uncertainty about how efficient this might be.91 A field test of a government project to inject stratospheric particles of reflective aerosols in the United Kingdom (called SPICE: Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering) was cancelled in 2012 over unresolved issues of patent ownership and intellectual property rights over the potentially lucrative capability to mitigate climate change.92
• Changing the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface. The engineering of an ice-free Arctic for the benefit of Russia’s north is a longstanding geoengineering concept intended to warm the Earth by altering its reflectivity. Other concepts involve changing the proposals to change the surface to cool the planet and neutralize global warming include, in one way or another, changing the surface albedo of the ocean by using various floating objects to reflect incoming light. There are obvious downsides to such applications, including littering shorelines and harming commercial fisheries. Clearing large tracts of the boreal forests of the Northern Hemisphere have planetary cooling effects by ways of several different feedbacks.93 Reroofing cities with white roofs would also make urbanized areas reflect more light and also reduce air conditioning demand, conserving energy. The contrast in clearing boreal forests versus white roofs is one of scale. Plans to alter the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface (or to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases) demonstrate a continuous gradient of local “green” energy conservation strategies to more grandiose geoengineering projects.
There are at least two broad and problematic considerations in reducing the amount of incoming sunlight by whatever means, at regional or global scales. First, the complexity of planetary interactions is considerable. Do we have the wisdom to avoid the unintended consequences of our geoengineering plans? Certainly, there is a need to know much more than we know do. Recently, two atmospheric scientists at the National Center of Atmospheric Research, Kevin Trenberth and Aiguo Dai, concluded their analysis and review of the issue of injecting sulfate into the stratosphere to increase the Earth’s reflectivity by writing, “creating a risk of widespread drought and reduced freshwater resources for the world to cut down on global warming does not seem like an appropriate fix.”94
Second is the persistent issue of who determines the beneficiaries and those who must make sacrifices on a geoengineered planet. Recall that as far back as the early 1960s, with the Soviet plan to put a reflective ring around the Earth there was a rationalization that the reflecting of radiation onto the Russian north would shade and make more temperate the sweltering tropics.95 Whether this is a correct assertion is not obvious. It is rather difficult to imagine that the consequences of geoengineering will benefit everyone on Earth.
Changing the Earth’s Energy Balance on the Outgoing Side
The greenhouse warming of the Earth is a product of the interception of some portion of the outgoing short-wave radiation from the Earth’s surface. The control of outgoing radiation involves reducing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The principal greenhouse gas is water vapor, but modification of the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere has not been proposed.96 Most of the plans involve reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Fossil fuel use can be reduced. The carbon dioxide generated by fossil fuel use can be captured. Geoengineering can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. For terrestrial ecosystems, carbon can be removed using forestry practices that store carbon in the soil and in trees.97 If trees are harvested, the wood can be stored,98 burned as fuel, or even burned as fuel with recovery of the carbon dioxide. One can also develop agricultural practices that store more carbon in the soil.
In the oceans, iron may be the nutrient limiting plant growth over large regions,99 with each atom of iron causing the uptake of about ten thousand atoms of carbon. Field experiments have shown short-term large increases in ocean productivity,100 but it is not clear that these increases can be sustained over a longer period of time.101 Further, there is reason to be concerned over any large-scale change in the chemistry of the oceans. The same can be said for using the oceans as a repository for carbon dioxide that has been captured from fossil fuel combustion.102
It is no surprise that the power to control the weather is a principal dimension of divine omnipotence. Does the sensitivity of simulations of the Earth’s climate to inadvertent human changes in the atmosphere and the planet’s surface imply that geoengineering could be effective to manifest planetary-scale changes? In other words, if we can change the climate by accident, just think what we could do if we really put our minds to it. The stakes to control the weather have always been high.
Certainly, control of weather has both tactical and strategic war-fighting implications. Choosing to fight battles under favorable conditions has been an aspect of warfare since time immemorial. Predicting these conditions is intrinsic to modern warfare. Modifying the environment to favor one military opponent over another has been deployed in the past but is currently under international injunction through treaties.
If to intensify storms, blizzards, hurricanes, and hail is the ultimate weapon, then to moderate these same calamities is the ultimate magnanimity. Breaking or causing droughts could control the fates of regions and cultures. Simply being able to produce rain at critical times during the growth and maturation process of crop plants could determine economic success or failure of agriculture at a myriad of scales. Issues associated with the geoengineering of the Earth have parallels with these issues. One problem is to know when and how geoengineering might favor one people or one nation over another. This was a persistent concern with respect to the USSR’s climate modification plans. The melting of the Arctic Sea was one of the preferred Soviet schemes.103 The possibility of this event worsening climate elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere was a worrisome consequence of this action. Ironically, at the time of writing there is a decline in Arctic Sea ice attributed to a general warming of the Arctic.104
Can we really geoengineer the Earth? Some scientists would see humans as having had a profound change on the climate with the dawn of agriculture.105 A majority of atmospheric scientists feel that human activities are altering climate today.106 Given the potential consequences of a climate change, geoengineering is becoming a popular technological solution to a difficult policy problem.107 Several holistic scientists see geoengineering as the challenge from which we cannot walk away, particularly at our population density and per capita use of materials.108 A reenvisioning of our energy production capacity, an intrinsically complex and costly option with nothing, including nuclear energy, off the table, is likely to be as contentious a debate in the future as it was in the past.109 Others express concern with the feasibility, ethical appropriateness, and likelihood of success of geoengineering.110 Is it cheaper to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than to modify the planet somehow to compensate for our actions? The methodologies involved can be divided into those for managing solar radiation or for managing the atmospheric inputs that effect outgoing radiation (notably carbon dioxide). It appears that scrubbing carbon dioxide from industrial processes may cost as much as a thousand dollars per ton of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere, implying a multitrillion-dollar cost each year. Still others are keenly aware of the importance to consider the options wisely: encouraging research but stopping large-scale field experiments to develop scientific oversight.111
We have the challenge of navigating the moral and ethical issues that attend climate modification. There is a significant concern that rogue geoengineers might take it upon themselves to change the planetary climate. We must at the same time assess the feasibility, risks, and costs. The history of weather and climate modification portends considerable difficulty in negotiating these difficulties, but it is an assessment that must be undertaken wisely and soon.
