Meanwhile, far more visibly, the famous scientist Irving Langmuir and his associates at the General Electric company
were exploring a new proposal for rainmaking. Their idea was to "seed" clouds with a smoke of particles, such as silver iodide
crystals, that could act as nuclei for the formation of raindrops. Langmuir quickly won support from military agencies, and
claimed success in field experiments. A small but energetic industry of commercial "cloud seeders" sprang up with even more
optimistic claims. Controversy followed, polarizing scientists, exciting the public and catching the attention of politicians.
As soon as some community attempted to bring rain on themselves, people downwind would hire lawyers to argue that they had
been robbed of their own precipitation. Concern climbed to high levels of government, and in 1953 a President's Advisory Committee
on Weather Control was established to pursue the idea. In 1958, the U.S. Congress acted directly to fund expanded rainmaking
research. Large-scale experimentation was also underway, less openly, in the Soviet Union.(
3)
Military
agencies in the U.S. (and presumably in the Soviet Union) supported research not only on cloud seeding but on other ways injecting
materials into the atmosphere might alter that weather.
=>Government, <=>Aerosols Although much of this was buried in secrecy, the public learned that climatological warfare might become possible. In
a 1955 Fortune magazine article, von Neumann himself explained that "Microscopic layers of colored matter spread on an icy
surface, or in the atmosphere above one, could inhibit the reflection-radiation process, melt the ice, and change the local
climate." The effects could be far-reaching, even world-wide. "What power over our environment, over all nature, is implied!"
he exclaimed. Von Neumann foresaw "forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined," perhaps more dangerous than nuclear war itself.
He hoped it would force humanity to take a new, global approach to its political problems.(
4)
=>Public opinionThrough the 1960s, plans for cloud seeding and other interventions remained active and controversial. A review by
the National Academy of Sciences tentatively supported some claims of success, government agencies launched competing programs
and conducted several large-scale field trials. The costly research programs were perpetually on the brink of proving something,
but never got truly convincing results.
<=>Aerosols Many academic meteorologists came to disdain the whole subject, infested as it was with unfulfilled promises and commercial
hucksters.(
5) Despite these misgivings, the U.S. government spent more than twenty million dollars a year
on weather modification research in the early 1970s.
The Soviet Union was determined not to be left behind in any
grandiose technology. Little is known of what studies the Soviets undertook on climatological warfare, but some novel ideas
did become public. One starting-point was a Russian legacy of hydraulic engineering fantasies, notably an old scheme to divert
Siberian rivers. Why not take the water flowing uselessly into the Arctic Ocean, and send it south to turn the parched soils
of central Asia into farmlands? The plans were reported in the early 1950s, catching the attention of the public and scientists
in the West, although a decade would pass before Soviet scientists examined the details in open publications. These scientists
pointed out that the diversion of fresh water would make the surface layers of the Arctic Ocean more salty. Therefore much
of the icepack might not form in winter.
=>Simple models Wouldn't that mean increased warmth, a boon to Siberians? A few Russian meteorologists questioned
the scheme, even though Communist authorities frowned upon anyone who cast doubt over potential engineering triumphs. O.A.
Drozdov, in particular, used weather records to empirically check what could happen around the Arctic in years of less ice,
and reported there had been serious changes in precipitation.
An even more gargantuan proposal aimed directly at climate.
Around 1956, Soviet engineers began to speculate that they might be able to throw a dam across the Bering Strait and pump
water from the Arctic Ocean into the Pacific. This would draw warm water up from the Atlantic. Their aim was to eliminate
the ice pack, make the Arctic Ocean navigable, and warm up Siberia. The idea attracted some notice in the United States —
presidential candidate John F. Kennedy remarked that the idea was worth exploring as a joint project with the Soviets, and
the discussion continued into the 1970s. Such "geoengineering" projects were in line with traditional American technological
optimism, and still more with the Communist dogma that "man can really be the master of this planet." As the title of an enthusiastic
Russian publication put it, the issue was "Man versus Climate." However, it was hard to tell whether giant projects such as
a Bering Dam made sense. Mikhail I. Budyko, the most prominent Russian climate expert, pointed out that the effects of such
interventions would be unpredictable, and he advised against them.(
6)
A more feasible scheme would
be to spread particles in the atmosphere, or perhaps directly on the ground. Beginning around 1961, Budyko and other scientists
speculated about how humanity might alter the global climate by strewing dark dust or soot across the Arctic snow and ice.
The soot would lower the albedo (reflection of sunlight), and the air would get warmer.(
7)
<=>Simple models Spreading so much dust year after year would be prohibitively expensive. But according to a well-known theory, warmer air
should melt some snow and sea-ice and thus expose the dark underlying soil and ocean water, which would absorb sunlight and
bring on more warming. So once dust destroyed the reflective cover, it might not re-form.
Russian scientists were
not sure whether this would be wise, and scientists elsewhere were still more dubious. In 1971 a group of American experts
said that "deliberate measures to induce arctic sea ice melting might prove successful and might prove difficult to reverse
should they have undesirable side effects."(
8*) As the respected British climate expert Hubert Lamb suggested,
before taking any action it seemed like "an essential precaution to wait until a scientific system for forecasting the behavior
of the natural climate... has been devised and operated successfully for, perhaps, a hundred years."(
9)
By
this time, the early 1970s, feelings about human relations with the natural environment had undergone a historic shift.
<=Public opinion Many technologies now seemed less a triumph of civilized progress than wicked transgressions. If it were true, as some
scientists claimed, that human emissions were inadvertently changing the entire global climate, the chief result seemed to
be droughts and other calamities. As for deliberate rain-making attempts, if they were successful (which remained far from
proven) they might only be robbing farmers downwind who should have gotten the rain instead. Such projects might even harm
the very people who got the rain. For example, a 1972 U.S. government rain-making operation in South Dakota was followed by
a disastrous flood, and came under attack in a class-action lawsuit.
<=Public opinion One cloud-seeding airplane was even shot at. An increasing number of people objected in principle to any such meddling with
natural processes.
=>Government The idea of changing the weather had shifted from a benign dream of progress to a nightmare of apocalyptic risk. Between
1972 and 1975 the U.S. government dramatically cut its budget for weather modification.(
10)
Meanwhile
the government had secretly been spending many millions of dollars on a grand experiment in actual climatological warfare.
The U.S. Department of Defense directed extensive cloud-seeding over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, hoping to increase rainfall and
bog down the North Vietnamese Army's supply line in mud. The public did not learn of this until 1974,
=>Public opinion two years after the program wound down in failure. Many people were dismayed when they learned of the experiment. There followed
a series of resolutions, in bodies from the U.S. Senate to the General Assembly of the United Nations, outlawing climatological
warfare.
=>Government The movement culminated in a 1976 international convention that foreswore hostile use of "environmental modification
techniques."(
11)
Of course we were already modifying the world's atmosphere with quantities of polluting
aerosols and greenhouse gases vastly beyond anything the most aggressive warrior had imagined. If that raised a risk of damage
to climate, some thought we were obliged to prepare a remedy. Now when scientists discussed steps to melt arctic snows or
the like, it was not to craft utopian weather, but with the aims implied in the title that Lamb gave a 1971 review article:
"Climate-engineering schemes to meet a climatic emergency."(
12)
Already back in 1965, a Presidential
advisory panel had suggested that if greenhouse effect warming by carbon dioxide gas ever became a problem, the government
might take countervailing steps.
=>Government The panel did not consider curbing the use of fossil fuels. They had in mind geoengineering schemes — spreading something
across the ocean waters to reflect more sunlight, perhaps, or sowing particles high in the atmosphere to encourage the formation
of reflective clouds.
<=Aerosols Some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic suggested such steps were feasible, and indeed could cost less than many government
programs.(
13) In 1974, Budyko calculated that if global warming ever became a serious threat, we could counter
it with just a few airplane flights a day in the stratosphere, burning sulfur to make aerosols that would reflect sunlight
away.
For a few years in the early 1970s, new evidence and arguments led many scientists to suspect that the greatest
climate risk was not warming, but cooling.
<=Climate cycles A new ice age seemed to be approaching as part of the natural glacial cycle, perhaps hastened by human pollution that
blocked sunlight.
<=Public opinion Technological optimists suggested ways to counter this threat too. We might spread soot from cargo aircraft to darken
the Arctic snows, or even shatter the Arctic ice pack with "clean" thermonuclear explosions.
Whether we used technological
ingenuity against global cooling or against global warming, Budyko pointed out that any action would change climate in different
ways for different nations. Attempts at modification, he insisted, "should be allowed only after the projects have been considered
and approved by responsible international organizations and have received the consent of all interested countries." The bitter
fighting among communities over cloud-seeding would be as nothing compared with conflicts over attempts to engineer global
climate.
=>Public opinion Moreover, as Budyko and Western scientists alike warned, scientists could not predict the consequences of such engineering
efforts. We might forestall global warming only to find we had triggered a new ice age.(
14)
Such
worries revived the U.S. military's interest in artificial climate change on a global scale.
<=Models (GCMs) A group at the RAND corporation, a defense think tank near Los Angeles, had been working with a computer climate model that
originated at the University of California, Los Angeles. This was normal scientific research, funded by the civilian National
Science Foundation. Around 1970, however, with opponents of the Vietnam war attacking anything that smelled of militarism,
the NSF backed out of funding work with overt military connections. The RAND group had to scramble to find support elsewhere.
They turned to the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense. ARPA was meanwhile on the lookout for computing
projects that could justify the funds it had lavished on its ILLIAC supercomputer.
=>Models (GCMs) The menace of Soviet climate engineering schemes gave a plausible rationale. ARPA awarded the project millions of dollars,
a secret classification, and a code name, NILE BLUE.
=>Government The money supported a variety of large-scale computer studies and even some work on ancient climates. Nothing of obvious
military significance turned up, but the program's results proved useful for other climate scientists. After a few years the
program was demilitarized. The NSF took over funding as work with the RAND model migrated to the University of Oregon.(
15)
As environmental concerns grew more widespread and sophisticated, experts and the public alike demanded a cautious
approach to any intervention. A 1977 Academy report looked at a variety of grand schemes we might use to reduce global warming,
should it ever become dangerous (for example, massive planting of forests to soak up carbon). The experts could not muster
much optimism for any of these schemes. The panel thought that a turn to renewable energy resources seemed a more practical
solution.(
16)
People nevertheless continued to come up with projects we might pursue if greenhouse
warming made us desperate enough. To cite another of the many ideas, we could collect carbon dioxide gas from the furnaces
where coal was burned, compress it into a liquid, and inject it into the depths of the Earth or the oceans. That sounded like
an engineer's fantasy, but studies indicated it might in fact be done at reasonable cost.(
17)
<=Biosphere Another fantastic yet perhaps feasible proposal was to fertilize barren tracts of the oceans with trace minerals. In
the 1990s, calculations and field trials suggested that an occasional tanker load of iron compounds could induce massive blooms
of plankton. The creatures would absorb carbon and take it to the ocean bottom when they died. However, scientists could not
be sure that the end result would be to lower the total of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.(
18)
Dozens
of other schemes for mitigating the greenhouse effect were published, ranging from modest practical improvements in energy
systems to futuristic visions. When a National Academy of Sciences panel convened in 1991 to catalog the options, the members
got into a long and serious debate over whether to include the grand "geoengineering" ideas.
<=>Government Might hopes of a future fix just encourage people to keep polluting? They reluctantly voted to include every idea, so
that preparations could start in case the climate deteriorated so badly that radical steps would be the lesser evil. Their
fundamental problem was the one that had bedeviled climate science from the start — if you pushed on this intricate
system, nobody could say for sure what the final consequences might be.(
19)
"Weather modification,"
a participant had written ruefully in 1974, "is based on sound physical principles that cannot be applied precisely in the
open atmosphere because several processes are interacting together in a manner difficult to predict." Moreover, attempts to
change the weather "are superimposed upon natural processes acting, perhaps indistinguishably, to the same or opposite effect....
Therefore it should not be surprising that the history of weather modification is one of painfully slow progress."(
20)
Much the same could be said of research on how humans were modifying the climate inadvertently.
