Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (review)

James Fleming has written an entertaining book about a serious issue: climate control. Debate over the desirability of human control of weather and climate has intensified in recent years, fueled by the interest and sponsorship of prominent scientists such as Paul Crutzen, who shared a Nobel Prize (1995) for his work in atmospheric chemistry. The serious discussion of very large-scale engineering fixes to the problem of global warming—planetary climate modification, as it were—has picked up the tag “geoengineering”; it explores technical solutions to the pollution generated by our energy-intensive lifestyles and economy. While advocates present climate modification as an effort to buy time until the international community gets measures in place for the mitigation of greenhouse gases, critics fear that its appeal lies in the illusory promise that technical fixes will make fundamental social change unnecessary. Fleming dives headlong into this debate with a plea for moderation and for the inclusion of historians, social scientists, and humanists in the debate over policy.

The book argues that current schemes for climate modification should not be seen as something recent, the product of a powerful modern science opening new solutions, but rather as the continuation of a long history of man’s obsession with control over weather that has been characterized by a weak understanding of the complexities of nature and little appreciation for the dangers of intervention. It is a history that Fleming characterizes as a tragicomedy, and he makes the most of a cast of colorful figures. The book devotes a chapter each to visions of climate control in and by myth and fiction, scientific rainmakers, rain charlatans, the concern with fog removal to aid aviation, cloud seeding, the use of weather modification for military goals, and finally emergence on a global scale, followed by a review of recent proposals in geoengineering.

After a full synopsis of over a dozen works of fiction that turn on efforts to manipulate weather and climate, Fleming has amply proved his point that the idea of control over nature is knitted into our culture. As the book unfolds, readers will be both horrified and amused that there seems to be little difference in method between the scientific rainmakers and the charlatans, both of whom employed percussive techniques such as firing on clouds or the evaporation of chemicals to induce rainfall. Both were active during the normal rainy season, making an evaluation of their effectiveness impossible for either scientists or the drought-stricken farmers who hired rainmakers. Our amusement at their foolishness colors how we read the chapter on Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir’s experiments in cloud-seeding beginning in 1946. Fleming labels Langmuir’s passionate sponsorship of cloud-seeding based on slender experimental evidence as “pathological science.” When he argues that “over-reliance on the credentials of a scientist, for example, a Nobel laureate” (p. 139) feeds pathological science, it is obvious that this argument is constructed to address current schemes as much as historical developments.

A clear argument of the book is that climate modification is not inherently benign despite its current manifestation as the solution to the shared crisis of greenhouse gases. Fleming’s coverage of the involvement of the U.S. military in weather modification techniques during the Vietnam War makes this point. Operation Motorpool, begun in 1967, consisted of over 2,600 sorties to seed clouds over the Ho Chi Minh Trail to disrupt the flow of supplies. It was not the only use of weather modification by the U.S. military during wartime, but this program fueled the push to ban the militarization of climate control by national law and international treaties.

Some readers will find the dominance of current concerns in shaping the structure of this book to be an important inclusion of historical perspective in modern policy decisions, while others may be bothered by its presentist perspective. Are there “historical understandings” when we engage history on its own...