Seventy seven years ago, on this day, June 15th, 1947 an experiment took place…,
The classic cold-war pronouncement on weather control belongs to General George C. Kenney, commander of the Strategic Air Command: “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.” New York Times 15 June 1947
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 310ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The first experiment with creating rain clouds was by tipping dry ice into them.
The context was that we just split the atom. Surely control of all of nature could not be far behind. And if you can make it rain, make the deserts bloom. You can feed the world, you can control the world.
What we learned is the ancient dreams of predicting or even controlling the weather. Got turbo boosted with the coming of turbo jets. See what I did there?
What happened next, lots of excitement about weather modification. And that also ended up kind of morphing into concern about inadvertent weather and climate modifications, including carbon dioxide build-up. And by the late 50s, this was being spoken of by all sorts of people.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
June 15, 1994 – Canberra Times soils itself by publishing denialist claptrap
The Guardian holds a climate summit. We. Are. Saved. June 15, 2009.