Category: International Geophysical Year

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International Geophysical Year Science Scientists

May 28, 1956 – Time Magazine reports on “One Big Greenhouse”

On this day, 28 May 1956, Time magazine ran an article with the following text:

“Since the start of the industrial revolution, mankind has been burning fossil fuel (coal, oil, etc.) and adding its carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In 50 years or so this process, says Director Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate… “Dr. Revelle has not reached the stage of warning against this catastrophe, but he and other geophysicists intend to keep watching and recording. During the International Geophysical Year (1957-58), teams of scientists will take inventory of the earth’s CO2 and observe how it shifts between air and sea. They will try to find out whether the CO2 blanket has been growing thicker, and what the effect has been. When all their data have been studied, they may be able to predict whether man’s factory chimneys and auto exhausts will eventually cause salt water to flow in the streets of New York and London.” –

“One Big Greenhouse,” Time magazine, May 28, 1956.

Why this matters

It’s nice context for the “puzzle” Roger Revelle asked Charles Keeling to look at.

What happened next?

Revelle hired Keeling (check out Joshua Wienberg’s “The next 100 years” for more about this.

The Keeling Curve was born.

“We” ignored it.

The end.

Categories
International Geophysical Year Technophilia United States of America Weather modification

January 1, 1958 – Control the weather before the Commies do…

On this day, 64 years ago the New York Times had a front page story with the title “US is Urged to Seek Methods to Control the World’s Weather”. New York Times, 1 January, p1

Written by one John Finney it begins…

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 — A special advisory committee recommended to President Eisenhower today an expanded and vigorous Government research program into how to control or modify the world’s weather

This was of course peak-Cold War. A few months previously the Russians, having captured better Nazi rocket scientists than the Americans had managed to paperclip, had aput a small metal ball into orbit, causing panic and despair.

It was also in the middle of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) ( at topic to which we will return).

Given the general paranoia and offense to the Uncle Sam’s amour propre, it’s surprising we didn’t end up with a “cloud gap” to match the illusory-but-useful bomber gap and missile gap…

Why this matters: we need to remember that the early history of understanding the climate is wrapped up in military needs (think about the British Navy and the Met Office) and computational models – see Edwards, 2010). It’s all part of the whole “give me absolute control over every living soul” thing that is steadily dooming us.

There is a strand of conspiratorial thinking, and fiction, which has ‘weather wars’ successfully being fought (I have a bunch of these novels, and should write about them. They’re fun, while bonkers).

What happened next? The IGY yielded a great findings (though the Pentagon briefly baulked at continuing to fund the C02 measures on Mauna Loa – that’s for another time). Weather modification experiments continued, but came up against the limits of human power.

References

Edwards, P. (2010). A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. MIT Press

Finney, J. (1958) “US is Urged to Seek Methods to Control the World’s Weather”. New York Times, 1 January, p1

Further reading

Fleming, J. (2012) Fixing the Sky: the Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. Columbia University Press.

Hamblin, J. (2013) Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism. Oxford University Press

Harper, K. (2008). Climate control: United States weather modification in the cold war and beyond. Endeavour, Volume 32, Issue 1, pp. 20-26.