|
And now let's indulge in a spot of crazed megalomania and start
mucking about with the weather. I mean, why not play God for
bit? Go ahead; flood the Sahara, melt the ice caps. What harm
could it do?
The idea of controlling the weather goes back to the 1920s when the
space pioneer Hermann Oberth came up with a scheme for placing giant
mirrors measuring 100 miles in diameter in Earth orbit to reflect the
Sun's rays back on the planet. Not only would it provide a
cumbersome substitute for street lighting, but by using a fleet of ten
mirrors in concert Oberth planned to warm the sub-polar regions and
eliminate seasonal temperature extremes. It was a plan that
Hugo Gernsback got behind in
a second and the creator of scientifiction swooned at the thought of
"perpetual spring over the entire world." Of course, Oberth
pointed out that such a mirror was also one heck of a weapon, as any
James Bond fan can tell you, but if the odd city faces incineration in
the name of progress, who am I to object?
In the 1933, Hugo Gernsback, not satisfied with
space mirrors, published this quaint little idea for giving the
interior of the United States a more equitable climate: Build a
huge bank of solar power stations to pump seawater through gigantic
tunnels and flood most of the southwestern states so that the water
could evaporate and raise the continent's humidity a bit.
Also the ire of everyone from Carson City, Nevada
to Salt Lake City, Utah when you explain that their homes are going to
be ten feet underwater.
 After the Second World War, some scientists felt that what with
splitting the atom and all, harnessing the forces of nature should be
a snap. The American government started looking keenly at the
idea of controlling the weather and were soon displaying the sort of
confidence that might make one think they were talking about building
an ornamental pond instead of climate engineering with the chief White
House adviser on weather modification, Captain Howard T. Orville,
saying that the US defence department was studying "ways to manipulate
the charges of the Earth and sky and so affect the weather by using an
electronic beam to ionise or de-ionise the atmosphere over a given
area." Nothing to it. Flip a switch
and Hey Presto; summer days on command.
A more sober approach came in 1962 with the start of Project
Stormfury, which for the next eighteen years tried to control the path
and force of hurricanes by strategic cloud seeding. This
had some promising early results, but hurricanes proved to be as about
as predictable as a toddler's moods, so it never came to much,
although projects like this did act as the inspiration for the Walt
Disney short Eyes in Space. This documentary
predicted a global weather control network that operated like a
combination NASA, Coastal Command, and Dan Dare headquarters with lots
of grim square-jawed types bending intently over view screens in an
ultra-modern command centre as they ordered fleets of cool robot
planes, missile batteries, and space stations to wage war against
in-coming typhoons in a proto-Gerry Anderson technofest.
Which is as the future should be.
|
