James Rodger Fleming, “Weather as a Weapon: The troubling history of geoengineering so far,” Slate Magazine
Is there a technological fix for global warming? Where would we put a “planetary thermostat,” and who would control the settings?
Archive for September, 2010
Slate
September 24th, 2010The Page 99 Test
September 21st, 2010“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” –Ford Madox Ford
Page 99 of Fixing the Sky tells two stories of rain fakers: the charlatans Doctor Sykes and Colonel Stingo who conducted a weather betting scam at Belmont race track Read more »
National Public Radio: A Very Scary Light Show
September 17th, 2010Robert Krulwich, “The Bomb Watchers.”
This is an actual case of geoengineering (planetary scale intervention) in 1962.
The American Scholar: Prozac for the Planet
September 16th, 2010Geoengineering in any form looks downright dangerous to Colby College historian James Fleming, whose latest book is Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. Fleming does not mince words: “Geoengineering is in fact untested and dangerous. We don’t understand it, we can’t test it on smaller than planetary scales, and we don’t have the political capital, wisdom, or will to govern it. Planetary tinkering is not ‘cheap,’ as some economists claim, since the side effects are unknown. It poses a moral hazard by possibly reducing incentives to mitigate. It could be attempted unilaterally, or worse, proliferate among rogue states, and . . . learning from history, it would be militarized. Geoengineering could violate a number of existing treaties.”
– Quoting Christopher Cokinos in The American Scholar (Autumn 2010).
