Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Late Night Live, Fixing the Sky: The chequered history of playing with the weather, Interview with Philip Adams, 10/19/2010. Audio here…
AHA National History Center, New Books in History, Fixing the Sky, Interview with Marshall Poe, 10/20/2010. Audio here…
The book launch on Wednesday, October 6 drew 60 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the following day at AAAS there were also 60 guests. Thank you for turning out, for the good questions, and for your kind and helpful comments. Wilson is posting the video of their event and AAAS is preparing a news report.
…on October 6th, in Washington, D.C., the Woodrow Wilson Center will be the site of a presentation by James Rodger Fleming, a professor of science, technology and society at Colby College and author of “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control.”
If, as the Washington Post article suggests, there is an interest in geoengineering, Fleming writes that “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.” Read the entire article…
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?
“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 trackMore
Robert Krulwich, “The Bomb Watchers.”
This is an actual case of geoengineering (planetary scale intervention) in 1962.
Geoengineering 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).
New York Times, June 28, 2010 by Cornelia Dean, “When the Day After Tomorrow has Come,”
[Fleming maintains that] “geoengineering proposals are “untested, untestable and dangerous beyond belief.” He fits them neatly into what he calls “a long tradition of imaginative and speculative literature involving the ‘control’ of nature.” Read more…
The hokum and hubris of geoengineering our climate
FIXING the weather is an old science fiction standby. Today, some believe we can fix our atmosphere’s ills by geoengineering the climate. Science historian James Rodger Fleming is having none of it. Read more…