🌀 It's actually a huge failure that we can't control hurricanes
Weather control is another 1960s Up Wing techno-dream that would come in handy right now
Such are the times in which we live: The powerful back-to-back hurricanes striking Florida have predictably led to conspiracy-theorist speculation. Maybe the federal government or some other entity is to blame! Who knows, they might be capable of steering or intensifying hurricanes for various reasons, including some sort of political manipulation!
I’m seeing a lot of unhinged folks, for instance, pointing to the existence of weather modification patents, which highlights both a misunderstanding of the US patent system and the state of weather modification technology. (By the way, I would definitely read a deep-dive look into the popularity of the X-Files during the 1990s economic boom and how it might be linked to the long-term rise of conspiracy thinking in America.)
That said, the notion of weather control is as much a part of postwar futurism as flying cars and space colonies. For example: A 1964 RAND Corporation survey asked a group of experts when “limited weather control, in the sense of substantially affecting regional weather at acceptable cost” would be feasible, with answers suggesting a timeline from the mid-1980s at the earliest and the year 2000 at the latest. It also found a median prediction of 1990 as when we would be capable of enough weather control to destroy an enemy’s crops or flood its territory. Good news for Pentagon planners: By 2000, “weather manipulation for military purposes will be possible." Actually, not.
In the 1968 book Toward the Year 2018, a compilation of expert forecasts published by the Foreign Policy Association, there was an entire chapter on weather control written by Thomas F. Malone, director of research at Travelers Insurance and chair of the Committee on Atmospheric Sciences of the National Academy of Science. Malone believed “the next fifty years will be crucial for controlling, to a significant extent, this particularly sensitive part of our physical environment.” Regional weather modification — increasing rainfall, reducing hail, suppressing lighting — seemed feasible, with even wide-scale control of hurricanes given 50-50 odds over the half-century.
Washington versus hurricanes
There was a notable US government project to control hurricanes: Project Stormfury. As Washington Post reporter Scott Dance wrote earlier this year, scientists in the 1960s attempted to weaken hurricanes by seeding the eyewall with silver iodide from aircraft, causing a new, wider eye to form around the storm's center, reducing the hurricane's maximum wind speeds. The theory was tested on four separate hurricanes, and initial results were promising. Wind speeds reportedly decreased by 10 to 30 percent in half of the experiments, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But as meteorologists gained a deeper understanding of hurricane behavior in subsequent years, Dance writes, they realized that eyewall replacement cycles occur naturally in many storms. This discovery made it impossible to determine whether the observed weakening was due to human intervention or natural processes.
Dance: “Stormfury disbanded in the early 1980s after a National Academy of Sciences panel concluded that a better understanding of hurricanes was needed before continuing the research. NOAA no longer conducts any research aimed at modifying hurricanes, officials said.”
Today, however, fears that a warming world will mean more destructive hurricanes are prompting new thinking on the subject. Dance highlights a Norwegian company, OceanTherm, that proposes using "bubble curtains" to cool Atlantic surface waters — perforated pipes would pump air to mix cold deep water with warm surface water, cooling hurricane-prone areas — potentially sapping storms of energy. Japan's Moonshot Research and Development Program is exploring various strategies, including cloud seeding, wind barriers, and wind turbines to redirect and weaken storms. (Bill Gates has an interest in this field, too.)
Let’s cool things off
Then there are the broader efforts to engineer a cooler climate through forms of geoengineering: reforesting the Sahara, building carbon-capture machines, or spraying stuff into the atmosphere to reflect a smidgen of sunlight. On that last approach, back in March, I podcast chatted with Yale’s Wake Smith and Harvard’s David Keith about their MIT Technology Review piece, “Solar geoengineering could start soon if it starts small.” They discuss the potential for a country or group of countries to launch small-scale deployment of stratospheric aerosol injection within five years. Such a project might use existing aircraft to inject 100 kilotons of sulfur annually at a 15.5 kilometer altitude.
Smith and Keith in the piece: “The cooling effect would be enough to delay global rise in temperature for about a third of a year, an offset that would last as long as the subscale deployment was maintained. And because solar geoengineering is more effective at countering the rise in extreme precipitation than the rise in temperature, the deployment would delay the increasing intensity of tropical cyclones by more than half a year.”
This measured pace — perhaps scaling up after mid-century — would allow for careful observation of impacts, method adjustments if necessary, and mitigation of any unforeseen consequences.
Keeping our eyes on the skies
Yet even a trial project would no doubt spur more wild conspiracy theorizing in this age of distrust, including toward climate scientists. It’s an issue addressed in a new Bloomberg op-ed, “Geoengineering Can Save the Planet — If We Demystify It” by Lara Williams. She notes that carbon dioxide removal technologies face public skepticism due to various environmental and health concerns:
Some fears are rooted in a gut feeling: Ocean alkalinity enhancement, for example, involves adding an alkaline substance to water in order to speed up the ocean’s natural carbon cycle. Though ultimately it’s accelerating a natural process by adding widely used materials like limestone or magnesium hydroxide, the method runs counter to the narrative that we shouldn’t dump stuff into the ocean. No wonder folks are suspicious. Conversely, methods deemed closer to nature — such as planting trees — have greater public acceptance. Other fears are based on past experience. Direct air capture (DAC) facilities use pipelines to transport the CO2 removed from ambient air to underground storage sites. But memories of the CO2 pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, are fresh — particularly in neighboring Louisiana, where one of the Department of Energy’s new DAC hubs, Project Cypress, will be located.
Williams explains that CDR companies are dealing with skepticism by talking openly with local communities. And to prove their methods are safe and effective, they're running real-world tests and getting independent experts to verify results. But if there’s a problem with carbon removal, I have deep concerns about what would happen when solar geoengineering meets social media. Too bad, we just might need to break the glass on that one.
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Micro Reads
▶ Economics
Politically Homeless in the Land of Economics - Conversable Economist
Unions Need to Join the 21st Century Economy - Bberg Opinion
Immovable Economy Thwarts Irresistible Geo-Risk - Bberg Opinion
▶ Business
Google break-up could turn Big Tech into Medium Tech - FT Opinion
▶ Policy/Politics
Google Should Worry About Regulators’ Case Against Its AI Push - Bberg Opinion
The Education Crisis Neither Candidate Will Address - NYT Opinion
How to Win Techno-Economic Competition with China - The National Interest
The world’s renewable energy potential is gridlocked - FT Opinion
▶ AI/Digital
▶ Clean Energy/Climate
▶ Robotics/AVs
▶ Space/Transportation
▶ Up Wing/Down Wing
A Godfather of AI Just Won a Nobel. He Has Been Warning the Machines Could Take Over the World. - WSJ
How Shame, Blame and the Internet Eroded Trust in Science - Bberg Opinion
▶ Substacks/Newsletters
AI is fueling a data center boom - AI Supremacy
Will genAI cause a compute crunch? No. - Exponential View
Media organizations are blowing their endorsements - Slow Boring
No, Our Adaptation to Global Warming Is Not Largely Fictional - Breakthrough Journal