“And yet many people today believe that weather modification is a hoax: the early overselling of rainmaking somehow caused it, down the line, to be grouped in the public mind with conspiracy theories about mind-altering ‘chemtrails,’ shock-jock speculation that the government manufactures tornadoes, and paranoid fantasies about the ‘weather wars’ involving earthquakes broadcast via the stratosphere. The reality is far less dramatic.” -Ginger Strand, The Brothers Vonnegut
In 1945, after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was much hand-wringing in the scientific community about the ethical implications of their physical research—research which had been turned toward purely destructive purposes; technology which threatened then (as now) to dehumanize the entire planet. Within this social and intellectual milieu two brothers soon found themselves part of a new corporate culture at General Electric: Kurt Vonnegut, freshly returned from his experiences as a POW in Germany, and his more empirically-oriented brother Bernard, who spent the war de-icing planes for the Air Force.
While the brothers daydreamed about nuclear disarmament and world government in the few years before the Soviet Union detonated its own nukes and the world spiraled into Cold War, a new technology captured the interest of GE, and the military: seeding clouds with dry ice and silver iodide, making it rain it the desert, busting up hurricanes at sea, filling reservoirs on demand, and perhaps even wreaking environmental devastation upon the enemies of the United States.
The Brothers Vonnegut covers the years they spent at GE, as Bernard Vonnegut, along with Irving Langmuir, pursued research in weather modification, while Kurt wrote spiffy articles for the GE press office and dreamed of self-reliance as a writer of fiction. Ginger Strand’s book is meticulously true to life, “reconstructing the day-to-day activities of historical figures through published works, interviews, and archival sources.”
While Langmuir fixated on dry ice as a way to nucleate supercooled water vapor, Bernard Vonnegut pored through chemical tables and discovered something he thought would work just as well: silver iodide. A strange series of coincidences led Langmuir and Vonnegut to believe cloud-seeding was more efficacious than it really was. A mischievous font of synchronicity confounded their scientific conclusions. Today, according to Wikipedia,
“New technology and research has produced reliable results that make cloud seeding a dependable and affordable water-supply practice for many regions. While practiced widely around the world, the effectiveness of cloud seeding is still a matter of academic debate.”
According to Ginger Strand,
“Today’s changing climate has renewed interest in weather modification. In the West and the Great Plains, severe drought and diminishing aquifiers have led water utilities, hydropower producers, agriculture groups, and ski resorts to fund cloud-seeding programs. In Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, Claifornia, Utah, and Nevada, rainmakers are hired to augment the snowpack.”
The book also covers the work of other scientists in the post-war period, including Norbert Wiener and his landmark book Cybernetics, John von Neumann and his computational approach to forecasting the weather, and the emergence of chaos theory as a counterpoint to efforts to predict and control the weather.
Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, satirized the corporate culture of GE and a future in which labor was done by machines and the proletariat rendered effectively useless. He would not attain lasting literary success until the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five seventeen years later, a phantasmagorical account of his experience in Dresden as Allied fire-bombing killed 250,000 civilians and layed the jewel of a city to ruin. As for GE,
“They continued to move right throughout the 1950’s, blacklisting employees who wouldn’t fully cooperatate with HUAC and gradually reining in its unions through tough negotiation tactics that came to be known as Boulwarism. Two years after Bernie left, GE hired an under-employed actor to serve as its public relations spokesman and to host the company television show GE Theater.”
That man was Ronald Reagan.
There is also the story of Harry Wexler, who in 1962 noted “we are releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other gases and particles to the lower atmosphere which may have serious effects on the radiation of heat balance which determine our present pattern of climate and weather.” He died months later, of a heart attack, at the age of 51.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/25L4wn2
“And yet many people today believe that weather modification is a hoax: the early overselling of rainmaking somehow caused it, down the line, to be grouped in the public mind with conspiracy theories about mind-altering ‘chemtrails,’ shock-jock speculation that the government manufactures tornadoes, and paranoid fantasies about the ‘weather wars’ involving earthquakes broadcast via the stratosphere. The reality is far less dramatic.” -Ginger Strand, The Brothers Vonnegut
In 1945, after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was much hand-wringing in the scientific community about the ethical implications of their physical research—research which had been turned toward purely destructive purposes; technology which threatened then (as now) to dehumanize the entire planet. Within this social and intellectual milieu two brothers soon found themselves part of a new corporate culture at General Electric: Kurt Vonnegut, freshly returned from his experiences as a POW in Germany, and his more empirically-oriented brother Bernard, who spent the war de-icing planes for the Air Force.
While the brothers daydreamed about nuclear disarmament and world government in the few years before the Soviet Union detonated its own nukes and the world spiraled into Cold War, a new technology captured the interest of GE, and the military: seeding clouds with dry ice and silver iodide, making it rain it the desert, busting up hurricanes at sea, filling reservoirs on demand, and perhaps even wreaking environmental devastation upon the enemies of the United States.
The Brothers Vonnegut covers the years they spent at GE, as Bernard Vonnegut, along with Irving Langmuir, pursued research in weather modification, while Kurt wrote spiffy articles for the GE press office and dreamed of self-reliance as a writer of fiction. Ginger Strand’s book is meticulously true to life, “reconstructing the day-to-day activities of historical figures through published works, interviews, and archival sources.”
While Langmuir fixated on dry ice as a way to nucleate supercooled water vapor, Bernard Vonnegut pored through chemical tables and discovered something he thought would work just as well: silver iodide. A strange series of coincidences led Langmuir and Vonnegut to believe cloud-seeding was more efficacious than it really was. A mischievous font of synchronicity confounded their scientific conclusions. Today, according to Wikipedia,
“New technology and research has produced reliable results that make cloud seeding a dependable and affordable water-supply practice for many regions. While practiced widely around the world, the effectiveness of cloud seeding is still a matter of academic debate.”
According to Ginger Strand,
“Today’s changing climate has renewed interest in weather modification. In the West and the Great Plains, severe drought and diminishing aquifiers have led water utilities, hydropower producers, agriculture groups, and ski resorts to fund cloud-seeding programs. In Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, Claifornia, Utah, and Nevada, rainmakers are hired to augment the snowpack.”
The book also covers the work of other scientists in the post-war period, including Norbert Wiener and his landmark book Cybernetics, John von Neumann and his computational approach to forecasting the weather, and the emergence of chaos theory as a counterpoint to efforts to predict and control the weather.
Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, satirized the corporate culture of GE and a future in which labor was done by machines and the proletariat rendered effectively useless. He would not attain lasting literary success until the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five seventeen years later, a phantasmagorical account of his experience in Dresden as Allied fire-bombing killed 250,000 civilians and layed the jewel of a city to ruin. As for GE,
“They continued to move right throughout the 1950’s, blacklisting employees who wouldn’t fully cooperatate with HUAC and gradually reining in its unions through tough negotiation tactics that came to be known as Boulwarism. Two years after Bernie left, GE hired an under-employed actor to serve as its public relations spokesman and to host the company television show GE Theater.”
That man was Ronald Reagan.
There is also the story of Harry Wexler, who in 1962 noted “we are releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other gases and particles to the lower atmosphere which may have serious effects on the radiation of heat balance which determine our present pattern of climate and weather.” He died months later, of a heart attack, at the age of 51.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/25L4wn2
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