# The Man Who Played With Hurricanes

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 23 Jun 2023, 38 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/8e999db0-8463-45ce-8b7b-b02a00904c10/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

Today, the idea of controlling the weather is controversial. Scientists who research geoengineering have even received death threats. But once upon a time, people were optimistic about remaking the climate in entire regions of the world. They approached this science with a touching faith in the power of human creativity. Absent-minded genius Irving Langmuir was one such scientist. He dreamt of making deserts bloom and conjuring rain from an arid sky. He even believed that his experiments with a hurricane had succeeded in redirecting its path. Why did we stop trying to control the weather? And might geoengineering help us solve climate change - or have we missed our chance? For a full list of sources, please visit timharford.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin Irving Langmuir stood in the control tower at the
[0:25] Speaker 1: airport at Schenectady, upstate New York. He was gazing intently
[0:31] Speaker 1: upwards uberinoculars a little single propeller aeroplane. Langmuir was in
[0:37] Speaker 1: his mid sixties, gray hair, brown glasses every inch, the
[0:42] Speaker 1: distinguished scientist. The year was nineteen forty six, a cold
[0:47] Speaker 1: and crisp November morning, barely above freezing, with an almost
[0:51] Speaker 1: completely clear blue sky. Almost there were some clouds fifty
[0:57] Speaker 1: miles away, and that's where the little plane was heading.
[1:02] Speaker 1: The plane had four seats. Two were occupied in one
[1:06] Speaker 1: sat the pilot in the other of inglang Muir's assistant,
[1:10] Speaker 1: a man called Vincent Schaeffer. He had with him a
[1:14] Speaker 1: cardboard box containing six pounds of crushed dry ice and
[1:19] Speaker 1: a motorized dispenser he'd rigged up back in the lab.
[1:22] Speaker 1: The little plane had taken forty minutes to climb to
[1:25] Speaker 1: ten thousand feet, but the cloud that Vincent Schaefer wanted
[1:28] Speaker 1: to fly into was higher still.
[1:32] Speaker 2: Can we get to it? He asked.
[1:34] Speaker 1: The pilot pushed the plane upwards. At thirteen thousand feet,
[1:39] Speaker 1: they reached the cloud just a little higher Schaefer looked
[1:43] Speaker 1: at his thermometer minus seventeen point five degrees fahrenheit twenty
[1:49] Speaker 1: seven point five degrees celsius. He fired up the dispenser
[1:55] Speaker 1: out into the cloud. When the first pound of dry ice,
[1:59] Speaker 1: the second, the third, then the dispenser jammed. Schaefer was
[2:04] Speaker 1: starting to feel dizzy. That's not surprising at fourteen thousand
[2:08] Speaker 1: feet in a plane that isn't pressurized. Forget the dispenser.
[2:12] Speaker 1: Shaeffer opened the plane's window and tipped out the rest
[2:15] Speaker 1: of the dry ice from the cardboard box. Back in
[2:23] Speaker 1: the control tower, Irving Langmuir stared at the cloud into
[2:27] Speaker 1: which the little plane had disappeared.
[2:30] Speaker 2: Was it changing?
[2:32] Speaker 3: Yes.
[2:33] Speaker 1: Within minutes, it began to shift and swirl, and then
[2:37] Speaker 1: out of the base of the cloud came just what
[2:40] Speaker 1: Langmuir had hoped to see, snow. There was no mistaking it.
[2:45] Speaker 1: He didn't even need his binoculars. From fifty miles away.
[2:49] Speaker 1: You could see the streamers of snow with a naked
[2:51] Speaker 1: eye before the little plane had even landed. Irving Langmuir
[2:57] Speaker 1: was on the phone to a journalist. This is history,
[3:01] Speaker 1: Langmuir said, mankind has finally learned to control the weather.
[3:06] Speaker 1: Of course we hadn't. We just started to fool around
[3:11] Speaker 1: with it. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales.
[3:43] Speaker 1: In the early nineteen hundreds, General Electric was one of
[3:47] Speaker 1: America's biggest companies. He'd like to invest in what would
[3:51] Speaker 1: nowadays call blue Skies research. When the young Irving Langmuir
[3:56] Speaker 1: left academia to start work at the company's campus since Schenectady,
[4:00] Speaker 1: he was given the usual welcome speech. Look around the lab, said,
[4:05] Speaker 1: Langmir's new boss. Work on any problem that interests you.
[4:09] Speaker 1: Don't bother with finding practical applications. Let me worry about that.
[4:14] Speaker 1: You just have fun. General Electric employed smart people and
[4:19] Speaker 1: let them do pretty much anything they liked. And Irving
[4:23] Speaker 1: Langmuir wasn't just smart, he was brilliant. He became the
[4:28] Speaker 1: first industrial chemist to win a Nobel Prize for discoveries
[4:33] Speaker 1: and investigations in surface chemistry. These discoveries did turn out
[4:38] Speaker 1: to have practical applications. Langmuir's work let General Electric corner
[4:43] Speaker 1: the market in gas filled incandescent light bulbs, not that
[4:48] Speaker 1: Langmuir cared much about that. He thirsted for knowledge, pure
[4:54] Speaker 1: and simple. Langmuir was the living stereotype of the absent
[4:59] Speaker 1: minded genius, famous for getting so deeply lost in.
[5:03] Speaker 2: Thought that he could be.
[5:04] Speaker 1: Oblivious to the world around him. There was the time
[5:08] Speaker 1: a woman fell down the stairs right in front of him.
[5:11] Speaker 1: As others rushed to help, Langmuir, in another world, didn't notice.
[5:17] Speaker 1: He stepped right over her and kept on walking. And
[5:21] Speaker 1: the time he forgot he was eating breakfast at home,
[5:24] Speaker 1: not in a restaurant, and left a tip for his
[5:27] Speaker 1: wife on the kitchen table. And the morning he turned
[5:30] Speaker 1: up at work without his car, it turned out he'd
[5:34] Speaker 1: been stuck in traffic, and he had simply left it
[5:37] Speaker 1: in the middle of the road and walked.
[5:42] Speaker 2: Now.
[5:42] Speaker 1: In nineteen forty six, Langmuir had a new obsession the weather.
[5:49] Speaker 1: During the war, he'd worked with the military to study
[5:52] Speaker 1: how ice forms on aircraft wings as they fly through clouds. Water,
[5:57] Speaker 1: of course, turns from liquid to solid when the temperature
[6:01] Speaker 1: drops below freezing point, except sometimes it doesn't. Clouds can
[6:06] Speaker 1: be in a state called super cool. The temperature drops
[6:10] Speaker 1: below freezing, but the tiny water droplets won't crystallize from
[6:14] Speaker 1: mist into ice unless something disturbs them. Langmuir and his
[6:21] Speaker 1: assistant Vincent Shaefer, both loved to ski. Their wartime work
[6:26] Speaker 1: made them look at the clouds above the hills on
[6:29] Speaker 1: a cold winter day and ask themselves, what if we
[6:33] Speaker 1: could make those super cooled clouds dispense snow on demand. Remember,
[6:40] Speaker 1: you could work on anything you liked at General Electric,
[6:44] Speaker 1: Langmuir and Shaefer decided to work on making snow. Shaefer
[6:49] Speaker 1: commandeered one of the chest freezers the company made. He
[6:52] Speaker 1: lined it with black velvet so he could see if
[6:55] Speaker 1: ice crystals were forming. Then he took a deep breath
[6:59] Speaker 1: and breathed slowly out into the freezer. His breath hung
[7:04] Speaker 1: there in a mist. Now he and Langmuir had their
[7:08] Speaker 1: very own own super cooled cloud right there in the lab.
[7:13] Speaker 2: What could they add to.
[7:14] Speaker 1: Their cloud that might make it form ice crystals? They
[7:19] Speaker 1: tried talcum powder, sulfur, magnesium oxide, no luck. Then one
[7:26] Speaker 1: summer day, the weather got so hot the freezer started
[7:30] Speaker 1: to struggle. Schaeffer needed to keep the temperature down, so
[7:34] Speaker 1: he got some dry ice. He dumped it back in
[7:37] Speaker 1: the freezer, and all at once, millions of tiny ice
[7:41] Speaker 1: crystals popped into being and settled on the black velvet lining.
[7:47] Speaker 2: It looked magical.
[7:49] Speaker 1: Vint and Schaeffer had made snow in the lab, could
[7:53] Speaker 1: he and langmure make it snow in the real world.
[7:56] Speaker 1: They waited impatiently for summer to turn to winter. They
[8:00] Speaker 1: rented a little four seater prop plane, and at last
[8:04] Speaker 1: a day arrived that was cold and clear, with distinct
[8:08] Speaker 1: clouds to aim for. Schennected in New York November the fourteenth,
[8:14] Speaker 1: scientists of the General Electric Company, flying in an airplane,
[8:18] Speaker 1: conducted experiments with a cloud and were successful in transforming
[8:22] Speaker 1: the cloud into snow. That's an announcement from General Electric.
[8:26] Speaker 1: It had its own in house news bureau to publicize
[8:29] Speaker 1: all the clever things its researchers did and help the
[8:32] Speaker 1: company's image. The press release stopped short of claiming that
[8:36] Speaker 1: mankind could now control the weather. For all his enthusiasm,
[8:41] Speaker 1: langmure knew they'd only done one experiment. Still, what promise.
[8:46] Speaker 1: It had shown a single.
[8:49] Speaker 3: Plane could generate hundreds of millions of tons of snow.
[8:52] Speaker 3: Thus a supply of moisture could be stored up for
[8:54] Speaker 3: the spring months to feed irrigation and water power projects.
[8:59] Speaker 3: Snow might also be produced at mountain resorts for the
[9:01] Speaker 3: benefit of skiers. The next month, December The little plane
[9:06] Speaker 3: went up again with a bigger load of ice, on
[9:10] Speaker 3: a day with more clouds in the sky. This time,
[9:14] Speaker 3: it didn't snow straight away, but once it started it
[9:19] Speaker 3: didn't stop. Across the Mont and upstate New York, the
[9:23] Speaker 3: snowstorm was epic. Dozens of cars crashed, businesses had to
[9:29] Speaker 3: shut up shop for a week. Langnuur was exultant. He
[9:34] Speaker 3: called his boss, the head of the research campus. We
[9:37] Speaker 3: did that, the boss said, don't tell any journalists. The
[9:43] Speaker 3: company's lawyers had started to think it might be unwise
[9:46] Speaker 3: for General Electric to go around claiming responsibility for the weather.
[9:52] Speaker 3: If they really had caused this snowstorm, that might not
[9:55] Speaker 3: be good for the company's image. With the people who
[9:58] Speaker 3: had crashed their cars or had to close their businesses,
[10:02] Speaker 3: they might decide to sue. The boss hatched a plan.
[10:07] Speaker 3: He called in the USA military. Would they be interested
[10:12] Speaker 3: in learning to control the weather?
[10:14] Speaker 1: They would. The boss told Langmuir that he wasn't to
[10:18] Speaker 1: meddle with clouds himself anymore. He could only advise the military.
[10:23] Speaker 1: They would conduct the experiments, and with any luck, they
[10:27] Speaker 1: would get the lawsuits if anything went wrong. Langmuir didn't
[10:31] Speaker 1: mind that at all. The military, after all, had bigger planes,
[10:37] Speaker 1: and Langmuir had big ambitions. He was already talking about
[10:41] Speaker 1: making deserts bloom and learning to control hurricanes. What would
[10:46] Speaker 1: happen if you dumped dry ice in a hurricane? He'd
[10:50] Speaker 1: like to find out. You couldn't try that in a
[10:53] Speaker 1: single engined, four seater prop plane, but you could in
[10:57] Speaker 1: a bomber. Langmuir and Shaefer theorized that the dry ice
[11:02] Speaker 1: might weaken a hurricane, but perhaps they shouldn't experiment on
[11:06] Speaker 1: one that would soon make landfall, just in case they
[11:10] Speaker 1: needed a storm that was heading away from anywhere it
[11:13] Speaker 1: could cause harm. In October nineteen forty seven, they got
[11:18] Speaker 1: their chance. Hurricane King had formed in the Caribbean. It
[11:23] Speaker 1: had clipped the western edge of Cuba and curved over
[11:27] Speaker 1: southern Florida, dumping vast amounts of rain. Now it was
[11:32] Speaker 1: drifting out into the Atlantic, further and further away from land.
[11:37] Speaker 1: It was an ideal test. From a military base near Tampa,
[11:43] Speaker 1: three bomber planes took off and flew towards the hurricane.
[11:47] Speaker 1: They were carrying one hundred and eighty pounds of dry ice,
[11:51] Speaker 1: a raft of scientific instruments to gather data and Vincent Schaeffer.
[11:57] Speaker 1: They found the storm three hundred and fifty miles out
[12:01] Speaker 1: to sea. They dumped the dry ice in it and
[12:03] Speaker 1: flew around for a while, taking photos and making observations.
[12:07] Speaker 1: Nothing too dramatic seemed to happen. They headed back to base.
[12:14] Speaker 1: As soon as they'd turned their backs on Hurricane King.
[12:18] Speaker 1: It did something nobody had expected. Cautionary tales will be
[12:26] Speaker 1: back in a moment. In her book Under a White Sky,
[12:44] Speaker 1: the author Elizabeth Colbert describes her encounters with people who
[12:48] Speaker 1: work on geo engineering ideas to fix climate change, not
[12:53] Speaker 1: just by reducing our emissions, but by intervening in the
[12:57] Speaker 1: climate in some other way. Those ideas are controversial. The
[13:02] Speaker 1: phrase under a white sky comes from a field of
[13:06] Speaker 1: geoengineering called solar radiuation management, shielding the earth from sunshine
[13:12] Speaker 1: to keep it cooler, like closing the blinds on your
[13:15] Speaker 1: window on a summer's day. You could do that by
[13:19] Speaker 1: shooting reflective particles into the stratosphere. One possible side effect
[13:25] Speaker 1: is turning the sky white. Colbert talks with an academic
[13:30] Speaker 1: who researches this idea. He gets hate mail, he tells her,
[13:34] Speaker 1: even death threats. She also talks to a physicist who
[13:38] Speaker 1: founded the field of negative emissions, basically sucking carbon dioxide
[13:43] Speaker 1: out of the atmosphere. He came up with the idea
[13:47] Speaker 1: after asking a friend over a beer, why is nobody
[13:50] Speaker 1: doing these really crazy big things anymore. Colbert visits a
[13:56] Speaker 1: startup in Iceland that's putting the idea of negative emissions
[14:00] Speaker 1: into practice. Picture an air conditioning unit stark on a
[14:04] Speaker 1: shipping container. It sucks in air, uses a chemical process
[14:09] Speaker 1: to extract the carbon dioxide and inject it underground, where
[14:13] Speaker 1: it turns to rock. The graduate students who founded the
[14:17] Speaker 1: startup tell Colbert they faced a lot of opposition. People said, guys,
[14:24] Speaker 1: you shouldn't be doing that. Those people weren't particularly worried
[14:29] Speaker 1: that the Icelandic shipping containers would damage the planet directly.
[14:33] Speaker 1: They were worried the shipping containers would foster complacency. We
[14:38] Speaker 1: don't yet know how well these ideas will work. And
[14:41] Speaker 1: if the general public gets the impression that scientists are
[14:45] Speaker 1: going to figure out how to fixed climate change, they
[14:47] Speaker 1: might think, great, we don't need to worry about reducing emissions.
[14:52] Speaker 1: But the idea of geoengineering wasn't always so controversial. In
[15:01] Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, scientists in the Soviet Union had a
[15:05] Speaker 1: problem they wanted to solve. For northern latitudes are a
[15:09] Speaker 1: gigantic ice box. The icy breath of the Arctic is
[15:13] Speaker 1: felt for thousands of kilometers around. It causes the permafrost
[15:17] Speaker 1: over vast expanses of Soviet lands, the silent tundra, and
[15:21] Speaker 1: the unexpected cold blasts which are feared by Ukrainian horticulturalists.
[15:27] Speaker 1: I'm quoting from a book called man Versus Climate, published
[15:31] Speaker 1: in Moscow in nineteen sixty one. Co author was Nikolai Rusin,
[15:36] Speaker 1: an outstanding climatologist with over fifty scientific publications. The other
[15:43] Speaker 1: Leah Flitt, a journalist with good experience in the field
[15:47] Speaker 1: of popularization of science. The book's publisher was so keen
[15:51] Speaker 1: to popularize this particular science that they put out an
[15:55] Speaker 1: English translation. The reader may ask, what senses there in
[15:59] Speaker 1: attempting to change the climate. Would it not be better
[16:03] Speaker 1: to leave this to nature and wait and see?
[16:05] Speaker 2: Of course not. The arcticgeis is a great disadvantage.
[16:09] Speaker 1: So what did Flit and Rousin think we could do
[16:13] Speaker 1: about the Arctic ice? They outline several ideas being discussed
[16:18] Speaker 1: by Soviet climatologists, you might scatter ash or peat dust
[16:23] Speaker 1: that would make the ice less reflective. It would absorb
[16:26] Speaker 1: more heat and start to melt. Scientists estimate that eighty
[16:31] Speaker 1: to one hundred kilograms of dust or ash per hectare
[16:35] Speaker 1: of ice ought to do the job. Alternatively, you might
[16:40] Speaker 1: use potassium to create a high altitude dust ring, similar
[16:44] Speaker 1: to that in circling Saturn at the right angle. A
[16:49] Speaker 1: ring around the planet would direct more sunshine onto the
[16:52] Speaker 1: northern latitudes.
[16:53] Speaker 2: And warm them up.
[16:55] Speaker 1: It would admittedly make the equator cooler too. That that
[17:00] Speaker 1: shouldn't cause any problems we couldn't solve. As Flit and
[17:04] Speaker 1: Rusin explained, the Africans would require warm dwellings and entirely
[17:09] Speaker 1: different clothes, shoes, etc. Flit and Rucin describe another proposal
[17:15] Speaker 1: for a fifty five mile dam across the Bearing Strait
[17:20] Speaker 1: between Siberia and Alaska. Such a dam would change the
[17:24] Speaker 1: direction of warming ocean currents the central heating pipelines of
[17:29] Speaker 1: our planet, point those pipelines towards the far North, and
[17:34] Speaker 1: in just three or four years, the Arctic would be
[17:38] Speaker 1: completely free from ice. Building a dam to Alaska would
[17:43] Speaker 1: need America's cooperation. Wouldn't that be unthinkable at the height
[17:49] Speaker 1: of the Cold War Not, according to then presidential candidate
[17:53] Speaker 1: John F. Kennedy. The idea of the dam, said Kennedy,
[17:58] Speaker 1: was certainly worth exploring. Flit and Rucin waxed lyrical about
[18:05] Speaker 1: the benefits. No more frost in Moscow orchards blew in
[18:09] Speaker 1: Alaska and northern Canada. All this is splendid, But is
[18:14] Speaker 1: it really possible technically?
[18:16] Speaker 2: Yes.
[18:18] Speaker 1: Nowadays we often see in the news that Arctic ice
[18:21] Speaker 1: is melting and perma frost is disappearing, and we tend
[18:25] Speaker 1: not to think of that news as splendid. We worry now,
[18:29] Speaker 1: not about the cold but global warming. You might assume
[18:33] Speaker 1: that Leah Flitt and Nikolai Rusin hadn't heard of global warming.
[18:38] Speaker 2: You'd be wrong.
[18:40] Speaker 1: The book mentions the greenhouse effect, although the term is
[18:44] Speaker 1: new enough that the translator puts it in scare quotes.
[18:47] Speaker 1: Flit and Rousin site figures on carbon dioxide emissions that
[18:51] Speaker 1: suggest that the mean temperature of the Earth's atmosphere will
[18:55] Speaker 1: rise four to five degrees in less than fifty years.
[19:00] Speaker 1: Four to five degrees centigrade in fifty years. That's nearly
[19:05] Speaker 1: ten degrees fahrenheit. Thankfully it hasn't happen that fast, not yet.
[19:12] Speaker 1: But what fascinates me is the lesson the author's draw.
[19:17] Speaker 1: The prospect of global warming doesn't scare them as it
[19:20] Speaker 1: scares us.
[19:22] Speaker 2: Quite the opposite.
[19:23] Speaker 1: They see it as encouraging evidence that man can modify
[19:27] Speaker 1: and hence control the climate. If we can affect temperature
[19:32] Speaker 1: so much as a mere byproduct of our everyday routines,
[19:36] Speaker 1: just imagine what we might achieve if we actively put.
[19:39] Speaker 2: Our minds to it.
[19:41] Speaker 1: Presently available power, resources and technological possibilities permit us to
[19:46] Speaker 1: remake the climate of entire regions.
[19:49] Speaker 2: Of the world.
[19:50] Speaker 1: Just as today we plan the construction of new cities,
[19:54] Speaker 1: so in the future we shall have to plan improvements
[19:56] Speaker 1: in the climate the things people used to believe. It's
[20:01] Speaker 1: easy to mock them, but it also makes me uncomfortable,
[20:05] Speaker 1: because we don't generally mock people for a sincerely held
[20:08] Speaker 1: belief in the capacity of human ingenuity to make life better,
[20:13] Speaker 1: especially not people who've proved their scientific chops, like Nikolai
[20:17] Speaker 1: Rusin with his fifty publications or Irving Langmuir with his
[20:21] Speaker 1: Nobel prize. The authors of Man versus Climate share Langmuir's
[20:27] Speaker 1: fascination with clouds, and not just with how to make
[20:31] Speaker 1: them snow, but also how to make them disappear. Many
[20:36] Speaker 1: regions of the Soviet Union are deprived of sunlight for
[20:40] Speaker 1: several months. By destroying such cloud cover, man could substantially
[20:45] Speaker 1: improve climatic conditions.
[20:47] Speaker 2: Crops would ripen more quickly.
[20:50] Speaker 1: When you eat man versus climate, there's no tone of
[20:53] Speaker 1: self awareness, no sense of I know this sounds crazy,
[20:57] Speaker 1: but hear me out. Instead, there's just a sense of calm,
[21:02] Speaker 1: measured optimism. Clouds, fog, thunderstorms, and hailstorms cannot be controlled
[21:08] Speaker 1: in the same way, say hand or engine driven machinery,
[21:12] Speaker 1: and yet man will eventually learn how to control, or
[21:15] Speaker 1: rather influence them in the desired manner. Man will eventually
[21:20] Speaker 1: learn to influence the weather and plan improvements in the climate.
[21:25] Speaker 1: Nobody now thinks we can do any of that. Why
[21:29] Speaker 1: did we lose that sense of ambition, that touching faith
[21:32] Speaker 1: in the power of human ingenuity, or as the physicists
[21:37] Speaker 1: who came up with negative emissions puts it, why is
[21:41] Speaker 1: nobody doing these really crazy big things anymore? The day
[21:48] Speaker 1: after he had dumped dry ice on Hurricane King in
[21:52] Speaker 1: a US Air Force bomber Vincent Schafer flew home from
[21:56] Speaker 1: Florida to New York. He had planned to use the
[21:59] Speaker 1: time on the plane to write up his notes, but
[22:02] Speaker 1: in the sky high above Georgia, Vincent Shaffer's plane began
[22:07] Speaker 1: to jutterer, and soon it was lurching violently. This was
[22:13] Speaker 1: the worst turbulence Schaefer had ever experienced, and he couldn't
[22:18] Speaker 1: write a word. He put down his pen and his
[22:21] Speaker 1: notebook and clung the arm rests of his seat. Later
[22:27] Speaker 1: he found out what had been flying through Hurricane King.
[22:33] Speaker 1: What was it doing in Georgia It should have been
[22:36] Speaker 1: hundreds of miles away, heading further out into the Atlantic.
[22:40] Speaker 1: The storm had done something completely.
[22:43] Speaker 2: Out of the blue.
[22:44] Speaker 1: It had abruptly turned back towards land, and far from weakening,
[22:49] Speaker 1: it had picked up strength again. Hurricane King battered the
[22:53] Speaker 1: coastline around Savannah with one hundred mile an hour winds.
[22:57] Speaker 1: It caused twelve foot storm surges. A falling tree killed
[23:02] Speaker 1: a man. The storm destroyed crops and damaged hundreds of buildings,
[23:07] Speaker 1: damage that cost millions of dollars to repair. Irving Langmuir
[23:13] Speaker 1: was thrilled.
[23:14] Speaker 2: We did that.
[23:16] Speaker 1: The lawyers at ge were having conniptions again, but the
[23:20] Speaker 1: dry ice had redirected the storm accidentally. Langmuir was sure
[23:26] Speaker 1: of it, and he was also sure that meant they
[23:29] Speaker 1: could learn to do it deliberately, to direct storms exactly
[23:33] Speaker 1: where they wanted them to go. Langmuir gave an interview
[23:38] Speaker 1: to Fortune magazine.
[23:40] Speaker 2: There is a.
[23:40] Speaker 1: Reasonable probability, he told them that in one or two years,
[23:45] Speaker 1: man will be able to abolish most damage effects from hurricanes.
[23:50] Speaker 1: Of course we didn't cautionary tales will return. At General
[24:12] Speaker 1: Electric's research campus Irving, Langmuir acquired another assistant, Bernard Vonnegut,
[24:19] Speaker 1: brother of the novelist Kurt, who also worked for a
[24:23] Speaker 1: while in the company's news bureau. Their time in Schonnectady
[24:27] Speaker 1: is described in Ginger Strand's book The Brothers Vonnegut. Like
[24:32] Speaker 1: all the smart scientists General Electric employed, Bernard was told
[24:37] Speaker 1: look around the lab and work on anything that takes
[24:40] Speaker 1: your interest. Bernard was interested in Vincent Schaeffer's freezer, lined
[24:46] Speaker 1: with black velvet and containing a super cooled cloud of breath.
[24:52] Speaker 1: Schaefer had discovered that pellets of dry ice made the
[24:55] Speaker 1: cloud in the freezer form. Snow, what else might Bernard thought?
[25:01] Speaker 1: A rapid expansion of compressed air might do the trick.
[25:06] Speaker 1: He went to a toy store and bought a children's
[25:08] Speaker 1: pop gun for seventy five cents. He lowered it into
[25:12] Speaker 1: the freezer, pulled the trigger, and it worked. Millions of
[25:17] Speaker 1: ice crystals popped into being something else made snow in
[25:21] Speaker 1: the freezer too.
[25:23] Speaker 2: Silver iodied.
[25:25] Speaker 1: One sub zero winter night, as Bernard drove home from work,
[25:30] Speaker 1: it occurred to him that the moisture in the air
[25:33] Speaker 1: must be super cooled. What would silver iodide do to that?
[25:39] Speaker 1: He got home, stuffed some newspaper and silver iodied into
[25:43] Speaker 1: an oil burner and carried it around. Before long, he
[25:47] Speaker 1: got a call from his next door neighbor, a colleague
[25:50] Speaker 1: from work.
[25:52] Speaker 3: Are you falling around?
[25:53] Speaker 2: Said the neighbor. Why, it's a lovely clear evening.
[25:58] Speaker 3: I can't see your house.
[26:00] Speaker 1: Yeah, that was me, replied Bernard. I made the fog.
[26:06] Speaker 1: In summer nineteen forty nine, Irving Langmuir, Vincent Shaefer, and
[26:11] Speaker 1: Bernard Vonnegut set up camp in New Mexico with their
[26:15] Speaker 1: team from the military. Langmuir had dreamed of making Desert's bloom.
[26:20] Speaker 1: He wanted to see if dry ice could conjure rain
[26:24] Speaker 1: from an arid sky. Bernard had brought along a silver
[26:28] Speaker 1: iod eyed smoke generator had made in the lab. He
[26:32] Speaker 1: told Langmuir he was going to set it going. Langmuir
[26:35] Speaker 1: didn't seem to hear him. He was lost in thought.
[26:38] Speaker 2: Again.
[26:39] Speaker 1: At six am, Bernard got up and started the smoke generator.
[26:44] Speaker 1: He sent up balloons to check which way the wind
[26:47] Speaker 1: was carrying the silver iod eyed smoke towards the mountains.
[26:53] Speaker 1: By lunchtime, clouds were building near the mountains, and was
[26:57] Speaker 1: that thunder It was nearly time for Vincent Shafer to
[27:01] Speaker 1: take off with dry Ice in a B seventeen bomber,
[27:05] Speaker 1: so Bernard turned the smoke machine off. When Shaeffer got
[27:10] Speaker 1: to the clouds, he was surprised to find they were
[27:14] Speaker 1: already raining. It rained, and it rained. That night, Bernard
[27:22] Speaker 1: again told Langmuir that he had been running the silver
[27:25] Speaker 1: iodide generator. This time Langmuir heard and he was stunned.
[27:32] Speaker 1: This was even better than dry ice. Bernard Vonnegut had
[27:37] Speaker 1: made a thunderstorm. Why do we no longer aspire to
[27:48] Speaker 1: influence the weather? There's an obvious answer, Despite what Irving
[27:54] Speaker 1: Langmuir thought, We've learned we can't. But that's not quite right,
[27:59] Speaker 1: because people still do seed clouds to day with dry
[28:03] Speaker 1: ice and silver iod eyed and there's no scientific consensus
[28:06] Speaker 1: on whether or not those people are wasting time. Some
[28:10] Speaker 1: say cloud seeding doesn't work, others insist that it does
[28:15] Speaker 1: to some extent in some conditions. I think that lack
[28:19] Speaker 1: of agreement after three quarters of a century tells us
[28:23] Speaker 1: there's a deeper problem. This sort of thing is hard
[28:27] Speaker 1: to test. You can't run controlled experiments on the weather
[28:31] Speaker 1: or the climate. Every time Irving Langmure picked up the
[28:35] Speaker 1: phone to a journalist, the US Weather Bureau grew more
[28:39] Speaker 1: and more exasperated. Their post bag bulged with angry letters.
[28:44] Speaker 1: Why are you merely trying to predict the weather? Why
[28:47] Speaker 1: don't you do something about it? The Weather Bureau tried
[28:51] Speaker 1: to make Langmure see that he couldn't make claims on
[28:54] Speaker 1: one off events. Would that thunderstorm in New Mexico really
[28:58] Speaker 1: not have happened without Bernard Vonnegut's silver iod eyde. What
[29:02] Speaker 1: about that huge New York snowstorm? Who could say for sure,
[29:07] Speaker 1: not the Weather Bureau. As for Hurricane King, nobody had
[29:13] Speaker 1: predicted that sharp turn back to land, but that didn't
[29:16] Speaker 1: mean Vincent Schaefer had caused it where the historians combed
[29:21] Speaker 1: through the records and found that something similar had happened
[29:24] Speaker 1: once before, in nineteen oh six. To find out if
[29:28] Speaker 1: dry ice really could affect hurricanes, we'd need hundreds of
[29:32] Speaker 1: storms to experiment on. But hurricanes are unique and thankfully
[29:37] Speaker 1: not common enough to provide a big enough sample size
[29:40] Speaker 1: for experiments. Statistical analysis, said the Weather Bureau was the
[29:46] Speaker 1: only way to prove an effect. Ginger Strand describes how
[29:52] Speaker 1: Langmuir took up the challenge. He devised an experiment. He'd
[29:56] Speaker 1: run Bernard's silver iodide smoke generator on some days but
[30:00] Speaker 1: not others, on a regular weekly pattern. Would the rainfall
[30:05] Speaker 1: also change on a regular weekly pattern. It did, but
[30:10] Speaker 1: the Weather Bureau combed through their records and pointed out
[30:13] Speaker 1: similar weekly patterns that had happened before. It might just
[30:17] Speaker 1: be another coincidence. Irving Langmuir came up with new ideas
[30:22] Speaker 1: to get statistical proof that he could make rain, but
[30:26] Speaker 1: he discovered another problem.
[30:28] Speaker 2: His penchant for publicity had inspired others.
[30:32] Speaker 1: Freelance rain makers were popping up everywhere, employed by farmers
[30:37] Speaker 1: to water their fields or municipal governments to fill their reservoirs.
[30:42] Speaker 1: Langmuir couldn't know if his own experiments were being affected
[30:45] Speaker 1: by the people he had inspired, and these burgeoning attempts
[30:49] Speaker 1: to change the weather led to lawsuits, just as General
[30:53] Speaker 1: Electrics lawyers and foreseene. After New York City employed a
[30:58] Speaker 1: rain maker, a huge storm caused a flood upstate.
[31:03] Speaker 2: The city faced over.
[31:04] Speaker 1: A hundred claims for damages. In the early nineteen fifties,
[31:12] Speaker 1: General Electric decided to pull the plug on Irving Langmuir's
[31:16] Speaker 1: weather research. It was too much hassle. Langmuir retired from
[31:21] Speaker 1: the company and went to work as a consultant for
[31:24] Speaker 1: the army. They persevered for years trying to turn weather
[31:29] Speaker 1: into a weapon. In nineteen fifty seven, Langmuir died, still
[31:35] Speaker 1: convinced that human mastery of the weather was just around
[31:39] Speaker 1: the corner. In nineteen sixty three, Bernard Vonnegut's brother Kurt
[31:50] Speaker 1: published a novel called Cat's Cradle. It features an absent
[31:56] Speaker 1: minded genius of a scientist, a man who gets so
[32:00] Speaker 1: lost in thought he abandons his car in a traffic
[32:03] Speaker 1: jam and leaves tips for his wife on the breakfast table.
[32:08] Speaker 1: In the novel, someone asks the scientist if it's conceivable
[32:12] Speaker 1: for there to be a kind of ice crystal that
[32:14] Speaker 1: would turn water solid at room temperature. The scientist discovers
[32:19] Speaker 1: that such a crystal could exist in theory, then he
[32:24] Speaker 1: makes it in the lab. When a crystal of ice
[32:29] Speaker 1: nine is accidentally dropped in the sea, it turns all
[32:34] Speaker 1: the planet's water solid, which wipes out life on Earth.
[32:41] Speaker 1: Kurt Vonagut later explained why Irving Langmure had inspired his
[32:46] Speaker 1: fictional genius. Langmuir, he said, was absolutely indifferent to the
[32:53] Speaker 1: uses that might be made of the truths he dug
[32:56] Speaker 1: out of the rock and handed out to whomever was around.
[32:59] Speaker 1: Any truth he found was beautiful in its own right,
[33:02] Speaker 1: and he didn't give a damn who got it next.
[33:07] Speaker 1: The moral of Kurt Vonigut's novel is that some scientific
[33:10] Speaker 1: knowledge shouldn't be pursued. And I think that's a big
[33:15] Speaker 1: part of the answer to the question why is nobody
[33:18] Speaker 1: doing these crazy, big things anymore? It ONTs seemed like
[33:23] Speaker 1: part of our human destiny to learn to control the
[33:25] Speaker 1: weather and remake the climate. As the decades went by,
[33:31] Speaker 1: more people began to think, if we try, we're bound
[33:35] Speaker 1: to screw things up. The sense that some knowledge shouldn't
[33:40] Speaker 1: be pursued, explains the hate mail for the academic who
[33:43] Speaker 1: studies solar radiation management. These ideas are hard to test,
[33:49] Speaker 1: so we can't be sure of the risks unless someone
[33:52] Speaker 1: does it for real, and the more academics debate the theory,
[33:56] Speaker 1: the more tempted someone will be to give it a go.
[34:00] Speaker 1: But attitudes to geoengineering are starting to change again. The
[34:06] Speaker 1: idea of negative emissions has already become heart of the mainstream.
[34:11] Speaker 1: When the graduate students in Iceland set up their shipping
[34:14] Speaker 1: containers to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, people said, guys,
[34:19] Speaker 1: you shouldn't be doing that. The critics thought it was
[34:23] Speaker 1: knowledge that shouldn't be pursued. Now we rely on that
[34:28] Speaker 1: knowledge being found. When climate experts say there's still hope
[34:33] Speaker 1: to avoid runaway warming, they're assuming we can make negative
[34:37] Speaker 1: emissions technology work on a big enough scale at a
[34:40] Speaker 1: low enough cost. That's still far from certain. And what
[34:45] Speaker 1: about the more outlandish schemes like reflective particles in the stratosphere?
[34:51] Speaker 1: Will they become mainstream too? Researchers in Germany recently asked
[34:56] Speaker 1: climate engineering experts how other scientists saw their field compared
[35:02] Speaker 1: to just a few years ago. They said others had
[35:05] Speaker 1: become much more open to their research. But that's not
[35:10] Speaker 1: because the other scientists find geoengineering schemes any less disastrously
[35:16] Speaker 1: risky than they did before. It's because they know we've
[35:19] Speaker 1: wasted our best chance to stop climate change by acting
[35:23] Speaker 1: more quickly on reducing emissions. So much future warming is
[35:27] Speaker 1: now locked in the temptation to try some ambitiously large
[35:32] Speaker 1: scale geoengineering projects might become irresistible. Perhaps it now makes
[35:38] Speaker 1: sense to pursue the knowledge in the hope that we
[35:41] Speaker 1: can minimize the risks. It's poignant to look back on
[35:45] Speaker 1: the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, when scientists like Irving
[35:50] Speaker 1: Langmuir and Nikolai Rusin dreamed of remaking the climate. They
[35:55] Speaker 1: had a touching faith in human ingenuity. But we now
[35:59] Speaker 1: know that it's a far more complex challenge than Langmuir
[36:03] Speaker 1: or Rusin imagined. And yet we've left it so late
[36:09] Speaker 1: that all that remains are a set of bad options.
[36:14] Speaker 1: So if we try to remake the climate, we'll have
[36:18] Speaker 1: a different motive. It won't be aspiration but desperation. I
[36:36] Speaker 1: very much enjoyed Ginger Strand's book The Brothers Vonnegut while
[36:40] Speaker 1: researching this episode. For a full list of our sources,
[36:44] Speaker 1: please see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary
[36:59] Speaker 1: Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
[37:03] Speaker 1: It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Edith Huslow.
[37:07] Speaker 1: The sound design and original music is the work of
[37:10] Speaker 1: Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. It features the
[37:15] Speaker 1: voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Gutshridge, Jemma Saunders and
[37:19] Speaker 1: Rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been possible without the
[37:23] Speaker 1: work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne, let Al Millard,
[37:28] Speaker 1: John Schnaz, Carlie mcgliori and Eric Sandler. Cautionary Tales is
[37:36] Speaker 1: a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardare
[37:39] Speaker 1: Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show,
[37:43] Speaker 1: please remember to share, grate and review go on you
[37:46] Speaker 1: know it helps us and if you want to hear
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