Poseidon by Mark Rain (www.azrainman.com). Source: Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Revisionist Climate

Americans & the Atmosphere

08.11.17

On this week’s episode, Nathan, Brian and Ed, talk about how Americans have interacted, dealt with, and tried to actively change the North American climate.

Climate change; environment; meteorology; weather

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Segments

I Speak for the Trees

Thomas Jefferson & Benjamin Franklin have different ideas about how to warm up the chilly American climate, and trees may be on the chopping block. Historian Joyce Chaplin explains.

Music:

Become Death by Jahzzar

BackStory Theme by Nick Thorburn

Netherland by Podington Bear

Cold Like This by Jahzzar

Benjamin Franklin; Climate change; Thomas Jefferson; environment; weather

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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BRIAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory.

NATHAN: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. I know we’re in the dog days of summer right now, but imagine that it’s the dead of winter. And because this is BackStory, let’s go back to wintertime in 18th century New England.

BRIAN: Uh-oh.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: It was unexpectedly and frighteningly cold even to the indigenous inhabitants.

NATHAN: This is historian Joyce Chaplin.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Winter as it approaches is just a kind of horrible thing that haunts you, that you’re not sure you can survive, and that kind of beats at you year, after year, after year.

NATHAN: Chaplin says that in early America winters were especially brutal.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Boston Harbor freezes over in the 1740s. And for one winter it’s said that people can actually walk from some of the outlying islands to Boston over parts of the ice that are thick enough. This is just unthinkable now, of course.

NATHAN: Colonists we’re experiencing the effects of what we now call the Little Ice Age. This was a period of cooling which lasted from the year 1300 until about 1850. Winters were so long and harsh that some years were described as a year without summer.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: The cold really affects the earliest colonists who are completely unprepared and they had not expected that there would be many feet of snow that would last many, many months.

NATHAN: That’s because their understanding of climate was based on the idea of latitude.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: It was the way the ancient Greek geographers had described the different zones of the world and why those around the equator seemed hotter than those toward the poles. Most of the parts of the new world that the English would settle in, including New England, should be far enough south, if you compare them across the Atlantic Ocean, to have the same crops as Spain or Italy. And they clearly don’t have the climates to do that. They don’t now, let alone during the past. So there is already description of the new world as posing a problem for understanding how the old definitions of climate, as latitude, should actually work.

NATHAN: In other words, those old definitions had to be revised.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: By the 18th century, there are definitions of climate that begin to talk in terms of a system of complexity. And that’s the way we think of climate today. That it’s not a fixed system. It changes. It changes hourly, it changes daily, it changes over the decades.

NATHAN: Chaplin says this was the moment when our modern understanding of a climate in flux first came into focus. It was a critical breakthrough, because back then understanding the weather was a matter of life and death.

MALE SPEAKER: New findings on the effect of climate change in the US–

FEMALE SPEAKER: A report obtained by The New York Times found the average temperature in the US has gone up rapidly since 1980.

MALE SPEAKER: But scientists say it’s more than temperatures, they have connected man-made climate change to deadly heat waves, droughts, and devastating floods.

MALE SPEAKER: Another study by scientists from 13 federal agencies directly contradicts claims by the president and some cabinet officials who say that human contribution to climate change is uncertain.

BRIAN: Last year was the warmest year on record, but 2017 could be even hotter. Since the late 19th century the Earth’s average temperature has risen about two degrees. Most of that rise comes from increased carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. Now two degrees might not sound like much, but scientists fear that those rising temperatures could produce even more extreme weather, famines, and millions of climate refugees.

ED: Americans have long been fascinated by climate patterns and how those patterns affect their lives. So today on this show, a history of how Americans interact with and try to control the planet. We’ll hear about an early 20th century scheme to make it rain in Southern California, a scheme that worked a little too well, and a secret pentagon plan to weaponize the weather.

BRIAN: But first, let’s return to those long icy North American winters in the 17th and 18th centuries.

NATHAN: At the dawn of the republic concerns about the climate were also concerns about national security. Chapin says lots of folks, including the founding fathers, debated about how to deal with the young nation’s harsh climate.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Being scientifically literate was culturally important during this period of time and you weren’t really a well educated person unless you knew some science.

NATHAN: Is there an earlier version of a climate debate happening among the founders in this period?

JOYCE CHAPLIN: That’s what’s really interesting about this period? Is that not only were there now theories of climate being complex, but there are also complexities within the argument about it. So there was not one theory. There was not one opinion. There was a big interesting argument about it all.

NATHAN: So Ed, Brian, take a guess at some of the ways that people thought they could fix the climate.

BRIAN: I’m guessing prayer.

ED: Recycling?

NATHAN: Nice try both. But the most popular theory, which originated in Europe, suggested that cutting down trees would produce warmer, more comfortable temperatures.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: They were convinced that forests, too many trees, actually shaded the Earth from the sun.

ED: Wait, so they actually thought trees were bad?

NATHAN: Well, kind of.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Land that had been overgrown with weeds and wild vegetation, if it were cleared and planted with crops, and all that land turned up with hoes or plows, that also would have a warming effect on the climate. And so we also see coming into focus a sense of anthropogenic climate change. What humans do affects the climate. The idea that humans on a large scale could transform the average temperature for entire regions, if not continents, was quite new. And yet this is what settlers in North America start talking about doing.

NATHAN: This idea was actively promoted by science nerd turned US President Thomas Jefferson.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: So Jefferson was an advocate, or a proponent, for clearing land, bringing it under cultivation through European style agriculture. And in some ways this is a criticism of the indigenous inhabitants who he thought had not brought enough of the land under cultivation, and that therefore the country was cooler than it actually needed to be.

NATHAN: So given these ideas about the link between deforestation and climate change being bandied about, did people actually deforest on a mass scale to bring about these ends?

JOYCE CHAPLIN: The deforestation took place on a mass scale whether people were really doing it to make the weather warmer or not. It just happened because a lot of settlers were moving across land and taking down forests in order to create farmland. It’s true that into the 19th century there was this other belief that land that was cleared would bring rain. So when people moved out into the Great Plains area, where there had been historic droughts, there was nevertheless a belief the rain follows the plow. That once lands are brought under cultivation the rain will come.

NATHAN: So the plow comes first then the cloud comes after? Wow, that’s something.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Yes, exactly. And only after several terrible droughts and people failing was there a kind of concession that maybe not.

NATHAN: While Jefferson and others were actively trying to warm things up, America’s leading scientists thought cutting down all the trees was a terrible plan.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: So Benjamin Franklin warned that taking down all the trees, or too many trees, might make the summers unbearably hot. So be careful. And be careful what you wish for. That if you really, really want a warm climate, fine. But having a climate that was going to be too hot was not going to be good.

NATHAN: Franklin, who had been studying climate fluctuations for a while, started by printing daily weather reports in his newspaper, and in Poor Richard’s Almanac.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Where, very conventionally, he reports on what the average temperatures were supposed to be, what the prevailing conditions, kind of odd weather events, storms, significant changes in weather, unexpected patterns. And these include the freezing over of Boston Harbor, really bad winter weather that begin to intrigue him because he starts tying them back into a theory that these are not just stray events, but part of a longer term shift.

NATHAN: And in trying to make sense of that shift Franklin collected data on a grander scale.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Franklin does study heat and weather in a lot of parts of the world. So eventually he makes observations about medieval Europe, different parts of the Americas, even as far away as Russia. So he really is aware of how global climates operated in contrast to each other, and how specific weather patterns were particular to different parts of the world. So in some ways he has a bigger geography that he comments on than perhaps Jefferson was doing in relation to Virginia, and to parts of North America, and the United States specifically.

NATHAN: Benjamin Franklin’s interest in patterns of hot and cold led him to a more sophisticated understanding of the climate itself.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: And in this way he contributes to early theorization about atmospheric circulation and oceanic circulation. How it is that patterns of hot and cold move over hemispheres over continents and over oceans. He describes, for instance, the circulation of hot air out of the Gulf of Mexico, up the continent, and eventually across the Atlantic Ocean. And he connects this to the phenomenon that we now call the Gulf Stream.

So that sense of circulation and of a kind of irregular pattern of heat and cold moving north and south as well as east and west, that was one of the biggest challenges to this old idea of climate as latitude.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Now we use an idea today of something called a Little Ice Age. They might not have used that language back then, but they certainly were aware that there were things happening kind of across many different generations that were reflecting changes in the environment. Is there a sense that the Ice Age, or the kind of long period of cold, that the founders were considering and that Jefferson and Franklin were debating, that has come to some kind of end?

JOYCE CHAPLIN: I gather from geologists that we’re not sure it’s over. We could still be in a period of global cooling, but we have forced the climate to be warmer, and that’s overriding the cooler stage that we would be in otherwise, which is kind of terrifying to think about that it would be even hotter. What we’re doing in terms of forcing carbon to the atmosphere would make things even hotter than it would be if we didn’t have this period of global cooling that’s still going on.

It does seem that the Little Ice Age, the conditions that were described from the late Middle Ages into the colonial period was fading over the course of the 19th century. We think it was still operating when Napoleon’s troops march out of Moscow in much colder weather than they had anticipated. It may still have been operating in to the 1840s, and up to perhaps about 1850, but the second half of the 19th century though, all of the components the Little Ice Age, extreme weather conditions, longer winters, freezing over of bodies of water, those stop being commented on, and we’ve entered a new age.

NATHAN: So, Joyce, can you give me any sense of what Native Americans might have thought about the Little Ice Age? Do we even know?

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Oh, I wish we knew more. And we need to know more. And this will require a lot of experts in indigenous languages and archeology to really expand our understanding. Because without that we actually don’t know a lot about how human adaptation to climates in North America would have worked before 1492, and it’s really essential that we do that.

NATHAN: And the way that the founders observed and debated the nature of climate change and human activity, are there any lessons from that we could point to and draw from today?

JOYCE CHAPLIN: I guess I’m always skeptical about the claim that anything that happens now is historically unprecedented. Because in some sense that self-congratulatory. Everything new happens to us. Whatever we are undergoing now, or talking about now, has never happened to anyone in the world ever before. Well, maybe so, but I think we want to eliminate the possibility that, actually, it’s happened before.

Yes, we may be living within something unprecedented in terms of anthropogenic climate change, that we have done it, but we’re not the first people to live in a period of rapid or dramatic climate change. And looking at everyone who has done that before could be incredibly useful for us.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: Joyce Chaplin is a professor of History at Harvard University and author of The First Scientific American, Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius.

It’s Getting Hot In Here

Nathan traces the origins of the first scientific reports linking industrialization to warming temperatures.

Music:

Rooftop by Jahzzar

Climate change; environment; industrialization

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

ED: You know that interview reminds us of something that we might not have thought about. We imagine that earlier generations just accepted the weather as something that happened.

BRIAN: Yeah, can’t change the weather.

ED: Exactly, we can talk about it. But we can’t change it, right? But that interview showed that people have not only been thinking about the weather, they’ve been trying to understand the weather, and even do something about the weather throughout the vast expanse of American history. The difference is that back in the 18th century they were worried about the earth becoming too cold. And, of course, now we worry about it becoming too hot. When did that pivot take place? How long have we been worrying about the effects of man, people, on making the world too warm?

NATHAN: So it’s pretty clear that as early as, you know, the 1820s and ’30s you see researchers talking about greenhouse gas, or what they call the hothouse effect at that time.

ED: 1820s and ’30s?

NATHAN: That’s right, 1827 in Franz, 1835 scientific papers start to pick this up. And you actually have a publication in an American Journal for the first time in 1896 that’s entitled, and you’ll love it, On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature On the Ground.

BRIAN: Well that’s an inconvenient title.

NATHAN: That’s right. That’s right. So it’s at least as old as Jim Crow segregation, right? The 1890s. But you don’t really see a public conversation about it yet. There’s, believe it or not, a small paper from New Zealand, that in 1912 talks about, again, this is a quote, “coal consumption affecting the climate.”

And that is, again, a knowledge that the burning of furnaces is putting enough fumes in the air to, again, affect the overall temperature of the atmosphere. But in the United States, oh forget it. I mean we were basically waiting until the 1980s until you get a headline in the New York Times about climate change.

ED: Really?

NATHAN: Absolutely. 1981 was the first climate change appeared as a headline in the New York Times. So, again, talk about a huge gap between when the scientific community kind of locates a problem and it winds up becoming part of the public conversation.

ED: So why did we first read about this in the New York Times in the early 1980s?

NATHAN: Well, again, I think you have to keep in mind that the public debate is long and slow in arriving to where the scientific debate was in the earlier part of the 20th century. I mean, it’s not until 1965 that the Johnson administration actually releases a report that carbon dioxide emissions could actually trap heat in the atmosphere. So think about 1965 versus the 1912 appearance in that New Zealand paper, right? And that’s, again, just within the scientific community.

Then you have, obviously, books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that’s raising some ideas about the dangers of made pesticides and chemicals and overall effects on the environment.

ED: And Earth Day?

BRIAN: Earth Day?

NATHAN: Earth Day is established in 1970 in April of that year. And there’s also, importantly, I think, a movement among Native Americans to make their claims much more public. And, again, the highlighting of a kind of American existence that is not wed to fossil fuels, but instead wed to the Earth, to a vision of nature that seemingly predates the republic itself, that was very compelling.

So all that to say, and I think there’s a combination of government voices, popular culture of voices, grassroots voices, that make it pretty hard to ignore by the early 1980s. And certainly by the late ’80s you have scientists even in NASA who are willing to testify before Congress about the connection between carbon dioxide burning and, you know, climate change. And so the ’80s is really an important decade, certainly, for giving us our contemporary vocabulary. But it still is another reminder that it took quite a long time to get to that point publicly.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Rain Man

Producer Eric Mennel recounts the story of Hatfield the Rainmaker, an amateur scientist in the late nineteenth century who believed he could make rain fall from the sky.

Music:

The Mountain by Podington Bear

Pythagoras by Podington Bear

Dark Water by Podington Bear

Two Boys and a Girl by Podington Bear

Not Much by Podington Bear

Climate change; scientific research; weather

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

ED: Most Americans might not have been aware of climate change until the 1980s, but that didn’t stop them from trying to change the weather. Now just to be clear, climate and weather aren’t the same thing. Climate refers to weather and other atmospheric conditions over an extended period of time and space. And that’s how business Franklin would have understood it. Weather, by contrast, refers to the heat, humidity, and other atmospheric conditions right now. And it was this weather that Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tried to change.

Radio producer Eric Mennel researched various schemes to make it rain, for example. He discovered one desperate city that tried to boost its rainfall with unexpected and unwanted results. Here’s Eric.

ERIC MENNEL: In 1915 the city of San Diego could be summed up in two different numbers. The first, it’s exploding population. In the previous 35 years the city’s population had gone from 2,600 to more than 40,000. The second number that could describe San Diego, average yearly rainfall. That number was stagnant. And San Diego needed to find water for its new residents.

They sent a telegraph to Los Angeles, to a guy named Charlie Hatfield. Because Charlie Hatfield had a very particular skill. Charlie Hatfield knew how to make it rain.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at the idea of rainmaking, but in reality Hatfield wasn’t the first person to claim that he could control the clouds. During the Civil War many soldiers and scientists noticed something strange. Every time there was a battle, a big one with lots of explosions, it seemed to rain very shortly after.

MALE SPEAKER: “If lightning and thunder, and thunder and rain have been brought on by the agency of man, when bloodshed and slaughter only were intended, this surely can be done without these latter.”

ERIC MENNEL: This is Edward powers writing in his 1871 book, War and the Weather. In the book he lists 153 civil war battles that were followed by rain. He then comes to what seems like a logical conclusion–

MALE SPEAKER: Rain has been, and can be brought on by heavy discharges of artillery.

ERIC MENNEL: Powers, like many others, believed that cannon fire caused the rain. He imagined an experiment, 300 cannons placed in a circle one mile wide, all facing inward and upward, all fired simultaneously. He thought that the shells would turn up the air and push any moisture together forming drops of water that were heavy enough to fall. In hindsight it feels a little like America’s third grade science fair project.

20 years later, the United States Congress took out the rainmaking mantle. They appropriated nearly $20,000 to shoot explosives into the air in Midland, Texas. Those experiments failed, but it didn’t end the fascination with rainmaking. CW Post, as in Post Cereals, you know, Fruity Pebbles? He spent $50,000 on rainmaking experiments between 1911 and 1914. He was apparently pleased with the outcome of his experiments and convinced there was a future in rainmaking.

Back in San Diego with the water crisis looming, they received a reply from Charlie Hatfield. It was an offer.

MALE SPEAKER: I will fill the Morena Reservoir to overflowin’ between now and next December, 1916, for the sum of $10,000.

ERIC MENNEL: Morena was a 15 billion gallon reservoir in the mountains above San Diego. And since it was built it had never been much more than one third of the way full. So for $10,000 Hatfield would supply the city with more rain than it had ever seen. This would give the city a nice reserve for its rapidly growing population. And if he couldn’t meet the goal, all 10 billion gallons of it, the city wouldn’t owe him anything. So for San Diego it was a win-win.

And Hatfield’s method of rainmaking was slightly more advanced than the cannon fire of earlier decades. He built wooden towers, maybe 20 feet tall, and on top of them burned chemicals into the sky. Presumably these chemicals would cool the upper atmosphere and provide solid particles for the moisture to grab onto and fall.

Hatfield set up his tower on January 1st, 1916. By January 10th his chemicals were burning. And he felt a little drop on his head, and another, and then a couple more. And then the sky let loose. For the next few days it seemed like just a much needed storm, that even the local meteorologist had predicted several inches of rain.

But then the flooding started. Roads became impassable, telephone lines began to fall, San Diego was becoming an island. On day seven of this remarkable storm the local papers front page asked, Is Rainmaker at Work? Somehow Hatfield managed to make a call from the reservoir to City Hall.

MALE SPEAKER: I just wanted to tell you that it is only sprinkling now. Within the next few days I expect to make it rain right. Now just hold your horses until I show you a real rain.

ERIC MENNEL: Supposedly one resident pleaded, let’s pay Hatfield $100,000 to quit. After two weeks the rain stopped. But a second round of storms came through. Five days later, a dam in the mountains above town burst.

MALE SPEAKER: I heard a great roar that cannot be described in words. C. Killingsworth, a resident of San Diego described the rush of water from the broken dam.

MALE SPEAKER: Before I realized what was happening the water was upon me. The waters towered with seemed 100 feet in the air. Folks living in the valley were running for their lives.

ERIC MENNEL: Dozens of homes washed away. At least 20 people were killed. Downtown San Diego had become the American Venice. All the while, up in the mountains, Charlie Hatfield must have been celebrating. Because enough rain had fallen to fill Morena Reservoir. He added 10 billion gallons of water in just one month.

It didn’t take long for people to start pointing fingers. If Hatfield was responsible for the rain, wasn’t he also responsible for the damage, for the deaths? And he never got his money. He had written his own contract. And the city of San Diego found plenty of loopholes to exploit.

Hatfield’s flood didn’t and the quest for control of the weather, far from it. In 1946 General Electric experimented with weather modification. They found a way to concentrate moisture at high altitudes. They could make it snow. But they canceled the program. General Electric got scared, because when you control the weather, there’s no such thing as an act of God. When something goes wrong, you’re the one to blame.

BRIAN: Eric Mennel is a former producer for BackStory. He recorded that piece a few years ago for an episode on the history of extreme weather.

Bombs Away

Historian Kristine Harper tells the story of how scientists during the Cold War wanted to control the weather…with B52s, among other things.

Music:

Springtime by Podington Bear

Climate change; Cold War; weather

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

ED: Charlie Hatfield learned the hard way that it’s dangerous to mess with mother nature. But that didn’t keep later generations of Americans from trying.

NATHAN: After World II the US government claimed it could control the weather with, wait for it, the atom bomb.

CHRISTINE HARPER: Right off the bat after the war is over you have this idea out there that you could use atomic energy for darn near anything that you wanted to.

NATHAN: This is historian and former meteorologist, Christine Harper. She says during the first decades of the Cold War some of the country’s scientists argued nuclear bombs could actually obliterate hurricanes.

CHRISTINE HARPER: So the idea that you could just, you know, take your b-52 out over the Atlantic and start bombing the arms of a hurricane and disrupting that and having the whole thing collapse is, pretty much, ludicrous on its face. But maybe you could find them when they were really tiny and just a tropical depression off of Africa, and you could send your b-52s over there with an atomic bomb and maybe that would be good enough to do it, right?

NATHAN: A butterfly’s wings, right?

CHRISTINE HARPER: Yeah. And nobody even says to themselves, geez, like, what about all the radiation that would get blown around? Wouldn’t that be a problem? Nobody mentions that. It’s like it doesn’t even exist. It’s just we’re going to use that energy, and we’re going to use that the way we want.

NATHAN: Are there documented tests of people physically launching bombs and missiles at weather to get it to change?

CHRISTINE HARPER: Well they talked about it. Now this is the amazing– this is the amazing thing. At one point we have the head of the weather bureau, who is Francis Reicherlderfer, talking to the National Press Club– this is in the early 1960s. And he had told them that man stood on the threshold of possible control of hurricanes, possibly by using an atomic or conventional explosives to break up the rotating arms.

And they wanted to get them while they were young so they could spoil them, right? And he emphasized the use of explosives was only in the quote, “gleam in the eye stage.” But they were hoping to be able to bomb a tropical storm within two or three years with conventional explosives. And that could lead to using a nuclear bomb in the one megaton range.

NATHAN: Chris, I have this image in my mind of people literally launching missiles at storm clouds. This can’t possibly be a good idea.

CHRISTINE HARPER: No, it was not a good idea.

NATHAN: And why not?

CHRISTINE HARPER: So it wasn’t a good idea for a couple of reasons. Number one, there’s not enough energy in a bomb to disrupt a storm to begin with, not even a little smidgen of a storm. But, of course, you have all of this fallout as a problem. Now they never did this. OK? But the point is they were thinking about it, and they did note that each bomb would cost about a million bucks, and that therefore it might be a little bit on the costly side, too.

NATHAN: And the idea that you can use bombs to control the weather might seem kind of shocking to folks today. But the fact that this was a pretty mainstream conversation in the 1960s, and what does it tell us about the influence of places like the Department of Defense, or even the military, and kind of policy life in Washington?

CHRISTINE HARPER: Well they were hugely influential. I mean at the time defense budget was just about, write me a check, you know? And they were looking for any kind of new technology that could be used as a weapon. And you had people were saying things like the country that can control the weather will control the world.

We knew that the Russians were working on this too. And if they were working on it then we had to work on it more. And so consequently you have these scientists who have huge reputations in the country who promoted this idea of being able to produce what might be called designer weather. In other words, the weather you wanted, where you wanted, when you wanted it. And that was extremely exciting to people in the Department of Defense and to congressmen.

NATHAN: So if people aren’t launching missiles at weather patterns and potential storms, how are they thinking about weather control? What forms of weather control are still being practiced in this late period of the 1960s? So what they’re doing is they’re using two different techniques. They can either use dry ice, which has been pulverized into little tiny particles. Or they can use what are called silver iodide seeds.

And so, essentially, silver iodide is mixed with other substances and then placed in what look like flares that you would put behind your car after an accident. And racks of those flares are then hung underneath an airplane wing. They seed the clouds with this smoke from the flares, and each one of those silver iodide seeds then absorbs enough water vapor particles from the cloud, and it takes a million of them in order to form a raindrop that is large enough to fall out of the cloud. OK, so that’s it that’s essentially how it’s done.

NATHAN: So the idea of, basically, weather made to order was pretty much a mainstream idea in the scientific community, at least?

CHRISTINE HARPER: Well it wasn’t amongst meteorologists, quite frankly. But it was among physics and chemistry type folks. And they had all kinds of plans. I mean, it wasn’t just about making it rain. It was about snuffing out tornadoes. It was about having thunderclouds collapse on themselves before they could produce hail and just having them rain out. So some of it wasn’t– It wasn’t like it was totally crazy. The nuclear part, bombing things, yeah, that was completely crazy. But they’re still going after this idea of controlling the weather.

NATHAN: That was not then a government secret, right? Senators could tell their constituents that this was actually an active part of the new scientific revolution of the post-war period, weather control?

CHRISTINE HARPER: Well, yes and no. So the domestic part of it, the part where you don’t have to build reservoirs an irrigation canals anymore because, you know, you can get the right kind of rain where you want it, and in the right amounts whenever you want it, that’s the public part. The not public, secret and top secret part, is about using it as a diplomatic tool, or using it as a weapon.

You know, it was really tempting to use that because who could prove– I mean, who could prove afterwards that you’d done it? I mean, you know what weather forecasting’s like. You know? We have no reason why they had all those pouring down rains up there and wiped all those people out. No idea at all. Couldn’t have been us, you know, there’s no way to trace those drops.

NATHAN: And how would you describe these ideas falling out of favor? What happened to these ideas?

CHRISTINE HARPER: Well they fell out of favor after Seymour Hersh broke his story in The New York Times in the early 1970s about the United States using weather control as a weapon in Vietnam and Laos. It was used primarily to enhance monsoonal rainfall over Ho Chi Minh trail. The idea being that if it were made muddy enough it would be impossible for both men and material coming down from North Vietnam.

And so people really didn’t support using weather as a weapon in general. It’s bad enough naturally, we don’t need to enhance it to be worse than it is. And the federal budget starts to– I wouldn’t say it would disintegrate, contract, let’s put it that way. Things that haven’t been terribly effective are the first to be axed. And so all these weather control programs basically get axed in the 1970s.

NATHAN: So if we think about the way people are considering technologies for controlling the weather, that’s different than a broader conversation in the 1950s about climate change. Was this a connected debate in people’s minds? Weather control on the one hand versus man-made impact on effecting the climate on the other?

CHRISTINE HARPER: So there are a couple of ways to look at that. The Department of Defense had found out in the late 1940s that glaciers were starting to recede and that there was a possibility that the Arctic would warm, and that had all kinds of implications for fighting a war with the Soviet Union. So they were really interested in that. But that was secret information. That wasn’t public information.

And so in the 1950s, people aren’t really concerned that the climate is going to change. What they’re concerned about is are people going to be able to produce the kind of weather we need right now when we’re going to need it, or can we use this as a way to stop bad weather? You know, like blow up tornadoes and hurricanes. But if you make the weather that you want that way long enough effectively, you have changed the climate, right?

NATHAN: Wow. So it sounds like, Chris, that the central conceit of the mid 20th century, or the Cold War period, was the notion that human beings could impact the climate, that they should try to shape the climate. And it seems at least now that it’s pretty clear that human beings have shaped the climate, but not in ways that they necessarily can control.

CHRISTINE HARPER: Well, that’s right. I mean, basically it was an unplanned experiment.

NATHAN: So what kinds of lessons can we take from the 1950s about climate change now?

CHRISTINE HARPER: I think one thing that’s kind of related between now and the 1950s, just in a slightly different way, is in the 1950s people were convinced that there was a technological fix for anything. Now what I see is you have some people who are convinced that we’ve actually influenced the climate, and the climate is warming. In other words, they go with the scientific consensus. And we need to do something about that.

And then you have another group of people who say, OK, well, that could happen, and yes the water could rise in the oceans, but we’ll be able to figure out a technological fix for that. It’s not going to be nuclear, but it will be something that we can figure out. So that same– that we can find a technological fix for any problem that ails us, that’s really not much different now than it was in the 1950s.

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NATHAN: Christine Harper is a historian at Florida State University and author of Make it Rain, State Control of the Atmosphere in 20th Century America.

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Political Climate

Nathan, Brian and Ed discuss how climate change went from scientific consensus to a partisan political issue in the U.S.

Climate change; partisanship; political division

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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ED: You know, think about what Nathan said about how in the late 60s, early 70s, the environment became a topic of major concern. Then it becomes overlaid with the energy crisis of the 70s. We can remember Jimmy Carter with his sweater in front of the fire. And from that perspective, it seems that the Democrats and environmentalism seemed pretty linked.

And yet thinking about this show, came across this quote from 1988 and George H. W. Bush, who says that the warming of the climate is not a partisan issue. It’s not liberal or conservative, is what he says.

GEORGE H. W. BUSH: Some say, these problems are too big. That it’s impossible for an individual, or even a nation as great as ours, to solve the problem of global warming, or the loss of forests, or the deterioration of our oceans. My response is simple, it can be done. And we must do it.

ED: So can you guys help me understand how it is that we go from the late ’80s, and in not being seen as partisan, to today when it seems hyper-partisan?

BRIAN: Well, I think one way we got there, Ed, is that as that scientific consensus formed that we needed to do something about climate change, things like the Kyoto international agreement, the first international agreement to begin to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide put out into the air, it’s precisely because of that consensus that those industries who earn their living by extracting oil, by extracting gas, they were at the forefront of funding research that would cast doubt on that very scientific consensus that we needed to do something. Otherwise the climate was going to continue to warm.

ED: Right.

NATHAN: I mean I think that certainly rings true. And if you look at one of the most consistent talking points on the environment, what do you hear about? The ways in which environmental regulations kill jobs. And that’s absolutely a way of dog whistling to working class people, largely white working class people, to get them to not sign on to really basic environmental protections.

If the idea is that by somehow advocating for green technology you’re going to decimate areas in West Virginia, or decimate you know, the Rust Belt, then people are not going to sign onto that. And lo and behold states will then turn in ways that make it very easy for people on the right to, basically, win elections. I mean Al Gore famously lost West Virginia in 2000, precisely because it was framed by the Bush campaign.

ED: The other Bush, Nathan.

NATHAN: Exactly, George W. Bush, that his approach to the environment was going to kill that state’s economy.

BRIAN: Right.

ED: Can we imagine this becoming reconfigured in some way that it’s not so locked into this partisan divide?

BRIAN: Well sadly, if the scientific consensus is correct about climate change, we are going to have more and more catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina, or Hurricane Sandy. So there will be plenty of opportunities to see if Americans can come together.

NATHAN: You know guys, it is a funny thing about the weather, in addition to it always changing, it actually obliterates American exceptionalism, right? I mean, there’s a way in which we will be suffering under the same kinds of global conditions that everyone else will be. And you would think that somewhere in a corner of American politics and culture, someone would try to hold on to that notion of American exceptionalism to solve the climate crisis, right? To say you know what–

BRIAN: We can be different.

NATHAN: We can be different. We rose to the top as the world’s number one polluter, we can find a way to rise to the top as the chief architect of the solution.

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ED: As we thank the people who help us make the show every week, today we want to thank somebody who’s helped us make this show for years, Andrew Parsons, our senior producer.

NATHAN: So, Andrew, I want to thank you for making my first year in broadcasting both high quality and low stress. It was an honor working with you, and I’m sure you’re going to rock it in whatever you decide to do next.

JOANNE: Andrew, I have to say it’s been an absolute honor to work with you, and you know how much that means to me. I’m only sorry that I didn’t get to work with you for longer. But you made my introduction to podcasting not only easy, but fun. So thank you.

ED: And Andrew I’ve known you for a long time, since you first showed up here as a producer, and then as you took over the reins as our senior producer as you saw through the transition from terrestrial radio to podcasting. Every step along the way you made it look easy. Every step along the way you brought a great sense of humor. Every step along the way you brought fruit to the office that we enjoyed sharing, which actually improved my dietary habits. So for that and for so much more, Drew, thank you so much.

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NATHAN: That’s going to do it for today but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of today’s episode, or ask us your questions about American history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org. Or send an email to BackStory@Virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStoryRadio. And if you liked the show feel free to review it in Apple Podcasts. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

BRIAN: This episode of BackStory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Emily Gattick, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director, Diana Williams who is our digital editor, and Joey Thompson is our researcher. Special thanks this week to Justin McBrien and Radio Ca’ Foscari at Co’ Foscari University of Venice.

ED: Additional help came from Courtney [? Spania, ?] Robin Blue, and Elizabeth [? Spage. ?]

BRIAN: Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in our show came from Podington Bear, Ketsa, [? Juzar. ?] And thanks to the Johns Hopkins University’s Studio in Baltimore.

ED: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. We’re a proud member of the Panoply Podcast Network. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia, and the Dorothy Compton professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is Professor of the humanities, and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond.

Joanne Freeman is Professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert [? Backster ?] Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

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